Well, I finally did get a few hours (maybe 4 max) to try to put something together; I almost even had it working. Basically a piece of string with one end attached to the mouse cursor but unfortunately it's still behaving more like silly putty than string. I decided not to upload it and subject everyone to what really wasn't a game. I did get a bit of cocos experience though so next pyweek I'll have an easier time gearing up. Too bad though, I liked this theme and I think the "toy" I had here could have developed into a fun game if I'd actually had a week to work on it.

Well, here is our first pyweek game:



Crazy Atropos!



A one-button world domination strategy game. You are the color Orange.

You play the role of Atropos, one of the Fates who is responsible for cutting the threads of life that her sisters spin and measure. Unfortunately, only the Greeks believe you exist, and it is they whom you have power over. Your omniscience allows you to see the lives and personalities of every great Greek leader in history, and your power allows you to prematurely end the lives of those that aren't fit to run your empire.



Each leader has his strengths and weaknesses, and it is only through a balance of these that your empire may grow and prosper!

Dependencies: pygame 1.8.0, Numeric (yes, Numeric, not NumPy. Sorry about this. I was shortsighted. The download link for ancient Numeric is in the README)

Due to the way color is used, pygame 1.8.1 won't work, I think - sorry!

There are three endings to the game - can you get all three?

(If you do, props to you! Despite our best playtesting efforts, we, er, never won the game. But since the AI don't receive any advantages and plays through the same mechanics as you, a win is possible. Maybe you're the next Guderian!)

The Mac .app listed as a separate download should not require anything extra to be installed now. Please contact me if this is not the case - I don't have a test machine available.

Update: One confirmed test. Should be good to go.

Apparently, our game requires AVbin to run in addition to Pyglet. You can get AVbin here.

I think I've fixed the memory leak. Uploading new version.

I made a post-pyweek entry with pyglet and squirtle, and it came out quite nicely! Enjoy :-)

Okay, the game is done and has been submitted (here). The zipped size is roughly 40 MB.

We've also made a Windows binary (thanks to PyMike for his wonderful PySetup script). This wasn't all together easy, because the current Skellington uses a variable called data.data_py to keep track of the gamelib directory. However, Py2Exe includes this in a binary file, where, of course, the path to gamelib is not the same. I made the script work by replacing this:

data_py = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
data_dir = os.path.normpath(os.path.join(data_py, '..', 'data'))

with this:

data_dir = 'data'

Before I realized this was the error, I also tried a script from Skellington 1.1 and my modified version of HanClinto's script. Both will probably work with the above changes and some minor hacking, though I haven't tested it.

We have not uploaded the Windows binary here, because we don't want to waste more of Richard's server space than necessary, and Google Code will not let us upload files over 20 MB. We'll see if we find some good place to host it...

Well pyweek is over and i thought i would illustrate some of the aspects of coding a game in a week that i think are important in my experiance, some do's an don'ts if you will.

Pyode - ode is a fantastic physics engine, its really quick, its really flexable and its wonderful, but we just didn't *need* to use a physics engine in our game, if i could do it all again i would of used some basic velocities to push the player around and use pyode's collision system, i think some of our stranger bugs could of been weeded out better that way. the gameplay movement dynamics could of been tweeked more as well, as they are they are very 'realistic'

pyOpengl - I'm an opengl coder, its what i do, i love it. pyopengl however is a bit.. special. whereas with C/C++ you just have this basic api where you can load extra function calls, in pyopengl it all falls apart into this python importing fiasco, add to that the fact that pyopengl isn't extreamly well maintained and you get a bit of a mess. a lot of the blackscreen/fullscreen bugs have been caused by that unfortunatly. i would still use pyopengl again as there are no other alternatives (all others use it by proxy) but i would spend more time pre-pyweek figuring out its strangeness.

Inkscape - Using inkscape to design your levels is the best idea anyone could ever have, its a *perfect* 2d layout engine it really really is. the fact that it produces nice xml means that its fairly easy to parse the .svg it produces and load it stright into your game. if it wasn't for the trimesh ode bug in ubuntu we could of done some crazy stuff with convex polgons and everything. if we hadn't of used inkscape we plain couldn't of made our game, thats a fact!

Game dynamics - We didn't figure out our game dynamics until about wednesday and even then its a fairly loose platformer. the string theme took us for a ride a bit as we wern't expecting it. i wrote down some ideas for the various themes before the week started and for the string idea i just had "string physics? endless string that you follow? not much you can do with string physics, its basically as much fun as playing with a bit of string" - so we were sure something else would get picked. booo all you people that voted for string! - if i could do that again i would almost definatly create a smaller gameplay idea and focus on that, a smaller more intimate game with a nice dynamic :)

This is what we found after about 20 minutes of play-testing:

• After loading a savegame the first partymember will have a wrong name. Stupid little bug..
• The bossmonsters' positions on the battlescreen are a bit off. This is what you get when you never test bossfights.. ;)
• You cannot revive dead characters. The Divine Charms don't work because.. uh.. the Shadow Legion has grown stronger and the goddess' powers are weakened. Kind of..
• General balancing problems. Bossmonsters are probably too hard, even if you can kill the normal critters with one hit after some levels.
• Typos. Oh, well..
• There is a stupid "~"-sign on every item in the buy-list.
• Something is odd about our damage calculation.
• Some dungeon maps have weird tiles placed where "blackness" should be. That's because we've had several black tiles and one was changed later. Oops.
• If you start a new game, then go back and start another new game, some names and character values may not be properly re-initialized including the inventory. Some mapevents may be missing, too. Better close and re-open the game for a fresh start.
• [ADDED] Experience points are not added properly. If you level-up the additional EXP you made are lost. I.e. if you have 90 EXP and need 100 for a level, then gain 40 EXP - then your EXP are set to 0 and not 30.
• [ADDED] After a level-up you become a 1-hit killer until you enter a new map.
• [ADDED] Loading games doesn't work. It only loads the first character. Great...
  Please change line 332 in entity.py to

  set_chardata(self.party[x], d)

  .. if you want to load your savegame.. ;)
• [Added2] The 3 Pieces of Magical String do not transform into the Magical String, thus you'll never be able to enter the temple for the final battle.
• [Added3] Game crashes when an "invalid" base damage is given. Which should be impossible, so it's probably related to 1-hit killer issue.

If you'd prefer to have easier monsters, feel free to replace the file monsters.py in the gamelib-folder with this one.

At least we have a cool intro. :)

version 1.1 of Snake RPG is now available. to be clear, this version adds significant new functionality and media that was added after the contest deadline. if this bothers you then judge the previous entry. i'll try to do one more final final entry before the server is locked.

New features in this release:

• Sounds and background music (the music takes up most of the space)
• Potions can now be used after being picked up (they restore health)