Final submission uploaded. I managed to squeeze in another couple of features and add a bit of polish here and there. As always, there are a few things I had in mind that there wasn't time for, but on the whole I'm fairly pleased with it.

Well, I didn't very far. Certainly a lot of development happened in the last frenzied hours. 

PyInstaller didn't work on windows with pygame. Wasted hours trying to get that work. Not that I expected much from windows, or python packaging. I ended up using someone's py2exe script. It worked fine on linux though. 

So much stuff got missed out, proper collision hulls, collisions between entities, sound beyond the fireballs, actual gameplay, proper controls...

If only the rules didn't require you to start from scratch. Re-implementing things I've already done was a huge pain. Either that, or not having a life-sucking full-time job. If you are going to try 'playing' it, I'd suggest using a gamepad, as effort behind mouse + keyboard was mostly dropped as soon as I got that working.

Hi, 

I have uploaded my final game. I'm pretty happy with what I've done, although I don't think it's a particularly fun game. There are also some major bugs. If the character runs around for long enough the amount of active minions can become very large and slow the game down to a crawl.

It's untested or packaged for windows or mac at the moment.

In hot pursuit of the beast.


Thanks to those organising this event - it was fun and it's given me some ideas for future games.

--Scott

Those who have played my games know that about half of the time I realize that I can't make things work on the last day, throw everything away and submit something small. It's happened again.

I was motivated by the fact last time I did well within a short time span, but this time even though I had slightly more time than before, I felt uninspired (the name of my game is proof of that). Finding a good idea that is fast to implement is quite hard. I scrapped a game once in the middle of the week and a second time today (although the game I scrapped today is not too unlike the game I submitted). Today I ended up implementing and submitting an idea that was simple enough but not from the top of my list.

I'm not particularly excited about this game, but hopefully it's not too bad. I realized the mechanic I focused on is not that fun after all, and I'm not sure I managed to make it fun. The basic idea is that you shoot both to your side and your enemy's side and you have to be careful not to hit your stuff while hitting the enemies (although in this implementation the context is much simpler).

Anyway, I hope you have fun playing it. :)

Unfortunately, I didn't nearly have as much time over the week as I had planned; I got basically two days (today and day 1) to write my game. And you can guess how that went...

I learned quite a bit though, and I'll be keeping my game idea for a future PyWeek or perhaps a standalone title. I will probably also write a 2D game engine between now and the next PyWeek so as to minimize the amount of time spent writing boilerplate code to 5 minutes or less.

Till next time, guys!

This has been an awesome pyweek.

Well... We are a little bit disappointed. We didn't have enough time to do all the things we wanted to do, but nevertheless we have accomplished more than we thought we could.

The game has a nice physics engine and cool sound.

We think it will be nice to keep working in it in the future.


It has been a lot of fun, and we have had a great time. We are very tired now...
We hope you enjoy our little game =]


Best regards,
Akathorn

Whew!!!

Im actually quite happy with my result, even though the game is not much by way of a challenge. I actually think this could make a really fun multiplayer game, but that's currently out of my experience level.

I had no firm ideas when the week started -in fact I would say that I 'discovered' the game around Thursday when it occurred to me to tweak things in this direction -I suspect many would say that this is usually how it turns out but I'm learning all this for the first time.

The thing I struggled with the most was the AI: in this sense I completely overreached. There are only two or three possible 'verbs' for a player in WebWars but it was still a crazy undertaking for me trying to squeeze competent behaviour out of the computer. The messiness of my code combined with Python's flexibility really saw things getting out of hand on the last day. In this sense Python gives you enough rope to hang yourself with.

I spent six days on gameplay and AI and managed to get all the artwork done on the last day. In future I would prefer to leave more time for the latter and of course to add sound which is something I never ever seem to get to!

Congrats to all who participated -cant wait to see what others came up with -I have a idea though, I've been keeping close watch

Also thanks to Richard for this awesome opportunity

So I woke up this morning (afternoon) and realized that the end game wasn't quite right.  If you finished all 10 levels (difficult) the game would just crash (no level distance set for level 11).  I couldn't see how I'd have time to add a You Win screen in the few hours remaining, so I punted.  There are now 1000 levels.  Good luck with that.  It's very retro.  There's no You Win screen on Pac Man.  It just gets harder and then you die.  So that's version 0.68 Final.

Then I tested it on a smoking fast machine (new i7) and found that the goo speed doesn't scale well at all.  The game is very, very difficult even on level 1.  With only one hour left, I don't have any easy ways to auto correct (or even characterize) this effect so I added a player speed option to the main menu.  If you are running a new-ish machine the base speed is good.  On slower machines you can turn down the speed a bit (you were getting away with murder) and on fast machines bumping it up about 10-15 points seems fair.  That's version 0.70 Final.

There are no more Final versions.  And this time I mean it!

So I didn't get in as much stuff as I wanted to, but I think the game came out pretty good considering the amount of time I had to work on it.

I would have liked to add different backgrounds for the different levels to give it a little more variety, and maybe put some more time into balancing the level difficulty.