...where exactly the theme is in our game, i can tell you its there :)

Technically the game makes use of the theme on several levels, but none of them are very good in the least IMO, but at least there enough to keep us from being DQ'd(I hope ;))

You must buy more plots/plants to win(for the plots, the only way is up, for the plants, the only way is up if you want to win ;)
The only way to win is to progress through the levels...
the enemy never runs out of gold, and his cash flow is almost always in the green(there might be a bug with this though...)

I cant really think of any others, except maybe that your plants only grow... upwards ;)

Just saying this because the game doesnt mention the theme very much at all(we had a mad dash for a completed game at the end there, and it was lost amongst the rest of the game)

Some of these entries though, definitely look like they'll get high innovation scores, and I cant wait to try them out!
I just hope ours compares :)

We were working on the game right down to the wire. The website was so busy we ended up submitting an MD5 of the final zip to Richard when the deadline rolled over (and now I've finally uploaded that zip file).

There's so much unfinished, but oh well. It was fun! Richard, thanks for running PyWeek again.

The game play is simple. Collect enough balloons to float, and escape out the top of the level. Left and right cursor keys to move, and space to drop a balloon.

Oh, and there's a development tool/cheat left in and enabled--press up to add a balloon to your bunch. It's not intended to be part of the final gameplay.

The final zip includes music, but due to the rush I left the pygame.mixer.music.play() line commented out, so you won't hear the music. :-/ There are three levels included, but only the first two are properly debugged. The third and final level might not be beatable without cheating.

The end, and the game even has a name now (from the term used to describe a change in orbit).

Some after-deadline fixes were made to pyglet. These fix the core dump on Windows during the credit sequence, and the mouse inversion and miscellaneous warnings on Mac. You can get the patched game to resolve these issues.

Some screenshots from the completed game:

The definitive PyWeek/delta-v/pyglet post-mortem to come, following sleep recovery. Looking forward to playing all the other games!

Now I can get on with life... :P

Well, I've learned a lot.

• Do not become distracted
• Do not add features at the last minute
• organize priorities!
• Don't do artwork for a feature you will not end up doing...
• always have a backup idea, something the game can be easily molded into, in the case time runs out...
• Don't let life get in the way of pyweek development! :P
• learned more about linux and python, via working with the hacked up python and pygame...
• and much more...

Tools of the trade: (I was forced to use these tools)

• mtPaint
• Xpaint
• nedit
• Geany

Other:

• custom python2.4 minimal distribution
• hacked up 1.7.1 pygame

Well that's all I have to say tonight. Time to get onto other things ;)

For anyone who tries to play this game, there is a small oops in one of the classes. While the game works flawlessly in Python 2.5, there is a problem in level.py where empty parentheses appear in the class definition. Python 2.5 has no problem with this, but it causes a syntax error in earlier versions. To play, just make sure to use Python 2.5 (or download the Win32 version if appropriate).

So yeah, this was a very last-opportunity entry to PyWeek. I'm on vacation right now, and things have been really busy with me switching jobs and everything. However, I had a little bit of time when I woke up a couple of hours early this morning, so I hammered out most of the gameplay before breakfast. I was pleased with what I was able to do, so I created an entry page and uploaded some preliminary screenshots. As we drove around for the day, I had little snippets of time where I could add more spit and polish to the game. Finally, we all hung out at the mall after spending most of the day at the zoo, and I was able to sit on a couch and upload the final version a little while before the deadline.

Anyways, enough of the story. Time for the official "postmortem":

What went right:
The best thing that went right about this project was having a small scope. As a result, I was able to accomplish everything that I wanted to do.

What went wrong:
Uhm... not much I can think of. I'm actually really happy with everything that happened with this project, and I consider it a fairly complete (albeit small) success.

our main coder collapsed due to sleep deprivation, our second coder also switched to a series of tubes (which also unfortunately seems to have no final entry) and our graphics guy is "busy" getting lost in a million other projects (and the internet). damn - no finished entry this time!

but the spirit of the game lives on... as 2m tall wall graphic!

and the whole team had a great time hacking away for pyweek. yay!

Wow, there are a lot of games to play in the next two weeks, something like 4 or 5 games a day! I hope everyone enjoys playing Escape From Robot Planet, we put a lot of effort into it, as I'm sure everyone else did. Congratulations to everyone that finished their games! To those who couldn't finish, maybe next time :) . I'm sure everyone learned something. It's the one week where you learn more than you have in month.

*PHEW* !!!

NOTE: if you can't start the game, remove the "32" parameter from graphics.py, row 22. It should look like this:

self.screen = pygame.display.set_mode((self.dataManager.w, self.dataManager.h), OPENGL|DOUBLEBUF)

The game works pretty well, only a few known bugs: Music doesn't loop. Numbers you've collected don't really position themselves correctly, and they don't get deleted when you restart, I think. Water is a bit too slow (not really a challenge?). Still, those are pretty minor.

One thing we forgot to mention in the readme: There's water on the bottom that keeps rising slowly. If you're inside it, you drown and have to restart the level.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Learned how to do collision handling (not just detection), even though it's just for AABBs. Doesn't work perfectly though... Still, the game is pretty fun, and kinda pretty too! :)

Please let us know what you think!

I'd love to hear any comments on my game by anybody, as I'll probably do a bit more work on it after the end of the week. Writing them as a comment to this entry would be lovely.

See you all next time!