Registration for PyWeek 6 has begun, but I don't really know what I'm suppose to do to register. Am I suppose to click "Register Entry" on the right menu bar? If I am, how am I suppose to know the name and description of the project before knowing what the theme will be? Do I just put anything in there then somehow change it when the challenge starts?

Just went through our ratings listing, and saw that a lot of you people had trouble with the game controls, sorry about that.

A few of you hoped that we would continue working on this game: Yeah, we will! It will be a bit different, but the same gameplay.

we're also working on a homeworld 2 TC mod, a Nexus: the Jupiter Incident TC mod and have plans for the upcoming UT3.

I know I posted something about this last time, but it is acting up again.

After some investigation, it appears that if you make a diary entry, if there is only one reply it will say the person who made the entry was the last commenter, when it should be the second person. This doesn't always happen, but often enough that I scratched my head a couple of times thinking someone had replied when they hadn't...

Woah, I'm late...

Yeah, Pyweek 5 is over and it's time to put all those impressions and thoughts together to make a delicious readable post-mortem sandwich. Congrats to the winning teams - we really enjoyed Wound Up! and Diskfield.

Statistically our new game is 0.3 points less fun than our last entry, while innovation and production have improved by 0.3 and 0.4 points. Which doesn't mean much. I'm just happy that we're somewhere in the middle of the table and that the game worked for everyone who tried. Thanks to all who took the time to play and rate our little Slider. And kudos to the one who found the easter egg! Raorrrr!! ;)

What went wrong: We didn't have a decent game idea for all themes. That was pretty stupid.. And I'm still slow at coding and had to drop some features. Zahme had to go to work during the day but luckily our game wasn't so graphics intensive.

What went right: Zahme really improved his pixeling skills. I bet he can pixel an armed Tyger within an hour now. With boots! And I.. uh.. I can do a little music with Chibitracker. Additionally, we submitted a working final and I'm quite happy about the look and the "mood" of the game. It's not really original and I wouldn't play it for ages but it's nice enough.. I guess it's the graphics and the would-be Japanese look that makes you stay for a few minutes. ^^

Next time: Next time we will think of good game ideas for all themes. We'll have a sample collection (so I won't have to hunt them down during the week) and more knowledge about Chibitracker. Zahme wants to learn more about mtpaint because M$ Paint isn't that comfortable. I guess I'll replace pygsear with a maintained library (pgu? pyglibs?) that takes care of all the stuff I don't care about. Maybe we'll bring in a third person that takes care of cooking and testing.. And next time Zahme can do Katakana, too.

A Slider 1000 final should at least include:

• level selection
• move counter and highscore
• keyboard controls
• 2-player mode (wohoo!?!)
• some kind of small tutorial
• animated intro(?)

See you all next time and big "Thank you!" to Richard for hosting Pyweek! :)

The Four elements competition at gamedev started today, and I thought that some of the people from pyweek might be interested in other competitions as well:

Four Elements (or "4E," as many of us call it) is GameDev.net's biggest annual competition, running for about half a year. We give you four "elements," and you go off and make a game based around them.

It runns from "September 27, 2007, at 1000 hours CDT" to "April 3, 2008, at 2300 hours CDT" and the elements (aka pyweek-theme) are Ponies, Accountants, Crystals and Explosions. Even if the competition runns for half a year, it should be possible to put toghether a cool game in a week or so, right? Anyway, it would be cool if there were more python games in the competition..

So, this being my first pyweek experience I'm not sure how this works so I have to ask; how do I make sure not to miss the next one? Since I'm registered on the site now I'm hoping an email notice gets sent out before the competition. If not I guess I just have to hope I catch the announcement somewhere, as I don't always remember to check back at the pyweek or pygame websites that often.


It was fun this time around; I've been wanting to do one for a while and never managed to catch it before; I only hope next time I have a bit more time to invest.

of course , i lacked time to do it , i was supposed to make a goal of colour sequence within a given time , and a robot was supposed to take the object that why only one thing can be taken , sorry for windows user , i dont know why it dont work for you. i really like all ure ideas and i will work on it , next rellease should appear on pygame.org.

Firstly, thanks to Richard for organising another PyWeek. It was great fun!

Secondly, congratulations to psyduck_revenge. I really liked Wound Up! and had great fun playing it.

Thirdly, thanks to all the other games. There were some that I really liked (and some I didn't like so much...) but given the high drop-out rate (I think roughly half the entries had final sumissions?) just finishing a game is good. Commiserations to any of you who didn't manage to finish.

Finally, I thought I'd go through my comments and reply to some:

I love the idea. I strongly encourage you to expand the game. There are many features you could add, like taking advantage of spinning (to break walls, for example), or manipulating more than one disk. The last level is particularly annoying, though.

I tried the spinning breaking thing but it got a bit hard to control. Multi-disks will work very easily - I'd just have to implement disk-disk collisions. Then I have to think of level ideas...

A nice idea, and really well executed. A little more graphical polish, and maybe a tutorial, and you'd have a seriously solid game on your hands.

I quite like the simplicity of the graphics. I'm not quite sure how I could impove them without reducing the clarity. The first few levels are meant to guide you though in a tutorial like fashion. I might put some hint text on some levels.

This was cool, the music gives it a funny old-school feel. Had a bit of trouble working out how things work after the first few levels when there were field arrows that somehow seemed to be related to the ones I was controlling but not exactly following them. More levels and a record of best times would be nice.

I see where you are coming from with the control issues. It was the best way I could think of showing a fixed and a non-fixed field interacting. I considered timing, but it didn't really fit with my graphical theme. I'll have another look.

Clever. Physics seems very solid. Couldn't get past level 10.

This seems a commen problem. I may re-order 10-15 some time in the future, as they jump around in difficulty quite a bit.

I'm realeasing a bugfix/performance tweak version soonish. Doesn't have any added content - just a bit of polish, and a bit of speed.

Thanks again for voting!

Would there be much point in uploading the finished game a month after the deadline or not?

Must... push... polygons... on... screen.

This was our first time on OpenGL, and it seems we were bitten by it. We had a lot of possitive comments, but also a lot of "I get 5-6fps, it is too slow". OK, not painful death, but slow indeed :)

Certainly 6fps is slow, the game was designed to run at 60 (and is perfectly playable if that goes to 35-40).

Unfortunately, we tested several configurations (CPU/OS/video cards) and it worked like a charm. 1.5GHz and old video cards (onboard VIA and intel graphic chipsets, a low-end GeForce2, some old ATI) worked quite fine, so we didn' t worry about optimizing. At some moments it slowed down a little (to 40fps instead of 60), so we profiled, found that it was a CPU bottleneck (not related to GPU), made some improvements, and moved over.

Anyway, it seems that we are doing something that kills performance under some configurations. I am guessing it is not CPU (some people with an AMD4000 had problems), but rather some OpenGL feature that is not hw-accelerated on all cards/drivers (some people have suggested that blending modes could be the cause). I am expecting to find out that our performance was killed by putting the score-gauge on the HUD or something like that :-/ .

That said, if you had problems, please let us know your hardware/OS/libraries configuration. If any of you is willing, I would love to have a chat with you trying to turn off different parts of the game to guess what is killing performance. Thanks!