After a few months, I finally managed to add the missing content to my game. This is the good new. Bad news is that with some configuration, the game still crashes, with no python error ... The new version can be downloaded from this page: http://thorpy.org/applications/torus.html .

I really appreciate all your suggestions and support, I am really sorry, I have being away.... So see you all wonderfully In Pyweek 23...

I converted my game from pygame to the kivy. It is now running on Android and is available for free on Google Play. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.test.btk&hl=en

I've uploaded a fix for the non-repeating music bug, so you can now enjoy endless Beijing Opera if you want. :-)

Theme

When the themes came out I took the opportunity to watch the "Dr Strangelove" movie. I knew about it but had never seen it. I thoroughly enjoyed it and really wanted to try to incorporate that tightly into my game. This turned out to be double edged. Some ideas came easily from that theme but it also felt a bit constraining as well.

Gameplay

I set out to make a stealth game, with you creeping into the facilities and trying to avoid detection. I spotted on day two that this is hard to make fun. Stealth tends to imply a lot of watching and waiting which is hard to make fun!

When I took a break for the night I thought of the "swapping" mechanic (yep, stolen from "the swapper") and suddenly I saw this was a good way out. Now when one guy is waiting you can be doing things with the other guy. Also, the you have to consider the inactive guy because he can sometimes be in danger of being discovered.

This opened up the game and allowed me to find the fun parts. It also changed it into a puzzler rather than a stealth game. That worked well and allowed me to experiment with level design so I was happy with that.

Graphics

I found the fabulous war and destruction pictures on Deviant Art. I knew I wanted to incorporate those but they were too serious for my overall theme. Happily I found a way to switch that also with the sudden jump to Dr Strangelove!

I totally underestimated the time needed to develop the level graphics. Generating tilesets and dynamic objects takes a long time. The door alone took well over an hour and that's a lot for a single item. The tileset is nowhere near polished enough but I suspect there's another week in there just for that!

Title and Story

There was a much bigger story element to the game that I never added. The overall idea was to echo the Dr Strangelove theme of the futility of the mutally assured destruction (MAD) strategy.

The name comes from the "Nash equilibrium", which is a specific state in game theory where both players know the strategy of the other and know that there is nothing to be gained by changing strategy. This is the stable state for MAD and so I wanted to play with that idea.

The story was supposed to be relayed by Strangelove and also by having snippets of speech from the guards. However, I didn't write Strangelove's text until late in the day I was simply too tired to add the creative part (lesson learned - do creative work up front!). So I just ommitted that.

I also ommitted the guards giving story hints. I discovered early on that I needed to use the guard's speech to let the player understand the guard's "thinking" and therefore understand the model of how they would operate. I realised that if I peppered in random story bits then it would hide this so I just kept them talking about what they were doing or thinking

Level Design

I worked on this a lot. I wanted each level to have a couple of elements that the player would learn about the puzzles. I took this from "The Witness" game. This worked well but meant that it took a long time to design and tune each level, so I didn't get many of them done.

It also meant that I had additional aspects that I built but never added to a level. The guards will actually get tired and go to sleep. When they do they call in someone else to "swap" out their patrol. This is fully implemented but I could not easily think how to teach the player how it worked and also generate a meaningful puzzle out of it.

I know if can be done but I think I would have needed several additional levels to introduce the idea properly so I left it out in the end.

My Two Favourite Bits

1. I love the hat switching. I'm so glad I found that approach.
2. The guards saying "Keycard!" when opening a locked door. Helps the player to understand why the guard can open a door that they cannot and also adds a bit of character.

My Two Regrets

1. Missing the story in the main game. I've since written this and it only took an hour but I learned that I really need to do this at the begining
2. The pymunk inconsistency! Aargh! It's not even used but my serge engine will try to load and initialise it when it finds it is installed.

Thanks again to all for playing and rating my game!

Congratulations to the winners and all the participants. A great showing with many amazing and inventive games. The standard of entries just keeps getting higher, which is tremendous to see.

I always enjoy participating and value the great feedback. Thanks to all who played my game and a special thanks to those that worked through the pymunk issue, which I totally missed!

See you next time!

I am very impressed that so many of you took the time to play play my first game and provide such serious and constructive comments. I was not sure what I was supposed to do in the comments box, so I did not give as good feedback as I could have. That's one more lesson learned and I will improve the next time. Thanks.

Thanks to everyone who played our game and thanks for the helpful feedback!

I think this year I am going to try and get an updated version of the game out sometime in the next few weeks, incorporating the feedback we got. Will post these on the game page at a future date. Apologies for some of the tedium in a few of the puzzles (its so hard to get this right in seven days :) ): this is something I'd like to tease out to make the game flow better across the levels. We also had a few extra mechanics planned out that were implemented but not actually used in any puzzles for lack of time (for example, the little red squids that float around will actually act as a shark lure if you harpoon and drag them around).

We really had a blast this comp, so many amazing games: congrats Tee for the individual win with Breach (my personal favourite)! Thanks to blakeohare for running the comp this year: once again, so glad pyweek exists and the community that surrounds it putting in many sleepless nights to produce such fun games :) !

Thanks to everyone who said nice things about my little game! It ranked quite a lot higher than I expected.

Someone said the character looked more Japanese than Chinese. That may be true, but it was one of the images that came up when I googled for "chinese doll", so it's all Google's fault. :-)

The music is definitely Chinese, though. From the web site: "Beijing Opera (Jingju) students in a class, playing the jing'erhu, at the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing."

Stray hornets: Yes, the nasty little things can be a bit unpredictable. Maybe they should die if they're too far away from the main swarm for too long, or something.

I think I may have found out why the music isn't looping like it should -- I'll post an update if I manage to fix it.

In any case, it's been fun getting back to PyWeek after being away from it for a couple of years, and I hope to see you all again next time!

As I enjoyed the feedback of the users who took time to try my game, I just would like to say that I plan to finish the game properly - I mean, not the bugged version of the challenge. I've made strategy mistake during the development week, and in the end too much bugs (serious bugs leading to program crash, as well as small bugs like season's summer/winter swap) came with the game. In particular, I take note of the comments that I received, and I will upload soon a clean version of the game, either here (but I'm not sure I will be able to use upload at that time) or on my site ( www.thorpy.org ).