finally... 9 hours before deadline.. I have all the features programmed which I wanted to implement:

- phone calls (call 12345 for a test)
- website browsing (visit www.somecorp.com)
- email accounts(admin@somecorp.com admin:admin)

Now on to the content!

So you are a detective who has to solve a mysterious case..
You'll get some note of initial info on the pinboard and then you are on your own.
You can check mails if you get your hands on the account infos or you can get some clue from the website of a famous corporation..
And after you got all things together you'll call the police and tell them who you think did "it". From there it's the point of no return and you can only hope that you were right...

I'd also like to mention that it is relative easy to make your own adventure:

You can write phone conversations, design websites and fill email accounts after reading the guidebook.
(the guidebook is not written yet)

i commited my final package! It's not as i hoped to, but you can call it a game. Have fun!

We haven't been updating much here, but that's because we've been hard at work! Here's some representative pictures from Thursday and Friday:

My game is finally turning into a game. :)

Still some work to do, but I think I can finish. Phew. This was a tough week. :)

What went wrong

The game idea that I had may have been a little too ambitious for one week's worth of work. If it were PyMonth I could have completed it, but one week is a very short period of time.

Actually, my original idea wasn't much like the game I started working on. My brother sort of convinced me to ditch my previous idea in favor for his. I was going to make a game similar to the Super Nintendo game "Mo Hawk and Headphone Jack." I'm not sure how many of you know the game, but it was a platform game where the ground has interesting gravity that pointed towards the nearest surface -- which means you can orbit chunks of ground and when you are running around the whole screen rotates around. I actually had it all worked out in my mind how I wanted to accomplish it, but my brother had other ideas.

I may have been able to come much closer to completing the game if I hadn't made a few stupid design decisions a few days ago. I thought that using a collision map with surface normal vectors would have been a good idea, since I could simply check the current pixel to find whether an object is colliding with a surface and what that surface's normal would be. Line segments would have been a much better idea.

One of the main reasons I avoided the use of line segments was because I thought I would have had to manually build the collision information for the terrain, and I thought that would involve having to write a tool to be able to edit start and end points of each line segment -- not something I wanted to do (however, oddly enough, the thought of not wanting to waste ten hours writing a program to process a black and white image to create normal vectors never really crossed my mind.)

The really sad thing, though, was that yesterday I thought about it again and realized that Inkscape's trace bitmap feature is very good at creating a collection of line segments from a black and white image. I could have exported that data to a scalable vector graphic then processed that file to create the list of line segments for my terrain. If I were to do this now, however, I would have to throw away fifteen hours of work and rewrite large portions of my game -- thus the urge to quit.

What went right

This PyWeek wasn't a total loss, though. I learned a lot that I didn't previously know. I created a simple scene graph for handling the location & rotation of objects and child objects. I created a quadtree class for handling collision detection (though I didn't yet integrate it into the actual game engine yet.) I figured out how to extract information from OpenGL matrices, such as world position and world rotation. Aside from terrain collision I had a pretty good game engine.

Watch out everyone, next year I'll be unstoppable. You won't know what hit ya. Kapow! What was that? Oh, it was my game smacking you upside the head! Yeah. It'll be that good, just wait.

with little less than 10 hours left it does not seem like our game's going to be playable in time, and we certainly don't have enough time to tweak it.

but I think this has been a great learning experience for all of us, most of us had not worked together at all before and none of us had worked with such a tight deadline before.

we jumped into the challenge unprepared and spent the first two days deciding what to do and how, and then we failed to grasp how little time we had to do it in =P

we have quite a few other projects in mind but maybe we'll be back for the next PyWeek =)

Unfortunately, I will not be able to complete a pyweek entry. The most important thing is that I learned something. Who know, maybe I'll be able to finish a game next contest!

Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to upload a completed game. My idea for the game was too ambitious. I did suspect that from the start, but I tried anyway. I ended up with a nice simulation that has no game component whatsoever.

I had a good time and some useful things were learned (pgu GUI stuff) and written (a cellular automaton implementation in C with Python bindings, not integrated with the game yet). Plus, I have a reasonably nice simulation framework!

The simulation currently looks like this:

It has population dynamics, wild plant domestication, war and peace. New maps can be generated using an external tool (not written by me) called fracplanet and then plugged in. I hope to extend the domestication system and also allow animal domestication. Then I need to add technology, add trade, and basically tweak it endlessly.

After this I can figure out some god game mechanics that allow people to twist the fate of the world. So far the only "game" is the game I've been playing myself - tweaking the rules of the simulation and seeing what would happen.

If anyone is interested in learning more, please let me know. Next pygame I'll get less ambitious and actually finish a game again!

Here is our "Ode to Eugman":



He's a block monster! Look out, he can't kick! ;)

*high-fives Eugman*

Well, I think I'll have to consider myself done. I don't know if I'll have time to add some features that I would really like, we'll see if I can get it done before the end.

Also, I just noticed I misspelled my short name. Chuck would not approve :(

The game only has three levels at the moment so it's a bit short :)