Junk food and caffeine have been acquired, ideas have been established, BEHOLD THE ROBOT!

I will write the new game.

1. Just use 8bit color
2. follow robot theme
3. add configure tool.
4. use the new game logic

I like eugman's additional challenges, but even before he posted them I was thinking up my own challenge since I was a tad bit disappointed in 'robots.' I decided to spend a half hour writing as many game ideas as I could in haiku form.

I ended up with 11 of them - most all of them are terrible. I'm going to wait until my teammate has seen them to post them in case one ends up being our idea, the other 10 will be up for grabs!

So I'll add to eugman's list of challenges: write a haiku, then base a game entirely on those 17 syllables.

"""
We declare war on the pyweek community.  
We will destroy all of you with our awesome toadstool.  
We will not cooperate with you - 
  we will only swaddle you with discombobulation.
"""

I'm djfroofy, and I support this message.

Ok, here's the deal: it's not that hard to think of an idea with robots in it so I've made a list of strange restraints to add some more challenge. Try to meet as many as you can but it's unreasonable to attempt them all. If enough people give it a try I might offer some sort of reward to the winner. The only thing I can think of right now is some free hosting.

1. Tiny screen: Have the longest side be no longer than 240 pixels. Scaling up for visibility is permitted
2. Long screen: Use a ratio of at least 3:1 instead of the usual 4:3
3. Limited controls: Players should need to use only two keys to play the game. No mouse.
4. Forget theme: No visible robots should be in the game. Find a different way to incorporate the theme. The insides or just part of a robot is ok.
5. Tiny file: The whole zip file should be less than 1 MB. Think of the children.
6. Pause: I know it's simple but make it so you can pause the game.
7. Flocking: Implement some form of flocking or swarming if applicable.
8. Help Screen: Make a help screen darnit!
9. Procedural content: make some of your content be made on the fly.
10. Oldschool color: some one should be able to run your game in 8 bit color mode witout any change.

I said before that my goal was simplicity, but I'm already thinking of an idea that's not very easy to implement. Maybe I can find a way to make it simpler...

This time I'm thinking of something puzzle-ish involving robots. Despite its complexity, I have an idea I kinda like, though I might drop it if I think of something more interesting. (I do have a certain tendency of working on ideas similar to other people's ideas, but I'm hoping this one is reasonably unique. :P)

Well, there's still some time left today to design. Good luck everyone. :)

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Hey there. I'm new.

We're new.

I've never entered PyWeek before. I learned Python about a month and a half ago. I have years of game programming experience, but I haven't completed anything substantial since this school year started. Fortunately, I'm working with what might be a great team. I've never worked with any of them before, and I hope we all live up to each other's expectations.

We've got a kickass design bouncing around between us that will work for 4 of the 5 themes. We're experienced programmers. My only worry is that this is a busy week for all of us. I have two exams this week and a 30 page paper due in three days. How the hell am I going to squeeze in type for this thing?

I really want to use pymunk, but I can't get it to work at all. It doesn't like my PyWhatever.dylib, even though I followed the instructions for Mac OS X to a T. Looks like we'll be implementing our own physics engine. I'm not too worried, though - the design is already between my ears, and in our game, everything is a sphere, so it shouldn't be that bad. Even if the spheres are sometimes stuck together.

PSA: If your game uses PyGame, I won't be able to play it. I've tried to install it five times. MacPorts always fails halfway through on some component or other, and the .pkg installer complains that I don't have "System Python 2.5," even though I do have an up-to-date Python installation. If anyone knows how to fix it, be my guest, but frankly I'm sick of it.

PyWeek Resolutions:
-No obsessive news/forum reading
-Less putzing around and more puttin' my nose to the grindstone
-Don't get last place

Diaries are laaaaaaaame.

Well theres been a few things i've been thinking about and they all seem to be issues of compromise.

Firstly, there seem to be a bunch of people either for or against robot/jig. The issue is that they seem to represent the wide ends of a certain spectrum.

Anyone could implement a robot game. Anyone. You could do a remake of robotfindskitten and it would count. So robot as a theme would lead to a bunch of well implemented varied games. The problem is they would be too varied and easy to make; the theme wouldn't actually act as any sort of creative constraint. No one is likely to go, "Wow, what a creative use of theme. I guess the proletariat are robots in a sense." It's gonna be lame.

At the other end you have jig which people are saying is this pyweeks twisted. It's just too hard to implement. It'll take some cleverness to implement but really there will just be games about irish dance, fishing and carpentry. Well, a few people will do something really neat but that's not enough reason to so painfully limit the whole contest. It's too narrowing. It's gonna be lame.

What's need is a theme which forces difficulty in implementation but the easiest way out has multiple possibilities so that way not everyone will default to the same thing.


Secondly, There's a compromise between coding ease and tester ease. I've decided I'm not going to make an exe. Everyone will have pygame installed and really I don't think anyone is wishing that much to be able to test on other computers. If I was using any other library I'd try to make an exe but in this case I just don't think it's worth the effort. A plain exe is never hard but I usually try to get an icon attached and make it so all the floating dlls are in a zip. that takes a while to figure out.


Finally, I am still trying to figue this one out: Quality vs innovation. I can't have both. Innovating means I try something I haven't done before. Like a online fighter game. With blocks. While I'm spending my limited pyweek time coding something that gives quickly diminishing returns i could be coding content, quality, and extra options.

I really want 5th place this time and I think I can do it. Unfortunately, that means not trying to make any sort of physics harder that I would for a shmup. It means not trying to do an rpg with no text.And for some reason I still feel like I'm obligated to try something crazy to see and show what's possible within the medium and the timeframe.