The original goal for this game was to have a top-down endless shooter. The endless part, I feel, was achieved perfectly, and is everything that I wanted it to be. Random level generation, increasing difficulty, and more.

The top-down part, however, was achieved not-so-perfectly. The movement feels natural if you play like a top-down shooter, but the sprites simply don't look like those of top down shooters. Maybe I could have fixed this by increasing the pixel count, giving be the ability to increase the amount of detail I could put in the sprites. Otherwise, it would just be blue squares shooting black squares, and the "Cops" theme would be lost.

With that being said, though, I feel satisfied with how the game turned out. It's a fun, theoretically endless, virtually random, and adequately challenging game. I have high confidence that it will get good ratings (did I just jinx it? crap).

See you in October, PyWeekers!

Personally I'm not happy the way my game turned out. Making a game is harder than I thought and it didn't help that I had never used pygame before. Anyway, I hope I don't get last place and I wish the other entrants luck!

- drones_flier

I still remember with a broken heart, how in PyWeek 30, our favorite theme wasn't chosen. No such bad luck in 31 tho, since the themes all were so random, we decided as a team to let the trusty "random" module perform that hard choice for us:

import random

choices = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
for _ in range(3):
choices.shuffle()
print(choices)

That made sure that we matched the level of randomness of the themes to choose from. So when the theme was announced, no broken hearts were reported by the team members and no one lost trust in the democratic process bestowed upon us by the PyWeek overlords.

With the theme known, we started brainstorming and came up with something that would fit the individual strengths and preferences of our team members. Hendrik-jan had a clear vision of what it should look and feel like to play and gave out appropriate tasks to the rest of the team. rdb got the job of "hell master" in charge of virtual pyrotechnics, Fireclaw was in charge of creating 3D models, tizilogic was advised to mix a potion using PRNG and math trickery to mash everything else together into a playable world (and call it procedural generation), while Schwarzbaer assisted us both with his input handler library, in the brainstorming, play testing and by whipping out his Potato-with-a-GPU-inside to make sure the game would play on ancient hardware. Our team leader composed and produced all the sound and SFX and steered the project admirably (to success the author of this diary entry wants to add), so everyone else on the team could focus on their part and produce great work.

The game came together pretty well, really fast. In no time we had something to start verifying whether reality matched up with our vision and improved on what we had incrementally. Around Wednesday it was already a lot of fun to play and we still had some time left to further improve upon that. On Thursday, we reached the milestone of "feature complete", so the hunt for bugs and the polish process began.

We are very pleased with the end result and sincerely hope the judges like our entry just as much as we do.