We got off to a bit of a late start, but the basic design for our entry is now pretty clear. It will be a dexterity game of navigating an obstacle course with a steam powered ship. The steam power isn't just a visual effect though, it will cause several quirks on how you have to control the ship.

This was a pretty productive day. The controls are pretty much set, and our little ship consumes fuel and needs to take care of steam pressure. Most of the UI is also in place.

We now have blimps flying around as obstacles, and the ship has gained a cannon weapon (watch out for the kickback though...) Next up is some anti-air cannons for further difficulty and the goal of the level (landing pad).

Thursday went mostly at work and I was busy with other things in the evening. I did, however, have time to implement shooting down blimps and colliding with them (spiced with programmer-arty explosion particles).

Sooo many things undone. On the upside, I think we'll get enough gameplay elements implemented this time to actually make a playable and (IMHO) pretty fun game. On the downside, there won't be time to add polish, and our entry will probably be without sound and music. All the menus will be a last minute job too, so no fancy graphics there, unfortunately.

I'm already looking forward to producing the "2.0" version after the competition. :)

The different levels for our game are done (10 in total) and what is left to do is add a title screen, menu and scoring.

Whew. Made it in time, but only barely. Hopefully there weren't any show stopping bugs left. The packaging was done in an extreme hurry, so I'm a bit worried. :)

So many things were left undone (again). My biggest regret is that I didn't have time to add any sound effects to the game.

Notice
Being in a hurry, I forgot to remove the save file from my last testing round, so you can remove the save.dat to erase my scores.

Requirements

• Python 2.4
• Pygame
• PyOpenGL
• psyco (well, not required, but helps a lot)

I didn't have time to optimize much, so it'll probably take a newish video card to run smoothly.

How to Play
You can change the game to windowed/fullscreen and edit the keys from the steamer.ini file. There is no README included (didn't have time to write one), but there is a tutorial level that explains the controls. I'll paste the hints here too:

• Press ESC to exit the tutorial (or quit any other level)
• Left arrow controls the left thruster and right arrow the right thruster
• Push both thrusters at once to take off and fly straight
• Gravity will turn the nose of craft down so keep it balanced
• The amount of pressure affects your thrust and turning rate
• Press the left shift to quickly burn fuel into more pressure
• Overburn is less economic than normal fuel consumption
• Press and hold the space bar for an air brake
• Using the brake drains your pressure, so be conservative
• The brake is especially handy for landing
• In order to land, the ship has to be upright and moving slowly
• Up arrow fires the cannon, but be careful of the recoil
• Use the air brake when firing the cannon for more accuracy
• The aim of the real levels is to land on the second pad
• The less fuel and time you use, the higher you will score
• Shooting blimps and especially cannons gives you a bonus

For PyWeek 3.0, would it be possible to append the team's/entry's name to the final zip filename automatically? :) Would make the judging work tons easier.

Just in case someone doesn't know this yet, as there are some entries that have music in mp3-form: The Windows distribution of Pygame doesn't support mp3s, so your game won't work for any Windows users. Please use oggs instead.