Thanks so much for all the great feedback on the ratings! I know this game didn't turn out to be "fun" (seriously, i thought it was unbelievably boring too!), but i am glad the important part, my attempt to capture the atmosphere, got through! What a fun pyweek. I wish my Ludum Dare piece was coming together as well, but i seemed to have been distracted by real world fun, and responsiblities. See everyone next time around! And next time i will spend more time on fun!

Hey, we wanted to thank everyone for their great comments on our game, and to congratulate all the winners (yknow, everyone!).

We've put together a polished release of our game "Make Me", which we think addresses most of the comments brought up in the judging. Most of these we already knew about, and we've been working on fixing them this past week; but we also modified the game to address many respondents' complaints about the speed of the game and introduction to the blueprints screen.

I've uploaded source code and Mac OS X and Windows packages to my website at http://www.partiallydisassembled.net/make_me. The Mac OS X and Windows packages have no dependencies; the source code requires only Python and AVbin (pyglet's included).

This newer version features:

• Many bug fixes, including graphics glitches on old and new cards, sound problems, memory leaks, collision bugs, and enemy A.I. bugs.
• Saved games are now saved to disk.
• A much larger world to explore, including some new robot parts to pick up with unique features.
• Changes to the existing map to better introduce how to play the game.
• Improvements to the menu interface to make the operation more clear.
• Graphical improvements to some of the tiles.
• Many new sound effects, and a new soundtrack.

We hope you enjoy this version of Make Me, and look forward to PyWeek 7!

16 out of 29? Not bad, if I may say so; it is about what we expected. I'd like to thank everyone for their comments and suggestions. As you might have noticed/read in the wiki, the game was developed and tested on unix-like systems, so running it in Windows introduces some new bugs.

The following is a compilation of the bugs that you reported:

• Fixed in SVN:
  • Also , once you get past level 7 the list goes off the bottom.
  • Crashes when I beat all cities above city 0.
  • City 10 won't load either: Could not load song data\music\robot_ending_arr.ogg.ogg Couldn't read from 'data\music\robot_ending_arr.ogg.ogg'
  • whenever i pressed left crtl, it would die saying it couldn't open data/images/bullet.png
  • it crashed when try to show me the credits :(

• Not fixed:
  • The collision detection was glitchy, and I tended to snag on walls (We fought this beast for two days, and decided to leave it as soon as you could run through the levels in an (almost) non-spasmic manner.)
  • It would also be good if you automatically could restart the level when you died (Never thought of that. Thanks)
  • Make the game save your best times so that you could speedrun it as well (To much to do; to little time ;) )
  • Addictive (This is a feature. Go to rehab if it gets worse ;) )

To download the latest version from svn, run the following command:

If you like the music, please visit http://www.cp80.se for more.

What on earth? These have to be the weirdest rating I have ever seen.
Here follows a little rant, and some responses to comments:

With more entrants than ever - we only had 28 respondents?

This was our best game *ever* - yet we got pretty close to our worst score ever - approximately equal to our last entry which had zero game-play.

We had zero DQ's or DNW's - yet a sizable amount of our responses were 1/1/1 or "I did not understand the game", and "where were the robots?"... yet there were no DQ's/DNW's given!?!?

And our ratings were a huge roller coaster - we were given either a great score, or a really low one, but only a couple that were average from our respondents - and an awful lot of them were like "it's just a risk clone..." - so, why did you rank it so low for being a certain genre (it is not risk, and was actually inspired by a different game) - did you do that for all the platformers, or the rpgs, or...?

Also, it seems that several of the games got a lot of 1/1/1's with no DNW/DQ, but the top games only got those (if at all) with a DNW, so it didn't count to there score... I assume this the judging irregularity richard mentioned?

Some comment weirdness:
"It had a very intuitive control interface, and it was a joy to play" vs. "Couldn't figure out how to play":
First, I realize that most people don't like to read instruction screens before playing - but once you realized you didn't get it - couldn't you have read the ReadMe (which points to the ingame instruction screens)?

And now a response to most of the comments, or at least their general meanings:

"too long of load time made it unplayable":
Yes, we were planning on optimizing the map generation - but it isn't that bad - some of the other games were this way too, and I think the addition of random maps outweighs the long load time...

"Graphics needed work":
Which ones in particular? The tiles were planned that way from the beginning - and the units were done by DiamondGFX at the last minute, and are really nice.
The rest - yes, they could use some work.

"It is not really related to Robot":
How so? Did you look at the title, read the instructions or look at the units in-game? The game is about robot armies duking it out - not very innovative for the theme, perhaps, but definitely there...

"SFX for every battle were too long":
Yeah - those can get annoying, I was planning on shortening them to be better, and not wait at all if they were disabled, but no time :(

"Pretty good, really. Would be nice to be able to see a count of how many units are in each area - sometimes it's hard to count the robots. Could use some tweaking, and some prettying-up. Use pyglet and you could have the window dynamically resizable, which would've been nice. Not sure why there's such a huge chunk of the bottom bit taken over by black.":
The count of bots would have been nice - I never considered this really, thx :)
Tweaking? Always :)
Prettying up? Not sure where - the gui could have been nicer, and a few things laid out better, but if you mean the GFX style (except for the background ;) ), that was intentional.
You can make the windows dynamically resizable in pygame too - but that would have been unnecessary IMHO, jut change the settings in your options menu.
The big black area was going to hold a lot more gui elements when we added multiplayer - like a chatbox and stuff.

