Well, for the third time in a row, I've entered both a solo and team entry. I didn't do much in the team entry this time, though - mainly just the animation code and art. It was mostly RB[0], so congrats to him for a job well done.

BubbMan 2 is definitely my most complete PyWeek entry. I think my biggest achievement was making it excruciatingly difficult without killing the desire to continue playing. I'm exceedingly pleased with it, and most people are enjoying it, so enormous satisfaction here.

AND I AM SO D@MN SICK OF MAKING PLATFORMERS! Seriously, this will probably be my last platformer for a couple years. (In python, anyway) Next PyWeek I plan to focus on the team entry, and make a little solo on the side. BubbMan 2 was a ton of work and a good coup de grace, so you can probably only expect little arcade-y games from me in my solos hereafter.

All in all it was a great week. The community is awesome and is growing as fast as ever. I'd like to give Richard a big thank you for organizing this competition.

Why did you autotune the Pragma screaming?

It worked for T-Pain and it will work for us!!

Those "cat's" look like children in teddy bear suits?

Pragma was a very strange old lady.

Why is Pragma's house an empty plot of gardening soil?

Pragma was a very strange old lady

Is this game really a metaphor for something else?

Yes.

I hate your face

Sir, that is not a question.

Well, it was as crazy day today.
SO, our final changelog:

Added missiles for your missile towers (wow, why'd that take so long?!?!)
Added laser, electro and bird food towers
Tweaked map generator
Added poison spray, mom with broom and lawn mower specials
Updated almost all images (really wish the missile towers had been fixed, but w/e)
Added fadeout for baddies
Made workers run back to base if they are hit by enemies
Made our hero (ugly, ugly image :S )
Tut screens and a story screen (bah, why so late, really hacky :S)


There is still a little art gone, and the sfx/music department is a little off (our musician was busy most of the week, and just didn't have the time to finish :S )
And, finally, the game balancing is still way off, almost impossible to win on easy (I haven't yet, without cheating).
Which is a question I wanted to ask everyone.
Basically the game is done, but to really enjoy it and make the levels right, it needs a little balancing.
I have been thinking about tinkering with that a little and then reuploading (the rules for uploading from last time were that bug-fixes in the 24 hour upload period were ok).
I didn't know if anyone thought this would be cheating or not - so I was thinking perhaps writing a script to do it, and people who want it can download/run the script to update, but that seems rather odd...
So, what is everyone's opinion - would slight balancing (stats only) and no gameplay changes, be alright, or frowned on?


Post Mortem:
Keeping it brief tonight, but here we go :)
I think this time we really did well, in that we got a good, feasible idea and stuck with it (yeah, we sorta changed idea for one night, but then came back to our original idea).
I didn't end the week sick and trying to forget about it like I usually do.
The team worked really well together, when we could. Pymike has a solo, so he was mostly absent on teh coding front. Nihilocrat was really busy, but he still got some sfx/music in and coded the system to use it. Keeyai had regular life come up, so he was gone after Wednesday.
But none the less, I think we did well. We have one of our most complete entries ever (if not the most), and I think we all learned a lot.
Personally I think I learned my limitations, both physically and mentally, so next time I will balance/pace myself better, how to better manage a team and my time, and I learned what kind of ideas to shoot for.

Cheers all, and happy playing :)

Because time attacking is fun and all that, I'm posting some times for you to beat in BubbMan 2. If you beat a time, post it here!

• Level 1: 19.2s
• Level 2: 13.8s
• Level 3: 17.4s
• Level 4: 18.0s
• Level 5: 34.1s
• Level 6: 21.5s

Well pyweek is over and csl-II is live, we called this 'The Unfortunate Undoing'

We took the premise of 'Get off my lawn!' and decided not to look at the immediate implications of someone saying that, but rather try and produce something that looks at the reasons as to why this person said that. Out of that came the idea of following a persons life and influencing their decisions in order to help guide them to hopefully becoming a person that does not say 'Get off my lawn!'

Jeiel did an absolutely amazing job on the graphics, he went for a rather neat style that works really well, the lack of detail in those pixels really lets you personify those blocky people :) But i'll let him talk about that himself.

Some notes: if you have a 64-bit machine you may have to provide your own chipmunk shared library, sorry about that. press escape to quit the game, the game itself only uses your pointing device.

Good luck to everyone involved, I look forward to playing as many of your games as possible :)

Link to the latest src package

Update

okay okay we are out of the uploading grace period, but i thought i would provide this small patch for people that are having trouble with the windows version, it just loads dlls from the already provided winlibs/ folder.
http://gordallott.com/run_game.zip

:::DESTROYSOUND AND MEOWFISH PRESENT:::
::: THE BUGGIEST PYGAME 8 ENTRY :::

::: OFF MY LAWN - THE RPG :::

This was supposed to be a tribute to the early Zelda games, but I had to cut a lot of features and a lot of stuff doesn't work. So, basically, it is a game in which you run around and hit things with your cane, and then you get randomly teleported into a tree. Then the crows come. And feast on your flesh.

Controls:

Arrows - Move
Space - Swing cane.
L-Alt - Use item
Tab - Change item
Uses PGU and python-xml. I'll put together a py2exe'ed version in the next 24 hours.

That was a fun PyWeek! Far less stressful than usual, probably due to us planning a project we knew we could get done in a day, rather than going for something ambitious and week-long. Still managed to get sick though -- happens every PyWeek without fail.

We got a couple of friends to play-test the game when it was nearly finished, so I'm pretty confident it can be finished by anyone with 10 minutes to spend. I might post a walkthrough later though if it turns out it's needed.

I've uploaded Windows and OS X binaries to my personal website; MD5 sums shown below to prove date authenticity.

• Windows: LeavingHome-1.0.zip
  (MD5: 4328d7b340bb19e0e6cc9c308ac8b42b)
• Mac OS X: LeavingHome-1.0.dmg
  (MD5: 8fdd3295deb6f1324f6d6b363bd141cf)

Hey, I actually made a game!!! (Whew!)

The gameplay is simple; the polish is zero; but both my kids have fun with it, so it's a success! (In fact, they want to make games of their own...)

Gameplay summary:

You can make enemy balls, and try to knock them off the lawn; or buddy balls, to help you. If you hold down 'C' all balls color the lawn under them as they move. H makes hills, D digs holes, and G restores greenness to the lawn, all under the good balls only. (All these keys have to be held down, not just pressed once.)

The kids like to "paint" the lawn by making enemies of a few different colors and knocking them around while holding 'C'. (I didn't have time for enemy AI or even nonpassive enemy motion, so this is easy.) Or make holes and call them "tents" or "caves"; or paint paths over the hills; etc... kind of like a 3d paint program.

I still only tested this on a Mac, and it has performance issues (which affect the physics) except on my newest one. After the judging I'll try to fix these, and maybe add more...

OK I uploaded my final entry. But it's 40 minutes late. Sorry judges.

I've added a fourth level. It's somewhat trickier to complete than I intended, but it's doable if you're careful and observant.

I suspect there's a bug that can occur if you get too many yarns crossing over at one point. If you find your yarns getting hopelessly tangled up, you may need to restart the level.