I really can't believe I finished before the deadline. Thanks to some anonamous people who helped me play test and of course the creators of python and TkInter. :D :D :D emoticons :D

Version 1.2 adds an indicator for your ship. Someone pointed out in the comments that it was missing, and it was something I was thinking it could be of use anyway. The graphic I ended up using is one of the target icons from Ardentryst.

Regular version:

https://pyweek.org/media/dl/19/onpon4/pacewar-1.2.zip

Low-quality music version:

https://pyweek.org/media/dl/19/onpon4/pacewar-1.2-ld.zip

Well, that's it. Pacewar is finished. The final version, 1.1 (unless I develop it more):

https://pyweek.org/media/dl/19/onpon4/pacewar-1.1.zip

And here's a version with low-quality music if you want a smaller download:

https://pyweek.org/media/dl/19/onpon4/pacewar-1.1-ld.zip

I indeed ended up finishing the AI. It's a lot less dumb now, and my brother found it to be convincing. So, yay!

The difference between version 1.0 and 1.1 is 1.1 makes your current key state transfer over to the next ship when you take control of a new one. That it didn't do this was a complaint my sister had.

The game is finished with music made by my brother Travis Kepley and should be uploaded shortly (it's a .exe file!) There is a problem with the server of Pyweek or something, it won't upload, I have been trying for awhile (just continuously loads the page I am on when I press upload.) I will keep trying though!

The game is as complete as I think I can get it without rushing features along without proper testing.

The download for the game is here in .zip format:download

Made some progress with the game, but not as much as I would have liked. The enemy spider can already move, and be pushed back if you hit it with a weapon, but only in one direction, and it is still very buggy.

But at least I made some progress with the intro screen (to ugly to link in the diary, but you can see it in my screenshots). I drew the Picture while driving on the bus, and you can see it. Not that it would have been much better if I would have set at a normal desk -.-'
And I don't really have time to compose a better screen. Maybe I should abandon the intro screen entirely.

Compared to the intro, the main menu did turn out much better (if I may say so myself ;) ). Have a look: The Light follows the mouse cursor. The options in the menu are selected with the mouse as well:

I also added rudimentary joystick / gamepad support. Rudimentary because I just added some random buttons for different actions. I didn't really put much effort in it. If you want to change the button settings, you will have to change it in the source code yourself. (The same will probably be true for the keyboard controls, but at least they have some better defaults).

Important things left to do

• Enemy collision detection
• Hurt + kill enemies
• Enemies drop goodies
• Enemies can at least walk randomly through level
• Rudimentary AI for enemies (trying to attack player)
• Dynamically spawn new enemies
• Enemies hurt player
• Player can die
• Game Over state
• Pause
• Lights gameplay mechanic

Not so import things left to do:

• Find and use better music
• Sound effects
• Finally center lights on player
• HUD / Player status display
• Control customization
• Developer sleep
• Improve / abandon intro
• Help Page
• Sleepy time for developer
• Improve Level
• Fix pesky viewport (works, but is rather inefficient at the moment)
• Why don't you already go to sleep if you can't even stay awake to finish this entry. Idiot.
• Add some torch graphics (game and menu)
• Sleep a whole lot
• fixing everything on these lists

Well, that's probably not even everything. I'll be surprised if I even finish half of the important list D:

Well, I'm gonna go to sleep for now. Something tells me that it is bedtime.

Now I just have to finish the levels and have an ending... oh boy.

Things are starting to really come together. Multi-player is working as far as I can tell (play testing multi-player is tough solo). I only need a few sound effects and should be able to wrap those up shortly. I still need to finish the high score system for single player, don't think I want high scores for multi-player. Right now the only dependencies are pygame and the standard library. Need to write a readme and test on python 2.7. Should be on track for getting it all done in time.

Pacewar 0.1 is right here:

https://pyweek.org/media/dl/19/onpon4/pacewar-0.1.zip

It turns out that it's quite big! Most of the size comes from the music, so I decided to package an alternative version with the music re-encoded in low quality:

https://pyweek.org/media/dl/19/onpon4/pacewar-0.1-lq.zip

This very well might be the final result; it depends on whether I succeed at the self-preservation behavior of the AI. We'll see. :)

While I still haven't finished the AI, I decided that polish is more important than intelligent AI, so I did that.

Firstly, when you start up the game, you now see the title and a little menu:

Secondly, every aspect of the game has been made fully functional. So yes, that 2-player option works:

And yes, that "controls" option (for configuration of controls) works:

There is one small bug that hasn't been worked out where you occasionally get control of two ships at once, and the controls aren't saved to a file, but other than that and a more intelligent AI, Pacewar is now basically entirely finalized.