Well, I'm disappointed that I get didn't get to spend much time this Pyweek, in fact I probably spent less than 24 hours on my entry. Most of the actual game play was programmed in the last hour of competition, which you could see by comparing the 1.0 to 1.1 zip files. My only consolation is that the game is truly as annoying as I expected it to be, and I will delight in the pain that all my competitors will experience when they play. Look for a post-pyweek entry sometime for a few minor bug fixes that I realized I left behind.

Complete and utter devastation... even with a mocked-up, playable game in place, I got turfed out of my house on Saturday, destroying any shot I had at finishing the game on time. Horrors...

But if nothing else I've gotten the game programming bug again, so that's a plus. Shout outs to Pete Shinners's "Line by Line Chimp" tutorial, Joe Wreschnig's "piman's writing" sprite tutorial, and Will McGugan's blog, which features a number of handy code samples that just hadn't been out long enough for me to use (I think).

And Good Luck, to all of you.

I'm not the admin but I wanted to copy the style a little. :)
Anyway. tomorrow I'm going to post a page with any bugfixes I can find so people can get them working and testing the games.
Please post and bugs and any fixes here that you know of.

Well, I got a lot done, but could have done more. I did some last minute testing on my Linux box, which wasn't able to keep up with the 60fps I was asking for, so I inserted some adaptive frame limiting to try to get it to play smoothly on a wider range of machines. Here's hoping I didn't shoot myself in the foot by adding that so late in development

I also added the pause menu on the last day, but I had a better feeling about that - although there are probably other bugs related to it. For example, if the window loses focus, the music ought to stop. That's one bug I know about.

The credits in the readme have at least one error, too. Had I been keeping my readme up to date, rather than dash it off between release candidate 1 and release candidate 2, it might have helped.

I had considered having my levels have an enforced progression - do all the tutorial levels, which would unlock Tess and Blake, and then when you finished all of them, that would unlock Woody. Didn't get around to it, and gave myself the excuse that it'd just get in the way of judging (thought about having a cheat code to disable the feature, but figured it wasn't worth it).

I did manage to get the colorblind contrast art to work. When you hit 'C', the ball art is replaced by this:

which, I'm led to believe, looks like this to someone with no color perception at all (which is the worst case):

The green ball is problematic again, but it's playable, I think.

I spent most of Friday night editing voiceovers. I think they add a lot to make the various characters more personal and alive. I also think it's within the spirit of the rules to tap my friends for this sort of asset, and still call myself a "solo" entry. If you disagree, and want to play the game without voices, you can turn the sounds off by hitting 'S'. That also strips out the non-verbal "plonk", "clonk", and "click" stuff, which I'm also pretty proud of. I thought about doing all the voices myself (which actually would have saved me a fair bit of work, as my friends gave me a lot more voice clips than I was expecting or hoping for, so the editing job was a lot more than I had scheduled for), but my ability to pull off a female voice would have been jarringly bad.

I only uploaded a "final" version of the source version. I have a PY2EXE version on my website HERE, which I didn't think to go through the MD5 process for. So you shouldn't use it for judging the game, but if you wanted to show it to a non-Python friend, you could.

Thanks to everybody who gave me suggestions on what to improve. I intend to continue polishing and improving the game after the challenge is over (and my machine cools down). I can take some easy steps to improve the filesize and performance. There are several game design suggestions that I was given along the way that I want to try out - I suspect that many of them would have drastic repercussions if I did incorporate them.

So, pyweek 5 is over. I'd like to thank Richard for hosting the pyweek (hosting the pyweek is hard, you have to deal with the smell of burning servers ;)).

As I count now we have only 37 entries, but I believe there are still those who sent their MD5s and need to upload. Last pyweek we had 53, so I think, even with the ones who didn't upload yet, it's looks like a decrease.

For me, this pyweek was especially tiresome, but I had fun. I hope you enjoy my game. Looking back at the goals I set at the beginning of the pyweek:

- Planning: I think I did ok. Planned a lot, but sometimes I wondered if if I had planned some more things would've gone quicker. Anyway, I'll take it as a goal achieved, because the lack of planning didn't interfere too much in my game.
- Balancing: Spent some time balancing, but I'm not sure it's well balanced. I'll only know after I read the comments. Let's say at least half a goal achieved because this time I spent a few hours trying to balance it.
- Sounds: Unfortunately, I only had time to add music. Still, that's better than last time, so I'll call it half a goal achieved.

My game unfortunately suffers from an unintuitive interface, though, but if you read the README.txt things will be fine (I hope). :)

I'm looking forward to play all your games, but I'll wait for everyone to upload and a torrent to be released. By the way, when will it be released?

...just as soon as I can get it to accept a pending upload now that the server is back.

This time, I made an unconventional game - from the development side. I wanted to have an RTS in the browser no matter what - it sort of worked.

You can see the result here: http://nekapuzer.at/games/ .. Or better yet, download the final submission

If you want run the RTSimple-server you don't need a webserver, but the python-django module (comes with its own testserver) and a mysql-server. I didnt include a howto for windows users, but you can download if from the django-site (see below) and install via "python setup.py" .

I used lot's of tools, that didnt make it into the README. So here there are:

Handy library for DOM-access and other JS needs

A objectmodel + web-helpers following the DRY principle

shiny web 2.0 magic, coming from my hometown vienna

There are a few things I'll code today, that are missing in the final submissions:

• Units defending themselves automagically when attacked
• Unit moving to attack-target if it is not yet in range (as of now you have to first move the unit in attack-range, then attack works)

And when that is done, I have to balance the units and create more, interesting maps.

In general, the tech-side worked better then before... using django, also first-time, was a relieve. I know my way around JS and its quirks, so now horror there either.

Yeah.. about that. It sort of didn't make it into the final submission lol. Maybe you think it's "twisted" enough to have an RTS with browser-tech. However the full story goes like this: This is a fast paced game with a duration of maximum 5-10min. To make it even more stressfull I planned on rotating (twist!!) a patch of 5-10 tiles in the middle of the map, where usually something of interest is. The buildings, units , etc. on that rotating-tiles would of course move with it... though, that didn't really make it into the submission.

In case someone prefers an .exe for some reason, I uploaded one here. (Made with py2exe.)

Link to download file:
http://code.google.com/p/pyweek5-maze/downloads/list

and here is the corresponding md5:
0839e2d6dac2f6c70105ac8473ee6c1a

I used this to generate the md5:

>>> import md5
>>> m= md5.new()
>>> m.update(file('Murmel2.zip').read())
>>> m.digest()
'\x089\xe2\xd6\xda\xc2\xf6\xc7\x01\x05\xac\x84s\xeel\x1a'
>>> m.hexdigest()
'0839e2d6dac2f6c70105ac8473ee6c1a'
>>>

I hope I can upload it as soon as possible.

Some comments:
It has been fun to develop this game because I got a chance to implement collision detection for the first time. I had some knowledge, but did not implement it until now. It is not perfect. Next time I want to concentrate more on gameplay since our gameplay is very limited...

~DR0ID

Well, it's as done as it's going to get. I didn't ave enough time to record sounds for it, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out. This challenge was tough, but I'm glad for Pyweek and the Python language. This is my second attempt at Pyweek. This entry was a little more ambitious than the last. Hopefully it shows. :) Thanks!