Play on youtube...

I re-uploaded the python version with a crash fixed... now at least you can see your garden being destroyed by black worms to the bitter end. Oh well.

Rose Ninja (Pyweek Release) Postmortem

Gameplay:

I didn't get all of what I wanted into the final release. I wanted to add in a mechanic for enemies and the player to block attacks, and also a way for the ninjas to attack while wall-sliding.

That said, I'm happy with what I got done, especially considering that I did it in three days! X-D

The enemy AI had its surprises. I didn't expect it to be so vicious, or to work as well as it did. Especially because it has two states, active and inactive, which are represented as a boolean. Otherwise, it's mostly based on the enemy's position relative to the player.

The levels were a mixed bag for me. The first level came out okay, I think, and the third came out very nicely. The second level was disappointing for me, though. The fight in the wall climb was fun, but it didn't really do much for me.
I also thought that the second level made it too easy for the player to run away, which was not the idea of it. (It was the idea of the third level) Perhaps I should have thought of that... :-P

The item placement wasn't my best work. Well, the third level came out okay. The second level, again, didn't do it quite right. The first level was okay in terms of items, though.

All in all, the gameplay came out pretty good, especially for having been coded in two days.

Production

Not so great. I mean, my graphics were okay, but not great. I didn't have any sounds, and I think that was a sloppy move. Still, I've come to like my graphical style, basic as it may be.

I think the next game will feature more detail in the images, and possibly varying images for ninjas, so that the enemies don't all look the same.

Time Usage

I made pretty good use of my time while coding and making sprites, but I putzed around alot while making the levels. I should try not to do that.

Overall

I was happy with most of it. Kinda wish I had either more or better levels, but it still came out okay.

I learned alot this time around. I think that next time I'll apply the strategy I applied this time, but I'll apply it from day one.

---Akake

The consensus within our team before we started was that we were going to do something simple. Me and Jakob had spent the better part of a year making a game as our graduation project, our Pyweek 6 and 7 entries either suffered from the game engine not being able to support all the ideas we had and, respectively, too many ideas for us to have time to implement into an otherwise strong game engine..

My personal goals with this Pyweek were:
1) Simple concept
2) No planning before the final theme was announced
3) No storyline!
4) Finish within a day or two, and spend the rest of the week looking for bugs

Yet, the first thing I did was to start on code for telling the storyline. The whole week, on my part, was a story of over-engineering. I wrote an isometric tile engine, when we really didn't need one. Because of said tile engine, I had to write a level editor. I didn't have time or energy to make it useful (you can only place tiles, and no enemies or structures), so it ended up a lump of code that just takes up space and actually restricts the rest of the game. This took the whole week. Meanwhile, Jakob began on the real gameplay. The thought was that we were going to meet up somewhere in the middle, and have a working game. We didn't. I wish I had been more active in the game development, but I wasn't. All the credit for the actual game should really go to Jakob and the artists.

Our game idea wasn't innovative, but I thought it was a pretty neat idea. Basically, you are a sheep, that is going to tear apart the human world of concrete and plant a lawn instead. The grass would spread on it's own from ruined buildings (in much the same way as Zerg Creep in the Starcraft games). Evidently, none of this was really implemented, and you just drive around and fight humans on a gigantic lawn. Most of this was hacked together in the last minute. If only we had had three or four more days, we could have made a game, instread of this demo, but alas.

Looking at the storyline that Clueless wrote, I can see how great this game could have become. Even though it was ambitious and didn't fit with my original goals, I still think we could have made it. Our team had four active members, more than in the previous competitions. What we lacked was a good plan regarding the codebase.

Ah well, there's nothing to do about it now. Thanks everyone, for a fun and inspiring week!

Well, we are really sorry, but it was not until yesterday when we added background music and sounds... and uploaded in the last minute.

It was this morning when we found a handful of bugs that prevent our game from working in Linux and Mac... agh.

- Sound file paths are written for Windows (\\ instead of /), so no sound files are found in Unix systems and thus it does not work.
- When fixing paths, some errors are thrown when exiting the game. It's something about deallocating sound memory...
- I just do not get why, but the score text, which uses the same font as the main menu, does not work in linux (squares are drawn instead). It does work if I use Arial, however.
- Some strange flicker with some graphic cards. That's something I don't like of Pyglet! (although I guess it's more a hardware issue).

As we are quite happy with our work and Kokoro has done an impressive work both with graphics and sound (you HAVE TO hear that soundtrack!), we really want to release the game for Linux and Mac. We will fix it as soon as possible!

#pyweek is a big big game,
thank you for richard and everyone.
I enjoy it.

....good weather, the "not skill" to saying no to barbeque (with all the nice sideeffects especially caused by beer) and family issues where all some of the causes I finally didn't finish my game. BUT I am not soo sad about it. All this pyweek was intended to be was to get familiar with python as I never did a single line of code (beside some blender scripting) and for sure I would have let python go if I just would have done it for myself. But so I experienced the magic of python programming and how fast it may be. Especially using functions like variables was very nice. I will for sure finish my game somehow and will share it here although it will not participate at the compo.... Ok...grats' to all people that finish a game. I will enjoy playing these and I will try to participate at the next pyweek and maybe until then I am bit better in that. Have fun, yours ToM

I'd like to hear what everyone thought of my game.

Does anyone have any comments on it? Compliments and criticism both are welcome!

---Akake

Hey guys, I had a lot of fun participating in my first pyweek. I want to thanks the peeps on the pyweek irc channel who kept me motivated.

My final upload is here: Get Off My Lawn (I really hope it works now!). It's a short adventure game where you have to retrieve your soccer ball back from a man who stole it -- after you kicked it into his flowers.

There are multiple endings -- one of which "Speedy Gonzalez" is a time attack mode. Please post your finish times here if you succeed - so we can compare speedruns!

Cheers, Ben

I've posted a long postmortem on our blog. I'm not sure if it's valuable to anyone else, but it was cathartic and clarifying for me to write.