I've now verified that it's possible to manufacture all the products, and set their recommended prices to something reasonable. Also fixed a few bugs and made some enhancements:

• You can now click on any part in the factory with the Inspect tool to examine it, without having to get it to a QC Station.
• The Assembly Robot can flip and rotate one of the parts before assembly. Also its footprint in the factory is smaller, so it can be placed a bit closer to other machines.
• Supply Hoppers can be placed against the right wall of the factory as well as the left.
• Various kinds of chute are now available for transferring parts from one conveyor to another. In particular, horizontal-to-vertical conveyor transitions can be made much more effectively.
• Supply and Storage Hoppers now have Reset buttons in their configuration dialogs.
• You can place crosshairs on the blueprint in the Products page to measure positions and distances more easily.
• There is now a Reference Manual covering all the features of the game.

Download here: threads-of-fate-2.2.zip. The list of changes since 2.1 follows.
Note: the game still hasn't been tested beyond the first dungeon following all these changes :)

• Add command-line ability to grant party XP and coin.
• Add some testing of combat outcomes. This includes some balancing and tweaking of the combat algorithms.
• Add zooming of display using scroll wheel.
• Add drag-grabbing to scroll map around.
• Add grab-hand feedback in generic UI.
• Visually indicate when an attack misses.
• Characters now informed when an attack on them misses.
• Spells are able to alter difficulty based on circumstance.
• NPCs now communicate and use their memory of PC locations.
• Optimisations in NPC path generation.
• Use GL_NEAREST when scaling up weapon sprites.
• Fix menu styling across board, including scaling.
• Fix bug introduced into assigning experience.
• Fix broken bashing action.
• Fix save/load of abilities.
• Some additional code cleanup removing out-of-date dags.

Greetings! ^^

Actually we won't have much time until February but we've already fixed a lot of bugs in LoK (right after Pyweek) - so I thought we might as well do a Pyggy entry and keep going.

To do:

• find new bugs and fix them
• fix conditions
• let (some) monsters cause conditions
• some more music (we already have 2 tunes)
• maybe more sound effects (we already have basic battle sfx)
• images for items in inventory
• images for intro
• some kind of "You win!"-screen

And if we don't know what to do anymore:

• simple NPCs (they stand around, they talk)
• animated outro
• prettier UI
• a mini-map

Download here: threads-of-fate-2.1.zip. The complete list of changes follows. The big stuff is bolded.
Note: the game hasn't been tested beyond the first dungeon following all these changes :)

• Add in light mapping - currently characters have the only light sources.
• Use lighting in attack chance calculations.
• Fix display sorting of player info background image.
• Line Of Sight remembers an "obscurity" amount used in combat and lighting.
• Fix Line Of Sight in certain cases (around corners, through walls).
• Better feedback during battle displaying amount of damage dealt/received (or healed).
• Scaling of interface fonts to fit smaller/larger screens.
• Fixed the visual offset sometimes seen when rendering attack animations.
• Add clicking of character in map to activate.
• Add a simple first-run help message when entering the tactical game.
• Fix blocking check for adjacent actions.
• Allow diagonal movement and adjacent actions.
• Add green box highlighting currently-active character.
• Clean up the cobble tiles a little.
• Lots of graphical glitches removed.
• NPC turn feedback.
• NPC brains sped up considerably.
• Make NPCs remember what they were doing at a basic level (ie. who they were attacking and where the target was) so they don't get lost along the way.
• Some game balancing with the NPCs so they're not such a walkover now.
• Better NPC turn handling so their animations play completely, giving the player better feedback.
• Added initial code to detect off-screen NPCs. Not used.
• Grant all characters some basic level of brawling skill.
• Add character abilities including the first one - Super Strike.
• Added character traits - first one is LowLightVision (not actually granted yet).
• Add a whole new (generic) user interface implementation:
  • Includes vertical / horizontal layouts
  • Labels and Buttons (both with text and/or image)
  • Text Input (including focusing)
  • Styling controls, including "skinning"
  • Drag-n-drop support
  • Has some tests
  • UI elements may be animated using Cocos actions (color, position, etc.)
  • Re-implemented all game user interfaces to use the new code.
• New font for inventory and shopping screens.
• New font for title menu.
• Add in better command-line option handling.
• Refactor out the music player to a single point to detect ability and also command-line --nomusic override.
• Add command-line control over fullscreen / window sizing.
• Fix resource snafu with finding save game files.
• Allow immediate selection of arbitrary levels from command-line for testing.
• Fixed a bunch of other bugs.

Lots more to do :)

We have a slew of pyweek games that were abandoned, and pyggy was the perfect opportunity for motivation to do what we have wanted to do so many times but couldn't muster up the energy - take a game to the next level. Our reasoning behind choosing "Up Up and Away" for pyggy, was that it both had a strong direction, as well as fell really short of what we had wanted.

Our other games, such as I dream of String in the last event, and Mech Revolution from the first one, basically reached their potential, if maybe missing out on things like polish, graphics, or game balance. Rather than polish a turd, we chose to mine deeper in a vein that came up empty hoping to find a gem. We'll have to see how it turns out.

Up Up and Away was fairly incomplete. Especially compared to the 5 full story-filled missions of mech revolution, and the mind-bogglingly difficult puzzles in the caverns of I Dream of String. Up Up and Away had 4 screens, and the gameplay consisted of clicking a few buttons and then watching people walk around (with my trademark SUPER ANNOYING walking sound that seems to be in every game) and hoping you made the right decisions. If you play a few times, you will quickly find a strategy to easily win every single game. And when doing so, it never really feels like you have a lot of control over the situation.

However, stylistically, we reached probably our highest point. The people are interesting to watch, and most of the graphics are pretty good. I'm still rather most proud of this game, and Don Blake is as well. So we are going to keep the style, and redesign the game, making it as game-like as possible while still keeping the simulation feel. Our main goals in improving on the original idea are to give the player as many ways to either improve or destroy the situation, and then just go crazy with the simulation itself.



Anyway, here is the link to the pyweek version: Up Up and Away
We need to do something about that title. It's just not representative. If anyone has any good ideas I wouldn't mind hearing them! If I can't think of a better name, I'll just have to leave it. As long as the rest of the game turns out OK...

Added some code to smooth out the lighting. Nicer now :)

Still hacking away. Took a bit of a break for a while there but am back into it now.
Stuff I've achieved:

• Added a new nice font to the inventory/shopping screens.
• Sped up NPC code considerably and made them plan a little.
• Fixed some bugs in the Line Of Sight code (seeing through walls).
• Return more information from Line Of Sight test (obscurity, distance).
• Added some initial code to detect visible off-screen NPCs.
  • Some more UI code work:
  • Added text input widget, including concept of focus.
  • Pass all details of mouse click to on_click handlers.
  • Worked on styling, including fixing the rect rendering.
  • Added some more tests.
• Added character abilities, including the first one "Super Strike".
• Added light mapping (needs optimisation).

I've uploaded the latest version of Assembly Line. It's substantially expanded since the PyWeek version, and I hope to make some more improvements during the Pyggy.

Reading the rules, I didn't see anything in there about being restricted to Python. I would like to enter the Flash port of our game into Pyggy -- is there going to be any problem with that? I'll do my best to get it working on open-source Flash players for Linux, but if people don't want to judge it, I'll happily accept the DNW's -- I just want to make sure that I can enter this thing.

Thanks for organizing this!

--clint

P.S. You probably already are aware, but the RSS feed is currently 404.