WARNING: long post :P

Well, first off, this has been a great pyweek, the number and quality of entries was astonding, and I was actually glad to lose to a few of them :)
We are very pleased with where we placed, even if it was lower than last time :P

What went wrong:

1. Started out with way too fast of a pace(literally), and a so-so idea that was really meant for a different theme and. Ran with the idea, created a simple 3d physic engine and particle effects. Found a multitude of bugs in the physics..

2. Spent 2nd and 3rd days trying to fix 3d physics to no effect. Finally scratched the whole thing, only to find that it was just moving too darn fast and losing events from pygame :(.

3. Finally scratched our original idea late Tuesday, and started work on it late Wednesday. But by this time we really didn't have enough time to really finish a game as big as we were planning, but decided to stick it out.

4. Our artist wasn't able to work on the game until Wednesday, so I spent 60% of the remaining time on graphics, instead of focusing on code :(

5. Waited until last day to implement menus, sound, skellington, levels, between game screens.

6. Our game designer wasn't able to do much after helping with the ideas(he was going to do levels/balancing).

7. After switching ideas, I decided to use my pyglibs library, but I haven't worked on it for a while, and it really wasn't competition-ready, so I spent about 1/4 of my programming time re-writing it, and thinking up ways to do things that should have already been done :(.

8. And last, we didn't have a plan for the compo, we mostly did whatever came to mind next, so some things that should have been implemented weren't, and some things that really weren't important were given too much time.

What went right:

1. I was able to do more graphics than I have ever done for any project in the past.

2. Found lots of way to fix up pyglibs into a better package.

3. Coded my first actual AI !!! :)

4. Learned some music-making basic(didn't use this new-found skill though...)

5. Have a better idea of what we'll need to next time to really accomplish whatever we plan.

The future...
Well, this is actually my favorite game that I have made to date, and we definitely will be planning on continuing its development :D

Here is a list of things that are planned for the next release(hopefully soon):

1. Fix up ai a bit(it will stop moving sometimes, and doesnt always work right...)

2. Add some more animation(especially for lightning bolt attacks)

3. Add some hot-keys.

4. Create an interactive tutorial.

5. Create a level editor and a campaign system, so you can create tournaments.

6. A trophy system(which thus requires a player-saving system)

7. A better menu system.

8. Add lots of levels(I'm really glad i was actually able to play through the entire game without it crashing because of levels :))

9. Add a custom ai setting to the levels.

10. Make the tile smaller(that should allow bigger map sizes, without hurting speed)

11. Add some more sfx.

There are a few more things planned, but they will not likely be in the upcoming release.

If anyone has any requests/comments/ideas or anything else, feel free to post them here.

Well, I'm off to bed now, will maybe work on the game some tomorrow. ;)
Hope to see you all again next pyweek :)

I figured I should write a postmortem, just to let you all know how it went. I'd like to encourage others to write one too.

What Went Wrong

• Time: I spent way too much time in this game. I sacrificed a few other (real life) things just to finish the game. Probably this came from having to redo a lot of things (code and art).
  
  
• Lack of code planning: This wasted a lot of time. I had to redo several sections of the code because it was very messy. And yet, it's still messy. :P
  
  
• Pixel art: I spent a day or two trying to draw some pixel art. My original intention was to create pixel art offices, but that turned out to be too hard and too time consuming. Fortunately, I figured out an alternative.
  
  
• Unbalancing and lack of testing: I think this was the biggest mistake. I should have spared more time for testing and tweaking.
  
  
• Strategy game: This is the first strategy game I've ever made, so I'm not used to it. Making something different teached me a few lessons, though.
  
  

What Went Right

• Finished: Woohoo, I finished it! :)
  
  
• To-do list: Saturday morning I decided to make a to-do list. It's only a to-do list, but it significantly increased my productivity, because I always knew what I'm going to do next, and there's that feeling of accomplishment (and consequently motivation) when you cross out one of the items. :)
  
  
• Graphics: I'm actually pretty surprised what I was able to do with the graphics. I had a totally different idea at first, but I ended up with graphics that, while far from being cool-looking as pixel art, they also look good, and, most importantly, it didn't take so much of my time to draw them.
  
