So the challenge is over. As I had final exams this week, I went with something rather small. The result is "DEEP SPACE", a kind of space shoot-em-up game. Yesterday I worked and included sound and music when I was with my grandparents, and before heading home, I put everything on an USB flash drive as a .zip file, to test it again before uploading. But for some reason, the .zip was corrupted, and I could not open it. And before I knew it development time was over. And therefore, the game comes without music and sound :(.

Finally finished with Pyweek 18! We just had some last minute file sorting to do, as we mainly worked in different places communicating over Skype. It was certainly an experience, and I definitely gained a lot of knowledge during this week. I want to thank my team for their hard work and dedication throughout the week. It was a pleasure partaking in this competition and worth doing again. The amount of satisfaction after completing it was awesome. It's also pretty great that a handful of grade 11 students, most of whom had just started learning to program the previous year, or even this year in 2014, managed to pull off a game like we did. It may not be Super Mario Brothers, but it's sure an accomplishment, especially to do so in one week. So the only question is: when is Pyweek 19? :)

Our game has taken up all of our free time on top of our full time jobs, but somehow we made it. It needs a little love, but it's playable and hopefully if you play it you'll get a kick out of at least some parts of it.

The characters and script were pretty fun to work on. Our apologies if anything is too confusing or weird. It was fun to come up with the references we did, and hopefully some of it is fun for you, too.

Well - that was pretty fun!

Game doesn't quite have the fun factor, but it is sort of tricky navigating your ship to shoot at enemies without them firing back.

What I missed out on:

• Victory / Loss screens
• Help screen
• Waves of enemies
• Adding ships to your own fleet
• Fog of war
• Battleships, Aircraft carriers, Subs etc
• Powerups

Next time I think I'll take a day off work, so I can spend a bit more time on it.

I've finished my game. It has a lot of rough edges. I like how a robot reacts to bit flags. But I think game mechanics will not be very clear to others.

Anyway, main idea is to combine bit flags and so influence robot behavior. Key word is combine

I've done most of the work during these two days.
- Gates. Prevents robot from passing through.
- Enemies. Tries to shoot the robot.
- Sensor*. Works with colors. Locks target (Gate points or enemies) only when sensor color is same as target's color
- Shooting**. So, the robot can shoot into gates and/or enemies

* To fully turn on sensor You need to turn on at least two flags: 4th and one of 5-7th.
** Shooting works only if sensor is locked onto target. Shooting bit is 8th bit.

What is missing:
- Music
- Sound FX
- Nice beginning/ending screens
- Better communication with player (Example: telling her/him that one bit depends on another)

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVimBF92kbU

We made it!

Stuff that happened today:

• Animations -- tile spinning and flashing borders
• Fine tuning tile selection
• Music added everywhere
• Decaying blocks
• New icons
• Puzzles
• Double arrow selectors
• REALLY fancy tutorial
• No, seriously, it's fancy
• GenericBits
• It has super cow powers.
• Generate JSON at build time
• Autoscrolling
• Bikeshedding (luckily there are only 15 options)
• NINTENDO Hard!
• Game balance -- everyone has an equal chance of dying
• Packaged all the things! For Windows, OS X, Debian and other Unixes
• Portability of .dmg is uncertain.

A selection of the week's most descriptive commit messages:

• pedantic correntions
• Mor deth wit speling
• F**king megres
• de-heath the tests
• robots repel locks
• Good point, neil, KP_ENTER should count too
• Don't scrible on the original image
• Squawk a bit
• Fix cheat detection.
• Hack hack hack hack
• PHYRRIC Victory\!
• *REAL* Python has no dict comprehensions.
• corrected horse metaphor
• Flashing your mom. Maturity level rising.
• You can deal with comlications in untroduction.
• To boldly unsplit [infinitives]

Download it from the official website!

I made something quite simple, but I think I'm fairly satisfied. It's at least relatively polished compared to my previous games (i.e., not unfinished). It's a fast-paced arcade game where you're a byte following the patterns they send your way. The only thing that's bothering me is that I don't think I was able to tune the difficulty very well, and it might be too difficult. I wasn't able to make the XOR mechanic interesting enough without making it difficult at the later levels. I'm interested in knowing if you manage to beat all levels.

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who's finished this Pyweek!

Well, I think my lofty goals nipped Enargy and me in the ass. As you can see in the assets and audio folders, we have a lot of content to add...just not enough time to code it all. Also Enargy has been juggling a sick baby, Mother's Day, AND his daughter's birthday.

In any case, this game plans on having an overworld map where the player could fly around space shooting NPCs and potentially encountering hostile enemies. The green balls are collectible orbs that would be used for currency to buy fun items for aesthetics and power ups. They wouldn't be drawn all over the map like they are in the 'final' build. As you can see there are planets and a structure that looks like a rip-off of Galactus' ship from Marvel Comics (which it is.) The structures and planets can be landed on however Enargy coded them out as they are no where near ready to be experienced. Basically landing on planets would put the player in a horizontal shmup style environment to take out planet specific enemies.

We plan on finishing this title, as it's been hella fun regardless of what little we have to offer, and will release more versions so keep an eye out.

We got the last few characters and sprites out of the way and started on music. We were also able to finish up the dialogue.

Our music set-up:

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

That quote basically sums up my feelings about my game. I wish my game was better, but it is what it is. It is only one level, but it is a complete game with sound effects, music, a title screen and workable mechanics. I learned a lot during this week but I still have a lot to learn about game development. There was plenty of stuff I wanted to experiment with or play around with that I just didn't have the time for. I'm also not convinced that the core mechanic of "bouncing" was a good choice for a side scroller. Overall, at least it works fairly well.

Making a game in one week was tough. I've never worked harder on a programming project before. While I can't wait to go back to my usual game development pace, I found this challenge very rewarding.

Github repo: Bouncy Shoes