Well, I managed to make some considerable improvements in the last few hours.

• It is now possible to hire more reporters an runners
• The player's reporters are now a bit more intelligent and don't require quite so much hands-on management
• Runners can have routes set for them

The best thing is that it's now possible to win -- I've proven it by beating my test level.

Even better, it's not easy!

PLEASE do try to play multiplayer before judging. I added a network mode to make that more feasible.
 
Key bindings are in artattack/keybindings.py - you might need to change them. 

The default server port is 9067. You may need to open a port in your firewall to host a game. There are command line options for starting a server on a different port.


I'm going to propose using the official #pyweek channel on Freenode for setting up games.
 
You can use any picture with an indexed palette, not just the pre-supplied ones. Just drop it into data/paintings/. Images with a 3:2 ratio whose dimensions are factors of 320 and 240, with ~4-8 colours work best (players can only hold 6 colours). In network games, the client doesn't need a copy of the image, because it is transferred from the host before the game starts.

 

Today was an incredibly long day, but a rewarding one. The bulk of the day was spend doing networking, which is passable but is not quite 100%, and the balance got a lot better late on, though that's not perfect either.

I also knocked up the quickest menu system I've ever done. Instead of writing careful positioning code I just dumped the menu pages straight out of Inkscape and hard-coded the coordinates of the buttons.

All told, this was a blast. I love PyWeek. I just get so invested I don't know if I could handle doing it twice a year.

So we're done! Unlike previous PyWeeks in which we've been able to devote literally several hundred person-hours to making ridiculously ambitious games, sixteen hours ago all we had was a rough gameplay skeleton and some moving squares. Anyway, we pitched in with gusto; here's the result.

LOOPBACK is an arena shooter in which you must defend the core from a host of invading enemies. Ultimately, the number of enemies arriving during the forty-five seconds of the game is far too many to take on; fortunately, you can travel back through time to rejoin yourself in fighting off the attackers, eventually weathering the assault a total of nine times. It features retro graphics incorporating several of your favourite geometric shapes and the ability to fight alongside eight past copies of yourself amidst a hundred-strong horde of exploding invaders.

yeah, i have started the last day.

• morning: cleaned up the main loop class from pyweek10
• afternoon: painted assets from scratch with mtpaint (great tool)
• evening: coded game logic from scratch
• night: added music composed by me
• late night: added some free sound effects (laggy!)

things that i liked:

• the cat walks cool with the soundtrack!
• watching silly movement bugs during developement
• the overall feel of silliness

things that i hated:

• everything else
• expecially failing to pay righteous homage to Revenge Of The Mutant Camels (Jeff, i'm so sorry)

well... seeya

Well i finally have my game finished, the final commit to git pushed right on the dot (hopefully bugless :s)

I have uploaded the a source copy and managed a mac binary. I still cant get windows binary complied though without it throwing some errors about sqlite3 not being a valid win32 application.

Ok im not sure if it is against the rules to have done it after the finish data but i have modified the library i used for high-scores to use pickle instead of squlite3. I think it was allowed as i changed none of MY code or fixed any bugs or problems with the game, i only changed it enough to complile.

Anyways i have updated the game's page and uploaded binary's for windows and mac as well as the source

Have fun playing

Although deviating a little bit of the contest idea, that was writing a python game in a whole week, we were able to finish our PyWeekend with a functional game and having had a great deal of fun.

There are still some known bugs that we might (or might not) be solved on the next few days and most of us will be happy to spend one or two nights without sleeping for another PyWeek in the future.

The uploaded version of the game has a a fair portion of the game playable, be we alas ran out of time before hooking up the final few bits. By poking at the debugging flags [1],  it's possible to see most stuff, but the game can't be completed.

The outstanding items will not actually take us long to add [2], but we are currently too wasted to do that now. We also have a bunch of packaging issues to sort out as well, which we will look at after sleeping.

We'll probably fix the outstanding issue tomorrow as well, since we are so close to having something completely playable and post a link to the completed version here for anyone interested.


[1] enabling DEBUG in constants.py and running with --all-tails (and maybe some other things)

[2] Estimates vary from 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how awake we are.

Well, that's it. Even if I wanted to, there is no time to make any other change. That's it, "The City Nine Times" is out there, and I need to write something because I just can't stop typing (after typing so much in so little time, my hands gained conscience and want to keep going).



First of all, I wanted to put this on the Readme, but I couldn't make it (and now I can't). My game is based on an old game I received in a CD once, called "Salary Mon". I wanted to give credit to the author with a link, but the fact is that this entry may as well be the only remaining trace of his game on the internet, since the site was hosted in Geocities and is now gone, just like the magazine.

Onto the game itself, I can seriously say that I can't remember when was the last time I worked so hard. The final count gives 160 individual animation frames, all made by hand, along with 1841 lines of code. Honestly, i don't know if that's a lot or not, but considering this is my first time programming with Python (I started practicing three weeks ago, and I never touched Python before that, so I guess is "mission accomplished" for the Pyweek guys), I'm kind of proud of it.

I'll take a break now. If I remember correctly, I have a dog and a cat somewhere, so assuming they didn't left me I think I'll give them some love. Maybe later I'll write about the main points of making this game, but my mind is leaving me.

Good luck everyone!