  

Unimplemented Features

• Items: There would be items that would give you bonuses and such. For example, you'd be able to buy a rendering screensaver, which would improve your chances of faking work ("Sorry, boss, I can't work while it's rendering.").
  
  
• Levels and descriptions of secrets: Secrets would have various levels, and each would have a description of sorts. Of course, the worse the secret, the more money or reputation you'd be able to get.
  
  
• Savegames: In a strategy game, savegames are pretty important. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to implement that.
  
  
• People working against you: And you'd also have secrets and stuff, including secrets acquired while doing sneaky stuff. And people would also blackmail you or expose your secrets in an attempt to gain money or destroy your reputation.
  
  
• Stocks: You would be able to buy stocks, which depend on how the company goes. If you have a higher position, you'd be able to influence more how the stocks go, maybe even release rumors as to raise or lower the price of stocks.
  
  
• Different endings: Instead of destroying the reputation of the CEO, you'd be able to buy more than 50% of stocks to own the company.
  
  
• Name and gender choosing, interview: You would be able to choose your name and gender. Also, an interview would allow you to change how much money you'd start with, your initial stats and initial reputation.
  
  
• Random events: Where you find out new secrets accidentally, or gain new secrets for other people to use against you, or work bonus, or stuff like that.
  
  
• Music and sounds: It's just a strategy game so music and sounds aren't that important, but it would add something to the game.
  
  

Conclusion

Wow, writing a list like this makes me see there were a lot of features I threw away. I hadn't noticed that.

Although the idea isn't bad, I wish I had thought of something more creative and fun.

I don't think I went too bad, but I could've done much better. I think if I had spared just a few hours to tweak it, the game would be more playable. So, I'm not sure whether this is a victory or a defeat (in terms of whether I'm satisfied with the game or not), so I'll call it a tie and move on to the next pyweek. :)

Anyway, see you all again on Pyweek 5. It was fun, thanks everyone, especially to Richard for hosting it again. :) Congratulations to Hectigo and TOBA. :)

Beware, large post. :) I'm replying to everyone who rated my game.


Very comprehensive gameplay, a little more in the graphics/sound department wouldn't hurt.
Yep, I agree. If I had managed to do my original plan (pixel art), it would have been great. But I like the current graphics because I did them so fast and they kinda look nice. :P As for sound, I wanted to add it, but I ended up scrapping it for more important stuff.

Interesting. But I haven't seen how the skills affect the game.
Productivity is pretty useless, just raises your paycheck a bit. Socialization is kinda useless, too. Subterfuge is the most important, because almost everything looks at subterfuge to know its chance of succeeding.

Nice game, but perhaps unfinished? I couldn't figure out how to win... Maybe I was missing something, I did try playing it several different ways :(
Well, yeah, it lacked tweaking. :(

Neat idea, nice graphics. Needs more balancing and challenge to add fun. I couldn't win the game though. I can't seem to surpass 95% reputation and can't surpass Director. Maybe I need to bribe more? Shrug.
I haven't won the game yet, but some say they did. :P

Seemed to take too long to get promoted. I was the only person with reputation in the game (about 96% IIRC - had 100% relation with everybody else), but I didn't seem to be going up. Maybe I should have not kept bashing everybody down to 0% relation and 100% rep.
Yeah, lacked tweaking...

At first glance it seemed really complicated and I shelved it for the end of my reviewing session, but picking it back up again, reading the readme, it's not that complicated and is actually a lot of fun! The game lasts pretty long so a save feature would have been nice. As it is I am leaving it open until I win. Thanks for the funness.
Cool, I'm glad someone enjoyed it. Thanks!

x Add a screenshot to your game, its easier to find on the entry-list page that way and makes it easier to remember. + Fun game! + Nice graphics - I can never remember which day/week its fire/promote time, so some sort of indication of how long its left whould have been nice. - There is a bug when you become the Executive Vice-President, the text is to long :) - What is "prentend to work" good for? - The game eats 100% cpu.. (Even if Ive written more on - than on +, the game is more + than - :)
Yeah, by the time I wanted to add a screenshot, the server was completely lagged. I'm glad I uploaded the game first. :P Thanks. Fire/promote time happens every bimester, but I should've added it. The fact that I haven't tested it very well means you'll eventually find bugs. :P Pretend to work gives you an extra action if you succeed (ok, maybe not that useful). 100% CPU, hmm, well, I'm not a good coder. :P I just do a loop polling for events and having a Clock tick. Any suggestions on how should I do next time?

