The Fox Assault website is up.

Our pyggy entry is up, and should be considered the new canonical source of news and information until we've managed to get our website up and running.

Thank you everyone who reviewed my incomplete game.  It was nice to have the feedback.  Better next time!

This game is a bit incomprehensible. What a great way to sum up the week! With so many ideas, and so much time wrapped up in other things, I don't think we every really comprehended the game at all ourselves, and we were the ones apparently making it.

About "order wife to get something" being offensive - yes, this is meant to be satire. This is why if you hit it too many times she brings you a divorce. Just as the parrot is meant to annoy, you realize that by passing allong the annoyance to the wife you are no better. I guess since everything is so incomplete this wasn't conveyed well at all.

But what it really is hiding is a missing component of gameplay. We had ideas about finding the right items to please the bird having a very strong puzzle component to it. For instance, an object might be buried under another object that must first be moved, but then that object is too heavy and some other solution would need to be found. Conceptually though, we had a lot of big ideas that seemed simple, but turned out to be faaaar to light on details in practice.

One comment said "The theme is feathers not birds" - another thing not communicated well I guess, but the whole point is that the bird keeps shedding his feathers, and you are trying to stop him from doing so. I don't see how this can not fit the theme.

One reviewer seemed to really enjoy it, so I'm glad we could entertain someone, even though things were so very broken! Going in I had planned to frontload things as much as possible, but I didn't follow through. Needed better time management. I always need better time management, but this time was worse than usual.

So thanks for playing the game, and I'm sorry to everyone who got frustrated not knowing which things were actually implemented and which weren't! If I had had time to make the instructions more clear I would have.

Well, first off, congrats to everyone - seems like there was a really good crop of games this time around :)
Secondly, I'm rather pleased that this is our highest rated game to date (if barely :P)

Now for the comments:

"Great job! You obviously put a lot of work into this, and it seems like you accomplished exactly what you set out to do. The gameplay is a lot of fun, even if the Faceball 2000 enemies are considered old school nowadays. The voice work is funny. Bonus points for the music! Original music is always welcome."

Thanks! Yeah, the sfx and music were a big thing we wanted to do this time, and I think they turned out fantastically, thx to Tim :)
Yes, the enemies are a little lame, originally they were placeholders but I ended up preferring them in the end.


"Nice work. Obviously not a comparably good FPS, but nicely done for Pyweek :)"

Thx, was a lot of fun to write :)
Not many games made in a week are comparable to ones made over months...


"Maybe not very innovative, but felt very polished and complete. Good work!"

It seems rather hard to be extremely innovative with an FPS anymore, especially with the limited time :(



"Didn't work on my computer. Needed to find a windows computer and install loads of library. Crashed when firing the chicken gun. Significant slowdown when some enemies got shot. Some floors didn't render. Very functional game. Hilarious speech and story. A bit monotone for now (everyone shoots straight, only at different speed)."

There are only four libs you need (and we recommend psyco, might not have made it to readme though) - which should all work cross-platform (possibly with some difficulty on mac, but I think we fixed that)...
That slowdown is rather odd, will have to look into it.
Shots are more/less powerful as well, but yeah, a bit "meh"
Some floors didn't render? Which ones? :S
Do you have the latest drivers, etc.?


"I had a few enemies come at me through walls, but other than that I can find nothing about the game to complain about except its brevity. I particularly like the humour in the protagonist's quips."

The aliens coming through the walls is not a bug, I thought we pointed that out somewhere but it may have been missed when I was cleaning up the dialog :S
Yeah, the duration was exactly what we planned, as most people don't really play longer than about 10-15 minutes on most entries, so I figured requiring more time than that to see the whole game would be problematic...


"Fun game - very Duke Nukem feel to the humour. I found dogding too slow, which was a bit annoying."

Yeah, strafing and backing up are slowed than forward movement, and aren't affected by running - probably a poor design choice on my part :S
Yeah, we specifically wanted the humor to be a large part (along with the sfx), glad you liked it :)


"I don't know... it just didn't have ... something..."

Not sure what to say, except that that is probably one of the 5 least helpful comments I have ever seen.


"Needing tons of libraries, and not explaining how to install them is not the best idea for making lazy people testing them... :("

As pointed out above, the game requires four "mainstream" libraries, and recommends a fifth. Almost anyone developing games in Python should probably have them anyways, and they certainly aren't difficult to install.
Either way though, being unable/unwilling to try and get libraries is not a good reason to "DNW" the entry, that is for critical bugs or when you have the libraries needed and it just won't run.


"Think the team was interested in the technical aspects of growing a 3D engine, and congrats for that."

Outside of Pyweek, yes we are interested in that, but this was not just a tech-demo to test out the engine (though it did help with that)...


"Pretty good effort for one week :) Story was suitably bizarre."

Hehe, thx :)



Gonna take this one in parts O_O
"Tacked on theme, bland, no innovation, uninteresting to play. I see the point of making it as an exercise, but why share it with us? Also PYGGEL has over 9000 dependencies even if they are not used."

And this is probably another of the 5 worst comments I've ever seen.
"Tacked on theme"
How exactly is the theme "tacked" on? It's actually used in-game as a plot/discovery element, instead of just floating there as eye-candy...
"no innovation"
Depends on what you mean, if you mean "oh my gosh that's the next thing in FPS gaming!" - no, of course not, then again, a few of the things we did were rather innovative, even if people didn't notice them, and it wasn't a clone.
"bland, uninteresting to play"
Apologies if you were uninterested in playing the game, apparently the humor didn't work for you.
"I see the point of making it as an exercise, but why share it with us?"
Wow, so what exactly is the point of even doing Pyweek for you? First, every entry is an exercise in some way, either in using specific technologies, trying new things, or just plain old-fashioned making games - that's the point!
Why share it with you? Naturally I wanted to see how it compared to other games made in Pyweek, also, from a purely technical standpoint, I haven't seen a first-person shooter in Pyweek that was actually complete or interesting before.
"Also PYGGEL has over 9000 dependencies even if they are not used."
Hmm, slight exageration? Pointed out in the Readme are exactly which libraries that are needed, and 4 is hardly that much (especially mainstream as they are)...


