Don't know why for sure, but Forrest just told me to write an entry detailing gameplay. Umm, it's probably in the README.txt, but I'll do it anyways. Protect the spool. Right click to place hub. String attacks enemy. Left click to select a hub to build from. Enemies get stronger with each successive foe. Hubs heal at a small rate. Eventually, you're gonna get raped, and we didn't put on a kill counter, so you never know how many you defeated. I've personally got to the point where enemies make one hit KOs on my hubs, and i still survived through sheer number of hubs killing the enemies before they even touched me. Soon enough, their health increased enough to get past my defenses and rape me some more. So yeah, that's gameplay.

Getting pymunk working on the mac is a bit tricky. A hardworking duo on irc produced a mac (intel) version of the Chipmunk shared library:

http://dump.omgcats.com/libchipmunk.dylib

If you've installed pymunk the typical way (as root, python setup.py install) you might need to place this library in the following place:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pymunk-0.8-py2.5.egg/pymunk/libchipmunk.dylib

Two people have gotten this game running on Mac so it is possible.

Hi,

Congrats to everyone who took part, pyweek was really fun! I look forward to playing your games.

we're not going to post a final entry. Our game isn't really at the stage where we'd like it to be... There's still a number of core features required before it's a 'game'. At the moment, it's kind of a fun intro, and a demo of what the game could be.

So we'll make a release some time in the next few weeks. Because we want to show everyone... but not before the basic elements are in place.

Until then, if anyone is bored, you can look at our subversion repository. The intro is pretty cool at the moment :) I think we spent far too long on the intro... so maybe that's worth a little download.



things that went well

kick arse intro (goes for 60 seconds or so). I would be happy playing it at party.

played around with portaudio. Which seems like the best solution for portable audio. I think we might use it in pygame (with likely something like swmixer)

learned to use ocempgui (finally).

got pitch recognition working for guitar fairly well. Learned about how the algorithm works, and the various limitations.

with a little more work, the game could teach people about music. We hoped to make it a useful program, as well as fun. Nicholas has already taken the pitch recognition parts to allow it to talk to other ear training programs.

pygame.threads.tmap combined with pygame.fastevents turned out to be a really nice way to do multithreading.

authors of libraries we used were very helpful. Especially Nathan(swmixer), and Marcus(ocempgui).

cool samples, and music. moxi made some cool music and samples. We only managed to use some of them because of the rush. However we are going to use more later.

found 4 new pygame bugs, and about 8 bugs in other python libraries. Even though they wasted time, it was good to find them.

things that went badly

thinking pyweek ended on sunday 5pm, when it ended sunday 10am.

dissapearing gfx team member, so I had to work on gfx elements at the last moments, when we realised he wasn't going to contribute.

spent most of the time on the intro. Including spending six hours failing to get the video playing with pygame.movie, and instead writing a multithreaded motion jpeg video player.

game elements left to the end. We should have polished those parts first. (But had lots of fun with other stuff :)

python bloat, and py2exe. Python really has put on the megabytes since python2.3. Took a while getting the size down from an initial 26MB to 6MB.

had technical issues getting the pitch recognition stuff working. That took a while. Was kind of pythons fault really. Including issues with the GIL(pyaudio doesn't release the GIL). Also the non deterministic way in which python does stuff (dicts, garbage collection, finalisers). Calling processes in python is also hard to do multiplatform nicely(even, and especially between different versions of windows).

issues with pygame sound loops, and Sound object loading. This wasted a lot of time.

cu,
--eye stabs.

I just realized in the last second frenzy that Forrest stopped me from uploading my copy of the game. My most up-to-date copy. So the main thing lacking from the game is the README.txt, which in Forrest's version doesn't have a license or a title. The title is... (quick Forrest, gimme a title)... umm.... String Defense! Yeah! And the licenses used would be the GPLv2 for all code and the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License for all artwork and music.

Have fun playing it guys!

I probably should've written this yesterday but I actually needed a break from the computer for a while :)

I woke up on Sunday to find that a few of the team had done some additional work overnight, including visibility of NPCs from PCs, some dungeon level tweaking, finishing off the introduction story (though I didn't have time to replace some of the placeholder graphics with better-quality images) and finalising the music.

Of course I spent about an hour dealing with PyWeek issues but it was far less stressful than any previous PyWeek - the 24-hour upload grace period was a bloody good idea :)

Overall I'm happy with the game as submitted. It includes almost all of the functionality I'd hoped we would get done in the week. There wasn't any stupid bugs that kept me frustrated and unproductive for hours like there has been previously. Of course there's a few glitches (apparently sometimes missile weapons can be rendered off-target, but I've not seen that myself; also the tile mapping has border artifacts that I'd like to try to resolve) but nothing that kills the game (AFAIK :)

Thanks to the XKCD folk who pitched in - I'm sure they learnt a lot during the week, and I'm grateful for their help and design advice during the week. I'm hoping some of them will stay on with the project and help me see it grow. I have lots more I want to add to it :)

The last - and best - version of my snake game has been uploaded, as snake_rpg_final.zip. This is much better than the contest entry version.

Improvements over v1.1 (see previous diary entry):

• Monsters drop pieces of string, and the total length is displayed at the end
• Swords and armor that can be equipped
• A training level and two full levels

There's many other bugfixes and improvements as well. PLAY THIS ONE!

Video walkthrough available here:
Linky linky

Ok, we finally uploaded the game today, after a long night yesterday of final polish and tweaking levels... We went to sleep, and went into packaging today, more relaxed. So, yaya for the extra upload day!

However... we couldn't resist the temptation, and used 3 hours after the deadline to finish some stuff (tweaking levels, choosing nice backgrounds, and such). So we cheated a bit; feel free to disqualify us if you think this is against the spirit of the compo.

We actually delivered something with a big bug known: the game gets slower after each race. It seems to be a bug on cocos (some scheduled events are not detached, so the previous level keeps running when the new one enters); I will have to research this later.

Anyway, it was fun! I now have to get up to date with abandoned work; after that I am looking forward to play other entries.

Well, it turns out that one week isn't long enough for me to finish a game by myself when I have to work four days of that week. Much of the gameplay is unfinished, but I've uploaded what I have to give an idea of it would have been like. There are no pegs pre-placed to tie strings between as there should be, but in this development version, pegs can be created arbitrarily by right-clicking. Ultimately, there would be a limited number of strings of different types and lengths available in the bottom toolbar, but that also hasn't been implemented yet.

Just wanted to say a few things, first of all:
- When I made the music, I made it entirely with instruments based on strings to make the sounds, such as guitars or strings.
- I look like a retard in my picture because there's an ice lolly in my mouth ;D
- Don't underestimate the commands in this game, there's a lot of "hidden jokes" as I'd like to call it. I love J-1's and Jakob's sense of humour ^_^