it doesn't have any bugs that i noticed but the game is not complete - there is no possibility to win and it is getting boring very fast
No bugs? Um, sounds odd because I haven't tested it well, but great. :P Yeah, you can win (or at least people say so). :P Yeah, I guess it gets boring very fast. :)

Nice concept. Just needs some balancing :-)
I agree. :)

There was a lot of polish on this. I liked the concept. It is funny that there were a couple of climb the social ladder games, this is one of the better.
I'm not sure there's a lot of polish, there's not even sound. But thanks. :) I think PyCor's was better than mine, although it goes a different direction.

I didn't manage to win the game or get far - but I always thought "let's try this one last thing", so I'd say it's fun but needs more options or a clearer direction
I admit I'm not good at explaining things clearly. Thanks for the suggestion. :) As for more options, I had a long list of features but I had to throw a lot of them away.

this was pretty fun, especially when I destroyed everyones reputation around me. The ending screen was confusing. Does OWNED! mean I now own the company or that since I destroyed everyone's reputation they threw me off the building and I'm trailing mony behind me? could have used some more interesting visuals and sounds though. Otherwise very fun.
Means you've owned them all. Or, you could look at it that way, but think of the bright side, you're dying rich. :)

points for exploring the "turn based office politics sim" genre.
Whee, points are fun!

Nice selection of font and graphics. The game is very polished, But not my kind of game.
To be honest, I don't play many games of this kind either. But I wanted to try it anyway.

Pretty decent game, it got a little meticulous near the end, and the skills and abilities seemed a little skewed, but otherwise a good entry.
Thanks. Again, lacked tweaking.

It could of been better but I liked what was made.
Yes, could have been better.

This is a very mean game. And FUN (although I'll probably not play this release over and over again - not enough content and challenge yet). Hope you'll keep going!
Thanks. I don't have the habit of completing pyweek games (even though last time I said I would), but, who knows. :P

Haha! Excellent game! It was especially fun right at the beginning before I knew what I was doing -- I snooped for too many secrets, and eventually just learned to bide my time and work up my subterfuge and socialization skills. It was a really good game that way -- excellently creative! The graphical look and feel was fantastic -- I really enjoyed it. The interface was wonderfully polished as well -- it was just an excellent game overall. More variation could help make the game hold more replay value in the future, but as such, it was a very fun game as it is. The end was slightly unsatisfying, as I never actually got the "John Doe Has Been Promoted" message, and never actually saw "President" next to my name (it still had the title of "Executive VP"). Regardless, thanks for the fun game!
I'm happy you enjoyed it, thank YOU for playing. :)

i love sims
Yay.

Nice game thingy...
Yay again. (Ok, I don't know what to reply to short comments. :P)

There seemed to be some quirks with the promotions... at one point I had a 95% reputation but I hadn't sullied anyones reputation above mine despite my reputation being 3x anyone ahead of me and having a 100% relationship with all of the people above theirs, and I still wasn't getting a promotion. This game kind of reminded me of those old Lemonaide stand type games for the Apple II.
Hmm, odd. I'll look into it if I decide to complete it.

Nice game! As pointed out by you there are some additions to the AI missing (working against the player character etc.), but what you have done within this one week looks good :)
Cool, thanks. :)

I liked this game, and I played all the way to the top. I am not sure whether I'd play it again after finishing it once, but it did keep my attention quite a while. The user interface is clear and easy. The concept is quite innovative as well, and fits the team well. It's a rather dismal view of the corporate world, but oh well. :) I would be interesting in seeing ways to enhance the replayability of this game however. Perhaps the unexpected happens once every while. Perhaps some mini games. Perhaps the player gets secrets. I'm not sure. Nice effort! I enjoyed this game.
Yeah, I agree, the way it is it isn't very replayable. In fact, two out of the three things you said were on the original plan.

