It was a busy week.
I'll write my thoughts later.
No one would read it, though.

What can I say, even though I didn't fully complete my game, it's been a great experience participating in the PyWeek challenge.  I did get a good introduction to game development and knowing how difficult and a fun experience game development is.

Hopefully, I'll get a chance to put more time in the game and upload a working, functional game before the judging process ends.  I actually look forward on trying and testing out the other games.

I'm satisfied with the apparent final game's quality, but the lack of testing time makes me dread undetected bugs appearing when users are playing...

Well, I did not manage to test the game with Python2.x, nor to add sound effects or music, and procedural vessel generation... In the end the actual game content differs a lot from my initial ambitions, but I would say this is "normal" for gaming challenges. I will upload a more complete version in a few weeks I hope.

Playthrough videos now available at:

Part 1 of 3: https://youtu.be/MzEqs0aj1y8

Part 2 of 3: https://youtu.be/bz7x3VbqBMc

Part 3 of 3: https://youtu.be/neNqHciPZXI

Alternate Ending: https://youtu.be/xagWlKJZlB0

Unfortunately my laptop hates running pygame and recording video from the screen at the same time, so the framerate of the game is reduced to half of what it would normally be :( ... hence sorry about the videos being a bit long. Hope you enjoy!

This one was a lot of fun to create. It's a boss fight, bullet hell type of game. At each round, you have a choice between two different curses, so it's a pretty direct interpretation of the theme. :)

Pyweek 22's "Beneath the Ice" inspired me to challenge myself to focus a bit more on art and polish, and I hope it shows. I'm not an artist and these things take a lot of time for me (at least too much time for me to do it regularly), but I'm happy with how it turned out. I'm always looking to improve though, so if any of you artists out there have any constructive criticism on my art, let me know! I kept finding myself wasting time with redoing drawings from scratch, and it would be nice to get things right on the first shot.

There was some polish here and there that didn't make it in due to time constraints, but I was able to put in all the features that I planned for. The only thing that I'm wondering is whether the balance turned out as intended: it's meant to be challenging, but also doable if you try hard enough. I kept tweaking things up and down while I was playtesting it and now I don't really know how well it is balanced for a brand new player.

I hope you find it fun!

Well, I created a game, start to finish, that has some simple interfaces, and an objective, and something to avoid. It is a complete game. It is somewhat fun and difficult.

I did a majority of the development in the last 48 hours. I was done before the deadline and had a brain freeze about zipping the files into a single upload. I uploaded the script instead, which is identical to the one in the zip, but doesn't include sprites and backgrounds. So please accept the zip.

I worked through a lot of the tutorials by Richard Jones, but also confronted some unique problems to create transitions from scene to scene. I didn't want to create a new set of classes for scenes and instead set flags and used events. It was an effective method, but not super clean. It worked for the simplicity of my program. And I was able to make the structure relatively consistent.

I hope this is enjoyable. My wife had acted as my tester and said I needed a weapon for defense, though I didn't have the time to add it. In the mean time, you are going to have to just run away and hide.

The lesser of two evils certainly does not get to fight back! Run away and hide my friends! Good Luck.

Today it was one more time a harder day. Struggling around with the python package management. cx_Freeze, distutils, pyinstaller, py2exe, py2app - what the f*ck?!
In the  morning I still added some features and fixed some presentation problems on the intro screen. So, I had the chance to review my knowledge of pygame's blit functionality and other graphics stuff like per-pixel-alpha.
Very late afternoon, almost evening, I went on with cx_Freeze. And after 4 to 5 hours, several Python, cx_Freeze and pyinstaller installation later, I have at least the feeling that I understand a little bit how cx_Freeze works. In between and in hope that the packaging worked better I restructured the directories and even the coding a little bit. The result was a last upload with a source and binary (for Windows). I downloaded it on another windows machine and at least on this my package was working. Unfortunately the very last uplaod came a little bit, tool late :-( So, I am completey dependent on the grace of the pyweek referees.

Good Night and Happy Judging for all of us.

Peter

Here's the link. Please let me know of any bugs by posting a comment here. Thank you!

Well we didn't even come close to finishing. I've been programming almost all day and we kinda got the game going. Also, turns out Clarissa was not added to the team and couldn't be added in later. Can someone move us to the team category for judging?

So I've been coding for almost 10 hours straight now. I haven't really eaten anything today. And boy does my code show it! About 4 hours ago, my brain kinda started seizing up whenever I went to tackle anything that wasn't straight forward. So it took about an hour to implement correct scrolling function and an hour plus to to debug collisions. At least both of those work.

So what's missing? A beginning cutscene (which includes the Lesser of Two Evils choice), another level, enemies, gravity, proper movement velocity, stairs, keys, jumping, doors, final boss, and final cutscenes. And whatever else we think to add.

But, this is the first game I've ever helped create the concept for and first full game I've tried to write in python. Clarissa and I are happy with what we have done and we will finish this game (and I will organize my code :P). I'm also going to try to get Clarissa in on the coding as due to the time crunch, I took over to get things moving.

Interesting to note, the game is mostly just an engine for Tiled. You can swap out that .json file for something else as long as you follow similar conventions.

But yeah that's it. Time to see everyone else's stuff now!

Oh my gosh.  I was able to complete the platforming aspect of the game, balance the difficulty, and add music all in the last hour.  In fact I had a pervasive bug where the corners of my platforms were black and not transparent.  It was with me for last day and I thought I was going to have to submit without fixing this.  Fortunately I found the bug in the last minute of the competition and was able to hotfix it!

It's been a really long time since I've finished a PyWeek.   I did all of the programming work and my wife did all of the art.  We found the music and fonts online free for noncommercial use and since this game is open-source, I think that counts.  If you are interested, you can track the development on github @ https://github.com/lukevp/pyweek23.  I took a code cut at 0:00 UTC and I am going to do some additional tweaking / code cleanup, but of course this will not be entered into the competition.  I wish I had budgeted a bit more time to do some more testing.