Well, I've uploaded my final version, and it is playable right through to completion, but it requires obscene compute resources for such a puny game - I'm afraid you will need a good processor to play this - my 2Ghz Athlon XP 64 on 64 bit Ubuntu chugs along at 12-15 fps depending on what is happening. (Its processor limited - rendering consumes very little time. Its not even the physics that is doing it - its the dam AI. Once this is over I'll increase the speed by an order of magnitude once I have the time to profile it properly. You just shouldn't call that many trig functions in Python. Be warned that if you do have a low frame rate the physics can explode...) Tomorrow I'll create a 'lite' version though - I presume its within the rules to simply adjust a few integers so there are less protesters and less policemen, so people can run it on lower end hardware. I won't mark those versions as final anyway and let the judges decide. My game requires Panda 3D as its only library to run (And Python of course, unless your on Windows, in which case Panda includes its own copy of Python.) - you can get it from panda3d.org. Its simple enough to install and supports Windows, Linux (32 bit and 64 bit, many distros.) as well as Mac OS support. Just note that Mac support is relatively recent and still has some issues. I have however created a Windows installer (The kettling-0.1.exe file) - that should just install and run, regardless of what is on your computer, with its own copy of Panda etc. I don't have time now but tomorrow I'll see if I can create a 32 bit Linux package as well - I think pandas packaging system does both .deb's and .rpms. (It doesn't work with 64 bit Linux or Mac OS though, so for them you will need to install Panda.) For the game itself I think its kinda fun - it initially seems simple, but turns out to be frustratingly tricky, at least when not in easy mode. A house mate also said he found it addictive, which was satisfying:-) A lot of stuff got dropped in the end, most notably detailed stats on completion and the bribing of politicians. (Both exist in part in code, but are lacking gui more than anything else.)

I have to say: I'm really pleased with what we've produced this time. I feel like it's been a very long week but we've got some excellent results. So I present to you the fourth Super Effective PyWeek production, Happy Insect Garden.

Happy Insect Garden is a bizarre style of defender game featuring:

• 19 different types of creature with flavour text as and when you find them
• 117 unlockable achievements for your completionist enjoyment
• 8 different levels, each showcasing different gameplay
• a variety of different creature movement AIs bringing it to life
• beautifully shaded graphics in a mix of rendered and vector styles
• a jaunty folk/traditional music theme to keep you entertained
• the most satisfyingly smooth menu graphics I've ever produced

To whet your appetite, just look at the following screenshots:

Then download the final version here.

To people who might have tried to play the game while I was writing this post, there was a bug that prevented the first level from being possible. Please play the current version, thank you. :-)

If you have problems with the game please tell us either below or on #pyweek (find Membury or mewo2) or by e-mailing insect-garden@supereffective.org.

NOTE: What we uploaded is obviously horribly incomplete. Don't bother rating, but you can have a look.

We ran out of time due to unforeseen computer problems that took the first weekend to fix. It was one of those learned-the-hard-way lessons, in this case "always back up your data before trying anything like resizing hard drive partitions" (don't ask...).

When I finally actually did get down to work, I spent Monday to Wednesday creating our GUI. In hindsight the game ideas should have received more time, but of course at the time I mistakenly assumed the engine was the most time-consuming part. It seems stupid to have thought that now (because as you can see, our engine is actually really simple), but for me, building any engine always seems to be some sort of learning process. Learning is good, but under time constraints, you'd obviously prefer to have learned everything BEFOREHAND. In this case, my "learning" was an improvement of a GUI engine and YAML, a really interesting and nice little "non-markup-language".

If anyone is wondering what our ideas actually were, I happened to be studying the Cold War (which is pretty interesting by the way) and Tatlin's Tower, upon researching it, brought that to mind. I was already having ideas for building a game like the one we have here, so Pyweek seemed like a good time for giving it a shot. It's basically a "receive info, decide what to do, repeat" game, but if we could have finished any decent amount of story, it'd actually probably have been interesting. Well, maybe. "Anything" is guaranteed to be interesting if you look at it closely enough...

Well, time to get back to normal life, right? I'm a busy guy; I've got things to do, places to go, people to meet...

YAY! we finished. Of course, there are some last minute issues that cropped up, but we are pretty happy that the game is fairly playable. Here are some things you might want to know when playing.

A. Enabling Specials.
(We didn't do a very good job of explaining them) The specials unlock when you fulfill a requirement on the list. If you continue to get that item they will continue to unlock! Use the number keys to launch a special as your next block.

B. What Specials do.
1 - Random. Chooses a random special.
2 - Nuke. Clears all blocks in your level.
3 - Bulldozer. Clears 1 block on either side.
4 - Flood. Clears all blocks in a horizontal line.
5 - Dynamite. Clears all blocks in a 1 space radius.
6 - Tornado. Clears all blocks in a vertical line.


C. The Lawn Guy
The Lawn Guy has a small bug. There is an empty space in the top right corner of this item, but if you build the other 3 spaces, the item won't register till you drop something in the empty space.

Other than that, it should work reasonably well. We couldn't get all the levels we wanted done, so levels 2 and 3 are the same for now. Have fun and tell us what you think!

m

we are not finished.

The coding is finished and we will go to bed now. Tomorrow a windows installer will follow.

Start uploading...

A happy ending, huh? There was a lot of progress during the last two days and we put together something we could call a game. Finished in a hurry, but works anyway. I finished the background music like two hours before the deadline, which was pretty intensive and doesn't make me want to hear it again in a while. The team seemed satisfied though.

Actually the project got much more fun in the end, when there was a lot of real-time interaction inside the team. It motivates you a lot when you make something and other guys like it, instead of doing stuff just for yourself.

Ok, I can't think of much to say, other than that it was fun and I'm curious to see what others have made and what they think about our entry. Cheers.

Despite the fact, that my submit isn't finished as i hoped, i'm surely am :)

I'm to exhausted to write a longer diary entry so this has to wait for tomorrow.

Good night!

AAAGH! It seems our watches were 15min. slow (but ALL our watches: two laptops and a desktop), and we are trying a last minute upload.

We hope there are no problems for our entry to be judged, because we are truly sending this in time! Problem is, it's like 12Mb and it seems it's taking quite a lot of time! Too much indeed! :(

Just in case, we are also sending an email to Richard (richard@pyweek.org) Pleasepleaseplease forgive us and let us in! It's cold outside! :(

It's almost over and all my bugs are almost gone. Coincidence? no. Just a lack of features. With this solid platform I now have I will improve it and share it in time for everyone to use it next PyWeek. This year was not a bust in terms of productivity, just in returns. The game is not complete, the engine is not complete, and the game idea was never really utilized, making its completeness irrelevant. The game was going to be fun for the same reasons Mario World was fun, and cool like Little Big Planet because it uses physics, but it will never be complete unless it is played as an MMO-Platformer. Wait for a similar product on you E-Store shelves sometime between now and forever.

I can't believe this, but I actually managed to put together a complete game, with graphics, music and sound effects. There are still some minor scoring bugs, which I discovered at the last minute, but the game is playable nonetheless. If you think it's too easy, you can tweak some parameters inside game.GameParameters class.