Well, the game is winnable, but the gameplay leaves much to be desired. Optimizing one's career advancement isn't that interesting, and doesn't feel like one is very involved in the whole thing - better writing would've helped to keep the player interested. The game could tell what kind of secrets the player finds out and exposes, for example. I like the graphical style, but the UI is not very straightforward for the beginner - it takes a while to understand what things are clickable on the map. Emphasizing the texts graphically would've definitely helped.
Your example was on my original plan. :) As for improving UI, it's a good idea. But I figured I'd just leave on the readme that texts on the map are clickable. Took less time. :P

Reminds me of a Sim game. Nice work.
Thanks.

Very cool! Work your way up the corporate ladder by being sneaky and pretending to work. I played it to the end.
Thanks for playing it to the end. :)

I liked the look of the game, but simulation type games aren't really my thing. Socializing your way to the top of the corporate ladder isn't all that fun in my opinion, but I'm sure others might think so.
Yeah, I don't play many sim games either, but I thought it would be interesting to try to build one.

Really fun! A bit intimidating at first, but once you got the hang of it, it wasn't that bad.
I think the intimidation can be lessened by a friendlier UI like suggested in another comment. Thanks. :)

I kinda liked this one. I just wish it had some other different activities to be done and other events in the game. The graphics, though looking very amateurish, actually add to ambience. As with most pyweek entries, I missed some sound effects and soundtrack. Maybe some elevator music would be perfect for this game. ;)
Yes, I wish there were more things to do too. :P Elevator music, ooh, good idea.

This game was interesting. It's one of the few that I've played so far that I'm actually planning on going back to, mostly out of curiousity and to try a couple new strategies. Anyways, it was certainly better than most. I didn't get as much feedback as I'd like: "a week has passed..." doesn't do much for me. There could have been a little more excitement in that arena, I suppose, or maybe I'll discover it when I play longer.
Yay, someone who wants to replay the game, thanks for, um, wanting to replay the game. :) Hmm, I'm not sure I understand what kind of feedback would be better. Maybe a screen of feedback, talking about the events of the week?


Thanks to everyone who commented. I'll take your suggestions if I ever decide to add more to this game. :) (I don't have the habit, though.)

Thanks everyone for reviewing our game! Thanks also to our host, Richard, for organizing such a great contest. Felicia and I were happy with the result of our efforts, and are quite pleased with where we ended up in the rankings. As I had hoped we did well on innovation. There is definitely a lot of game play work that can be done after this, but I'm glad to see people enjoyed themselves!

Especially amusing are the expressions of animosity against our birds and fishes. We hope to add some more annoying animals.

One bug that got reported a few times is the beaver ending up in the top left corner (after a collision?). I haven't seen this problem myself so I'm quite interested in finding more about this. People who had this bug, did you have this with the Windows version or on Linux? If on Linux, which version of ODE/PyODE were you using?

The game source code is available on google code now, here. I hope some people will be interested in joining the project for the post-pyweek release that I hope to bring out in a while.

Congratulations to everyone who entered the fourth challenge. It was a huge success, and special congratulations to TOBA and Hectigo on their winning entries!

If you'd like to upload a fixed version of your game, or a new screenshot, please do so now.

30 hours, 8 games left.

How is everybody else doing rating? I've found despite the number of games I've had quite a bit of fun doing it. I keep having to stop myself coming back to a few of them.

Ok, I've rated most of the games now (many of them are really great!), so I guess I should start writing my "final" statement about how much went right/wrong for us/me in Pyweek4. My team-mate Zahmekoses wrote much more comments than me, so I may write a lot of pointless stuff here just to catch up.. Yaddayadda..

Some first-timer's memories:
Day 1: The theme is announced! We are highly motivated. I have little idea how to put our game idea into working code, so I go for straightforward, naive solutions that'll be a pain to clean up. I can think about proper solutions later, right?
Zahme has some fun making the 32x32 pixel tiles for the ground, metal crates and wooden crates and more little graphics and wonderful fake-screnshots. We won't finish but we'll have some fun.
(....)
Day 5: Trying to implement something that handles cutscenes but my brain doesn't work. Tired of browsing documentation. Zahme struggles with the cat balloon. Pixels driving him insane. Start screen done. Replacing buttons. Simple code to handle story-images. Ugly crook for outro scene. Watching a funny movie in cinema... feeling a little more human.
Back from cinema. Cleaning up our release (e.g. delete all the things we/I couldn't finish in time). Trying to make a nice package but I always end up with weird packages where things are missing or different. Must get up early tomorrow.. Need.. to.. upload.. file... so.. tired....

