Some stuff I meant to write throughout the week

FatHat on 2009/09/06 09:08 of A Murder Of Crows

I meant to write blog updates throughout the week, but that was before I realized that trying to make a game in a week is time consuming enough without these blogging shenanigans.

So here's some history on the game conception. The idea originally came from Adam Carolla's rants on crows:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV09m3k2_iE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BXMrsoKQxY 

The first idea was that you'd have a guy walking around, and you had to use your attack crows to solve puzzles and protect him. I still think this was a pretty good idea, but when we started writing the game we realized attacking things with the crows was way more fun than pretty much anything else. Also, uh, puzzles take a long time to make. That's the main thing. We barely even eeked two levels out.

From a technical standpoint, this was HARD, because we were doing things that Box2D did not approve of, so it took every opportunity to crash. We ended up having to use a custom compiled version of Box2D to up the contact limit so it would stop crashing. In retrospect I wish we had used Chipmunk, but Chipmunk didn't have some of the features we needed. Also, I'm rather proud of the dynamic animations. Granted they lurch around like a lush drunk, but man, it lets us do things like pull off peoples limbs and have them hobble around without any extra content work.

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Comments

adam on 2009/09/06 11:19:

Any game which dynamically simulates people hobbling around because their limbs have been pulled off by crows sounds like a good one to me.

Cosmologicon on 2009/09/13 07:34:

I get what seems to be a pyglet bug with this game. It says it can't find data/ground.png, even though it's there. Does anyone know the issue? I'm on Ubuntu.
<pre>Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "run_game.py", line 4, in <module>
    main.main()
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/main.py", line 107, in main
    mw.init()
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/main.py", line 27, in init
    menucontext.MenuContext(self),
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/menucontext.py", line 14, in __init__
    MapContext.__init__(self, window, "MenuContext")
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/mapcontext.py", line 92, in __init__
    self.init_world()
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/mapcontext.py", line 104, in init_world
    self.init_physics()
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/mapcontext.py", line 121, in init_physics
    self.build_ground()
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/menucontext.py", line 52, in build_ground
    texture='data/ground.png'
  File "pyweek-9-all/MurderCrow/a murder of crows/gamelib/physics.py", line 19, in __init__
    self._texture = pyglet.resource.texture(texture)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/pyglet/resource.py", line 599, in texture
    file = self.file(name)
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.6/pyglet/resource.py", line 383, in file
    raise ResourceNotFoundException(name)
pyglet.resource.ResourceNotFoundException: Resource "data/ground.png" was not found on the path.  Ensure that the filename has the correct captialisation.</pre>