Hi,

I was unable to package a windows version of my game, but I was able to get it to work under windows today. There were a few of steps (sorry) ...

You'll need:

• Allegro5 (I tested with this http://cdn.allegro.cc/file/library/allegro/5.0.8/allegro-5.0.8-mingw-4.7.0.zip)
• PyOpenGL (hopefully everyone already has this, but the version I used is this one https://pypi.python.org/pypi/PyOpenGL/3.0.2
• Setuptools (I'm not sure if this is required... and most people should already have it ttps://pypi.python.org/packages/2.7/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.7.exe#md5=57e1e64f6b7c7f1d2eddfc9746bbaf20) 
• PyCollada (this is only available from git, but I provided a win32 version here - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6231892/pyweek/16/pycollada-0.4.win32.exe)

Make sure you install this:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mingus/0.4.2.3

Phew, that's that.  This PyWeek has certainly been more intense for me than the last one I participated in, although certainly more fruitful.  I'm rather satisfied with the result; I've learnt a lot and I feel that I could not have done a better job.  I've faced challenges that I had not faced before, which was the primary reason for my participation.

The game turned out to be an action-adventure style game.  There's not an awful lot of content, but there's not a lot of content that one can produce in a week for a game of this style.  But we implemented most of the content that we had planned to make from the start; I was not certain that we would be able to pull this off.

I did most of the modelling in Blender3D, about which I've uttered both praise and curses during the course of the week.  Most of my curses were at the exporter, though, which I've had to modify on several occasions in order to support a particular feature that I wanted.  But in the end, I managed to set up a reasonably working pipeline, that would make adding further content a lot easier if we were to ever pick this up again.  I certainly had a lot of fun with Blender's ambient occlusion baking and with its Ivy Generator, though. ;-)

I had planned from the beginning to push off texturing to the second half of the week so that I could focus on adding more content from the beginning.  This worked out well, but the texturing ended up being pushed off until the last two days, which caused it to become more of a rush job.  I'm satisfied with how it turned out, but it could have been better had I started a day earlier.

Unfortunately, there was an issue with normal and specular mapping on the walls - they simply didn't show up for some reason.  This is a real shame, because the game would have looked so much better with them.  The fact that the lighting system that I hacked up was so incredibly hacky made debugging this complicated.

We also didn't get as much done as we wanted regarding sound.  I didn't get 3D sound working, and we didn't find the right sound files in time.  The code to play the music was added within the last hour of the challenge.  This is a shame, as better sound effects would have added so much more atmosphere to the game.

But aside from all that, I'm pleased with the result, and I hope that it's received favourably.

Pyweek over, see my finished game 'Space Rotate', to play you just need to click the mouse (click on instructions on the main menu screen).  The basic game mechanic is clicking on circles in order to 'align' them - but some circles are 'connected' to some of their neighbours.  Try it - it's simpler than it sounds!

This was my first time developing a game and so I opted for something fairly minimalist.  I found that while getting the game working wasn't too hard, making the game 'fun' was quite tricky.  Fortunately I discovered this with time to spare and so was able to work on the gameplay quite a bit.  To make the levels, I wrote a quick and dirty level generator (which I haven't included in the package), and tried to order the levels produced in a sensible way.

There are 5 'galaxies' to complete in the main game, each of which consists of 10 'levels'.  Then, if you can't get enough there is a 'bonus' galaxy, which is a random selection of 10 from 300 levels, guaranteeing almost endless 'fun'.

If you manage to complete the game, I'll be impressed - the end of galaxy 4 and galaxy 5 are quite tricky!

Of course there are aspects of the game I'd like to improve, but overall I'm happy with what I've done.  Have a go and see if you like it!

This probably wasn't our most prodigious effort in pyweek, but it's got a good balance for fun this time.  Not a lot to say about it that isn't better said in-game, so you know, go play.

Unfortunately i can't manage to release my videogame. But anyway it was fun to try and i've learned how to use pyglet,  that was one of my goal. One week is quite enough to make a game, and next time i'll finish. THx to all people involved into this pyweek. It's now time to try your games :)

Last Will of the Emtar



I have noticed an occasional bug where a tile appears activated when it shouldn't be or vice versa. I believe this is due to server/client async. It doesn't affect the gameplay that much: just rotate the tile back and forth to fix it. Please let me know about any bugs you find.

Online multiplayer games are always a lot of work to balance, and this was no exception. The way I finally settled on is, players can unlock nodes that other players have already unlocked. Since these nodes will tend to already be well defended, it should be pretty easy. You can probably beat the game by just choosing a few well-defended nodes and watching the action.

But for people who want more of a challenge, find some nodes without defenses, build the defenses yourself, and give it a try. If I'd had more time I probably would have added a "decay" mechanism whereby defenses disappear after a time. Anyway, I don't think the game is that hard even if you do this.

The final boss, however, is pretty much impossible to beat alone. (EDIT: no it's not, you can probably beat it alone.) Once you unlock the final boss, you can have any other players join you, even if they haven't unlocked it.

I hope the final cutscene is worth it. :)

Well I got a bit further than I thought I would and nowhere near as far as I would have liked. My final version has been uploaded, while it may have non-functional shields and rocket launchers, it does feature engines, lasers and a slightly unpredictable collisions system.

Without any further ado I present

Day 7 was a long hard sprint to the finish.

Things that dropped today included damage, death, AI, spell selection, more spells, music and sound, the latter taking only about half an hour thanks to the author of this pre-prepared pack of spell sounds I hit upon just when I thought it would be too late to get sound into the game.

The only final day snag was when my models started blowing up into a mangled mess of triangles as I was trying to add the death animations. I finally cracked it by baking bone envelopes into vertex weights and then doing weight painting. Make sure to keep vertex weights normalised!

I started the day with a small but significant improvement: the wizards have different robes, cloaks and different colour crystals in their staffs. This took a rewrite of the model/material loading code so that materials could be shared between models or not, while vertex lists remain shared.

This shield effect is probably the highlight of day 7 - it turned out to be relatively easy graphically - just a few lines of shader code and a light - but what really sells it is lepton's ability to make particles deflect off it:



This laser effect on the other hand isn't all I wanted; it doesn't have the sense of hurling energy at your foe.



There's a bunch that didn't get done. I had tons more ideas for spells, of course, but I was keen to get in a system of charging up a spell, costing more mana but getting more explosive effects. The scenery is also very barren; I was going to put in a grass texture and add a bunch more background flora.

All in all, I had a lot of fun this Pyweek. I've disclosed on the entry page that this built on the ramshackle collection of 3D code I'd pulled together pre-Pyweek. Nearly everything has been rewritten and improved, so it would be a shame to be disqualfied, but I'm not in it for the win this time. I've improved my 3D graphics knowledge, learned a few ounces more Blender, and battle-tested the scenegraph code which I hope to get documented soon. I look forward to playing everyone's games!

I've now finished the game to my satisfaction.  I've added music and a Windows executable.

PS the options menu is accessible via the F1 key, F2 switches to fullscreen and F3 toggles music.