...
Um... I guess some other things happened between Day 1 and Day 5, like distracting each other by asking "What are you doing?" or by offering chocolate and "Nyanyaihatepaint!!" and insightful conversations like "Huh???"-"Yeah, I expected that error."-"But it worked yesterday!?" ... And losing the ability to speak and think (at least on my part). All those precious memories..

What went wrong: I didn't prepare and I didn't feel like getting into the Skellington during Pyweek. And I couldn't make a Windows binary because.. uh... I didn't have the time and I didn't prepare. I wasted much time looking for basic information.. I didn't take care to keep a Python 2.4 testing enviroment around. Not to mention some horrible codepieces...
Zahme is unhappy about some of the graphics (I can live with them, but he's the graphics artist). And our game has only 2 levels.
What went right: We made a little game! I honestly didn't believe we'd get that far... it probably worked because Zahme did the graphics so I could concentrate on messing up the code. Btw: Thank you for all your effords and putting your sanity at risk, Zahmekoses! I like your graphics....

So what's left to do?

• make some more levels
• map-editor (would be helpful for building maps)
• clean up the damn code
• make some fancier graphics(?)
• some optimizations (the game doesn't need 100%CPU - nothing happens until you press a key, anyway..)
• change the movement style (like.. with animations and not teleporting from tile to tile)
• real catscenes (not just text)
• put some music in
• some AI tweaks
• probably more stuff I forgot

Since I don't remember how awful day 2, 3 and 4 were, I'll probably take part in the next Pyweek... And I suppose, Zahme will be around, too.... It was fun, wasn't it? Was it not? Was it..?

Until then and thank you all for this Pyweek,
-Serval

I cant run your game!

After telling the game to start at the main menu, it does the time machine sound and then "freezes".
the game doesnt crash, or raise an error, what it does do(if I'm in fullscreen) is kick me to windows, as if I had minimized the screen, which I didnt, and it wont let me back in.

After deciding to search around, and placing multiple print signals, I have found where the game seems to lock up at:
line 141 in map.py. It seems that the call to createCurve is somehow entering an infinite loop, or something. That probably isnt so, but that is the only way I can interpret it :/
It might also be a thing with using the stencil buffer, are you doing anything "un-orthodox" with it?
I dont think this is a driver issue, as I have run numerous games/programs that should be far more likely to barf at an opengl call ;) But then again, it could be I guess :P

Any ideas?

So, PyWeek 4 is over, I've tested almost all of the other people's entries and released two updated versions of my game after the competition. It seems like we have a record number of entries, and most of you have done a very good job - or at least learned a lesson for next time. I guess it's time to look back and analyze my doings a little. Overall I like what I did over this PyWeek, and gained a lot of confidence by doing everything myself.

Stuff that I did right this time:

• Got the core gameplay ready early. Nothing is probably more important than this. It makes one able to balance the game elements more carefully as the project progresses. Might even make the game fun to play.
• Gave some time for polish. Menus, oh yeah. I love 'em. Game over screens, even better. Pretty important for the overall experience.
• Did lots of testing. Watching friends play really gave me a better clue about what was right and wrong with the game, and I was able to make it play a lot more smoothly as a result.

Stuff that I didn't do right:

• Wrote quick and dirty solutions instead of proper ones. Well, some of my quick and dirty solutions proved working OK, and I was even able to rewrite some of them before the deadline. Others just gave me loads of trouble, and I had to spend some time after the competition just cleaning up the mess I had made. In the end, I have cut the performance requirements of the game by about 50% after the competition.

And then one final note - to achieve better cross-compatibility, I used a function for fetching the user's home directory in Trip on the Funny Boat as a point of reference for writing my code. The rules state that using "existing personal codebases" is forbidden - if you think this should be counted as such, disqualify me if you will. I didn't actually write the code in question, but as I was a member in the project, I had a good idea what it did. Should've probably asked about this, but, well, I didn't.

Which other game-developing contests do you guys know? I've been thinking about running on the next Ludum Dare, but I don't know when the next contest is starting (this information is apparently unavailable right now).

I'd love to know about information on other contests.

-Shundread