"Bugs! But very, very nice."

And others like it:
Which bugs? The one with the chicken gun crashing was fixed in the torrent version - perhaps you got a previous "final release"? There was still an issue with losing the chicken gun when you scrolled, but no crashes, or other bugs that I am aware of - so if it was something else please let us know what it was specifically :)


"Although this is a critical bug, I'm not going to report this as a does-not-work issue: When attempting to use the Chicken Gun, on the level immediately after picking it up, an error occurs on weapons.py:290: self.obj.pos = self.pos: - AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'pos' Other than that, it looks like most of the control issues have been smoothed out and the difficulty is much better-balanced, making the experience much more fun. It's still a tiny bit sluggish and lacking the polish a full FPS would require, though, hence the 4 instead of a five (I'd 4.5 fun if I could). Innovation is only really held back by the relatively bland level designs. I know there wasn't much time to do things, and that you wanted to keep stuff on a 2D plane, but traps or pits or teleporters or something would have made things more interesting."

See above for bug.
As far as level design, yeah, not a whole lot to do, locking to the 2d plane made the game possible, but limited where we could take it :S


"Yeeehaw! I like the blocky look. The aliens.... squares would look much cooler if they were kind of glowing and hovering up and down. And you should settle on one kind of tileset. The two just don't fit together and eventually you wonder why the ship is made of (alien) plastic AND (alien) stone at the same time. ;)"

Hehe, thx :)
As far as tilesets, yeah, had a member who didn't really like the stone, so they whipped up the other one(s) at the last minute, and it is kinda weird...


"Ran real smooth. Good work."

Great! Making it run at a constant rate was a real pain O.o


"Nice, tough to do anything in 3d!"

Indeed it is, but very fun :)


"Obviously this is brilliant - you must be well chuffed to get so much done by the deadline. Many congrats, very amusing. "you alien... square." - classic. Thanks! I did experience the crash on shooting the chicken gun on entry to level 6 - that was the first time I'd even fired a shot with the chicken gun. I was on WinXP. I'd run using the pyw, so didn't see a stacktrace, and it didn't happen again for me, sorry! I modified your source to add keyboard commands for the weapon change - since I'm on a lappy, I have no mousewheel. :-)"

Yeah, an alternate control scheme was considered, but I just ran out of time :S
The bug you got was the chicken gun one I noted above, most likely.
And yes, we are indeed well chuffed :)


"Nice, I like the slow bullets, nice graphics, but no sense..."

Eh? Glad you liked the bullet/gfx, but the last part makes no sense (no pun intended) to me :S


I'm not going to list out the remainder of the comments, since they all seemed pretty similar to the previous, but thx again to everyone who tried the game and took the time to rate us :)

Everyone:

I love it, and it is horrible, but it don't depending on anything for running.
It is fun for design, fun for playing and fun for writing.

You can playing in any computer. it runs python.

Milker

我真的幸運能寫出這樣的遊戲，雖然它看起來是如此不堪入目的。
但我從中學了很多東西。
（在 python 上我還是一個不節不扣的初哥，很多東西都不懂！）

另一樣令我開心的是，我差不多能不靠任何程式庫，而寫出這樣的遊戲。
它可以確保我在任何電腦上都能玩。（只要這台電腦是執行 python 的。）

Milker
P.S. 文字給人的印象都是野蠻和未開放的？！

Well, coming in first was definitely a nice surprise. There were some very fun, elaborate and well made games that I played during the judging period. Congratulations to all the other entries! I enjoyed playing them.

Since I had never released a game to the general public before, I wasn't sure how well it would be received. I'm very glad that people enjoyed my game. It is especially satisfying to see from the comments that players liked various aspects of the game, some of which I thought might be overlooked. So thank you for all your comments!

I am of course hoping to release a post-competition version but as usual, there isn't that much free time to do this so there may be a short delay. But given the feedback, I definitely want to work on this some more.

Well... After the usual Pyweek struggle to get a game done ("Let's make a hex-based TBS." - "Uh.. okay........ How do I handle hex-maps?") and the usual effort spent on rating all entries ("But the README doesn't mention that this weird lib is required.." *grumble*) I expected our average game rating would be around 3.0 and we'd end up somewhere in the middle. As usual. Maybe a bit higher or lower - the middle is nice enough.

So when Zahme looked at the ratings I was really surprised when he said: "We're fourth." - "What?!"

Thank you for rating our entry and giving feedback. We'll try to complete the game during Pyggy, improve the UI, add more maps and a campaign. Hm.. I'd better think of a (good) way to implement campaigns and finish that map-editor as soon as I can.

So.. Congrats to the winners, thx for the fun and hope to see you all next time! ;)

I want to start working on a team. How about a collaboration for Pyggy? I'd rather work on someone else's game, to get used to working with other people's code, but if need be I have an old entry or two that we could do. Anyone interested?

I presented a post-mortem kinda thing at last weekend's BarCamp in Melbourne. The kind folks there video taped it! So here it is: The 7-day Game.

I'm going to look into putting together a higher-quality video with basically the same content but recorded directly off my laptop. If anyone's got any suggestions for content they'd like to see in the video (except for "less 'um's please") then please comment :)