"I couldn't zoom because I don't have a scroll wheel, which made it more awkward to play that it should have been.":
Dang! I forgot about that, sorry. Will fix shortly ;)

"Cool ai":
Thanks, I'm really surprised how well it worked too.
We were planning that Markus would handle this - since he is really good at it, and I would do multiplayer.
It ended up opposite ;)
In the end, this ai was my first real one, and took only about 3 hours to do so I am very pleased :)

"Like TEG...":
Never played - but it looks like just a clone of Risk - which this is not - some of the more advanced features were cut to save time - which did make it look closer, it isn't actually IMO.

"It would be nice to be able to move 'some' but not all troops":
This was planned - but after some consideration I decided that it might take away some of the interesting parts of the game - that and there was no time to implement the gui, ai or rules to fit this.
Will probably be in a later version though.

"Couldn't win because it would crash":
We have been trying to find this crash since before we released - no clue why it is crashing - could you give us a traceback?

"Will you work further on this?":
Absolutely :D


A few hints on game-play, for those having difficulty:
Read the instructions!
Guard you capitols and factories always
Try and grab other capitols/factories early
Play as several players, ie "players = 7", "ai = 5" or something
Wait for the map to load!!!

Other than that, thx again richard and everyone for a great pyweek.
The nice game we have now is more than worth the headaches from the site crashing, or the md5 uploading, or the weirdness in the ratings.

Cya all next time, and congrats to the winners :D

Sorry everyone. In the mad dash for submission before the deadline it seems I forgot to include the source code. I apologise for breaking the rules of the challenge and have submitted the source should anyone want to look at it.

On a related note, from seeing that I only got 5% disqualification votes I think that disqualification votes should have higher weighting. As the entry broke the rules it should have been disqualified. But because most people didn't notice this it went through uncontested anyway. This should perhaps be looked at for future contests.

Hi there,
PyWeek is over and it was better than the last one. Although i am a bit disappointed that my last entry did better than this time (which i wouldn't expected) i'm overall pleased. It was fun working out a design concept, writing the code and i even had time for gfx. Next time there will be also sound :)

Playing the other entries i often wondered, what good games were created in just one week.

So i hope, you had also as much fun as i had and that we meet again at the next PyWeek. I look forward to it!

Thank you all for the feedback! I'm sorry for the bug that makes previously killed enemies disappear. There is a bugfix in the wiki. However, it is possible to complete the level without cheating. Just kill the top-right enemy first, then step backwards and the rest is settled. :)

There is actually only one level, and it was just my test level for the development. I did not have time to make a good set of levels. I have plans on making other types of traps and gadgets, like moving ground, user terminals, pre-programmed macros etc. It will be more fun when it's ready. :D

I think: the game's logic isn't easy understand. and the game need two player and two joystick, maybe isn't good for you.
But I enjoy it.

Thank you for your respondent.
P.S. I will care the diff type joystick setting in next game. ^^
and keep it easy control from us keybroad.
Thank you for report it cann't running in XP.
I just test it in my linux ( debian ) .

First of all, thanks to everyone who gave this game a good rating. Considering it was less than half finished, I was fully prepared for it not to attract much interest. Getting 4s and 5s was an unexpected bonus!

I'd like everyone to know that I'mn still working on it, and there will be a much improved and more complete version available to try out soon. And if the Pyggy Awards get off the ground, it'll definitely be making an appearance there!

Instructions Several people seem to have missed the fact that there was a tutorial, despite it being mentioned in the readme file under "Running the Game". Perhaps I didn't mention it prominently enough... I guess it could be easily missed in the heat of judging.

Interface I know there are several things about the interface that need to be improved, and they will be.

Making the rest of the products Most of the products were dreamed up in about an hour on Sunday morning, and I didn't get time to even try manufacturing them. With the limited machine types available, some of them may well be impossible to make. There are several more machines I intend to add, which should help with that -- although I don't want to make things too easy!

Sound I know. I know. One of the many things that I ran out of time for.

Vertical Conveyors There is actually a way of rotating some types machine, but it's totally non-obvious and I didn't get around to documenting it: you press the R key while in the midst of positioning or dragging a machine. It should be possible to build vertical conveyors that way, although I haven't tested it much.

Bigger Factory I'm thinking about whether to allow the factory to be bigger than the screen and scrolling around in it. However, one of the ideas I have is to let you build multiple factories, and allow parts produced in one factory to be used as input to another. That would give you a way of effectively building a larger factory without the need for scrolling.

No Numeric for 2.5 Sorry about that -- I've been doing development with Python 2.3, and I hadn't realised that there were no Numeric builds readily available for 2.5. I'll see what can be done about making it work with numpy as well/instead.

Any further comments or suggestions are welcome!

Ouch, only 9 people judged our game? :(