Well we've got a game idea, a look-and-feel, and a name for our game.

I've spent more time than I probably should have learning Curses to do the ascii graphics, but overall it's working well. Sadly, Curses doesn't work on Windows. So even though my teammate and I are both developing on non-Windows systems (OSX and GNU/Linux respectively) and can run Curses natively, we are targeting the largest demographic of Pyweek developers and players, which is Windows. So in order to keep using curses, we've borrowed and are modifying the Pygame-based Curses emulator that Alya wrote for Isle of the Cursed Phoenix. It's a thin but fantastic piece of code, and it's been great to learn how to use curses while expanding the emulator that Alya started.

Spent too much time doing ascii artwork and animation for our RegEx Express train, but we're pretty excited about the theme and throwback to the old "Conjunction Junction" style rhymes, puns and whatnot.

All aboard!

Thanks to ZeroByte for the cheesy pun in the title. :)

We're letting loose a lot of our features -- sortof like disconnecting some heavy cargo cars from the end of the line because they'll cause you to roll into the station too late. "Better light than late", I says.

Our stack-based UI is working well, making it really easy to navigate within the game and add new sections to it. I think I want to write this up as a template structure for making a generic object-oriented game -- it's a wheel that I've reinvented so many times, I'd really like to template-ize this thing to speed up future development. Not that I want to make this a code library -- more just like pictures and rough class interfaces to help with partitioning / organization of projects, regardless of genre, platform or language.

So to recap, we now we have our curses-based UI, a class to hold our puzzles and load them from files, context-sensitive help, and our dynamic as-you-type regex puzzle interface.

Next stop, randomly generating puzzles, getting the animated ascii train into the main menu, and last but not least, scoring -- which will, incidentally, be heavily influenced by the length of your string. If we have time, we'll add in user testing, revise the tutorials, and possibly add a new game mode or two.

Keep up the great work, everyone -- I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's entries! The number of physics games this year is exciting. :)

Wow, thanks for the strange awards, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the mental exercise. Part of the reason we wanted to do a regex learning game is that we are sort of amateurs at the subject. Well, I suck, at least. So, this was as much of a learning experience for me as for anyone else.

We wanted multiplayer, but alas, time did not allow. Hanclinto did a fantastic job with the curses interface. I really enjoyed working with him, so here's props to the Hanclinto!

If we learned anything, it's that a good division of labor, source control, and small enough scope is a good recipe for getting a game finished, even without much time to work on it.

RegExExpress 1.3 EXE.zip 3.45mb

Thanks to Eugman for the encouragement, we've now made an EXE package of our game. Part of the reason why it took so long is because we were having trouble getting our data to package correctly in the library.zip that was being created with some of the other py2exe scripts floating around. So with reluctance, I dug out my old Skellington py2exe script, and surprisingly, it worked like a champ on the first try! If you're having trouble packaging up your game, please give this a shot and download my Skellington-specific py2exe script. Just put the unzipped files (the .py and .ico files) directly into your gamelib directory and then run it -- it will walk you through the rest.

SkellingtonSetup_ExtractIntoLibDirectory.zip 2.1k

I'm interested in feedback if this works for people -- if we have enough success with it, we might want to consider putting this as a setup.py into the next revision of the Skellington -- though if we're going to do that, I'd perhaps like to expand for py2app as well.

Cheers!

--clint

w00t! 54 games played and rated, 1 game marked as DNW (never got Allephant to work on OSX).

I'm sure my wife will be happy that my evenings won't be quite as consumed with Pyweek now. :)

How is everyone else coming? Anyone able to run and rate all 55 games?

Edit: Aww nuts, just noticed it was only 53 games successfully played -- pw7_trobadour was a DNW for me as well.

Rarely do I get the motivation to continue working on a speedgame after the contest is over. And so RegEx Express is a bit of an anomaly for me, in that I'm still working on it.

However, I'm not working on it in Python -- I've ported the Curses emulation library to ActionScript, and have started porting over RegEx Express into the world of browser-based games.

When working on RegEx Express, I created the UI class structure in such a way that it could apply to any game, in any language. I've been tentatively calling this structure HUGS (Han's Universal Game Structure) -- basically, I'm trying to distill my experience with speed-gaming down to a collection of "best practices" that will help solve the perennial wheel-inventing that goes on with trying to create a UI structure, managing a game clock, how do you switch screens, do cut scenes, etc etc etc. I've been planning this for a while, and the first successful use of HUGS was on RegEx Express. Afterwards, I used it on my Pyday entry (though took advantage of precious little of its capabilities), and now I've got a working HUGS implementation in Actionscript as well.

So because I made a fairly straight-shootin' port of the Curses library, and I've got a HUGS game structure in both languages, it's a fairly copy-paste-port of the game. It's honestly not much more than copying the code, changing a few constants ("self" to "this"), and syntax changes (semicolons, curly braces, etc).

I'll definitely keep y'all posted with the progress in this front -- my goal is to port the game to Flash and get it up on some online edu-tainment portals, and perhaps even get it fun-enough to go on a place like Kongregate.

Thanks for reading, and I really genuinely appreciate everyone's voting feedback. We're working hard to implement many of those changes in the new version, and I hope that many of you will be willing to test and give feedback for future Flash versions.

Cheers!

--clint