Friends, help. How do you package your games into a Windows file? Is there a scheme for all dependencies and files, pictures and sounds so that everything is collected into one file? Please share the recipes.

As part of our monthly Python User Group meetup at the local hackerspace (Metalab), we had a small retrospective on PyWeek 34 and our entry, "Red Planted". Claus thankfully took the reins and give his personal view on developing the game and what worked and didn't work during the one-week development of Our Little Game. His slides are available on Github. I'm impressed that we have such a nice "paper trail" of documentation, as I've already forgotten some of the things that happened during PyWeek, and having old screenshots, old discussion entries and such really helped give a clear picture on how we developed the game.

Or to quote Claus' summary: "It was awesome! Let's do that again."

A little less than two days to go for trying out our game and leaving feedback. Looking forward to what everyone has to say :)

We made a short visual guide to go with our game! We know its a bit complex, but hey, it is rocket science :) ... hope you enjoy!

The core idea of Red Dust is a card/strategy game where each round represents an expedition, and your cards represent the supplies that let you move around the map each day. Each card also has a special effect, most of which can only be activated once in special locations (ruins). Your goal is to get rid of all the worms in the area with special cards.

I personally find strategy games difficult to get right in Pyweek. This is in part because there is a lot of implementation work, but also because I have a hard time tightening and fine-tuning them in a short amount of time. This week I spent most of my time on the interface and framework, and I'm happy with how the game looks and feels (given my limited artistic skill), but I just couldn't get the gameplay to work the way I wanted to. The mistake on my end was that given the time pressure I thought I'd just keep grinding through the implementation and try to figure out the gameplay in the end, and I got something playable a few hours before submitting but I didn't know how to actually make it fun within the time frame.

I think there is potential for a good resource-balancing card game based on this concept even if I wasn't able to get there. In retrospect, there are several design issues and a major one is that the game doesn't really have imminent threats or anything that makes you keep moving, and it's very easy to play safe. I did have a boss-type sandworm that would occupy multiple tiles and you had to kill it as your end goal, but I didn't have time to finish that (the code is still there, commented out).

That said, although I wish I had spent more time on the design phase at the very beginning, implementing this game was still an interesting experience. I hope you can get a feel of what I was aiming for and enjoy it.

What? Less than half of the competition is left! And what does it mean? It's time to start active development! The architecture of the game has already been developed, now it remains to complete the animation of all the characters, work out all the mechanics and, of course, fix the bugs.

Day 4-5: This is the basement.

We worked out the base of the game, movement, character classes, and fixed bugs.

Day 6: Very active work.

Our team worked until 0:00 UTC, right before the deadline. Due to our time zone, we stayed up most of the night, but we finished the game right on time! I want to express my deep gratitude to all members of our team, they did a really great job in one day.

Day 7:Testing.

Before publishing the game, we decided to fully test it and fix bugs, as the organizers allowed in the Discord server, and bring it to the ideal. The game is completely ready! We finally finished it, it was a productive work, thank you all!

Very soon we will publish this game and you can play it!

Please comment here (or catch-us on Discord) with any questions or bug reports!

wow we made it how is this possible

I hadn't made a game before and didn't know how to use Pygame this week, so the sole aim here was to make something that runs, even if it's not very good or fun. It's all been very rushed because I haven't had too much time to work on this, plus have also had to learn the basics of Pygame.

There are lots of things I would have liked to have added but just didn't have time to do or to learn how to do, such as adding sound effects.

Today is packaging day. Documented all third party artwork sources properly (we had notes, but now the list is complete, with only the artwork that remains in the final game release). Also, used PyInstaller for the first time to create a (hopefully self-contained) app bundle for easy running the game on macOS (this release has been uploaded as well, but you can also get the "source" release and run it with your local Python 3 (+PyGame + PyOpenGL):

Got somewhat close this time.

What I was trying to go for in this run: A difficult vertical platformer in which you can easily descend to grab the artifact But getting back up to the surface is the toughest part of the game.

Instructions/Lore: You are an astronaut on an expedition for hidden artifact. One such planet is your most recent lead and decided to land on the surface. The artifact is located at the bottom of a dark hole. Thankfully, your hi-tech suit and the planets gravity made you invulnerable to any fall damage...But by the time you reach the bottom, the numerous pitfalls make it a difficult journey back to the surface.

What haven't been implemented in time:

- The map that sets the stage, terrain, and objects for the gameplay portion of the project

- Player sprites artwork/animations when running and jumping and implementing them

- The goal in which you collect the artifact and return to your ship to complete the game

- Sound/music: If I had any extra time leftover I would have worked that

- A catchy title name

Before the next pyweek event I will be brushing up on my coding skills so when it starts, I'll be ready from the get go.

...I'll be back.