Actual gameplay, but more tech demo than game

drnlm on 2016/03/06 01:17 of koperkapel
— edited on 2016/03/06 01:23

We didn't manage to get enough done during the week to actually make a game, so this isn't a complete entry. Thanks to a frantic push on Saturday and Sunday morning (which tripled the total commit count), we did manage to get a lot of the elements we discussed on the first Sunday more or less implemented, but we that left no time to work on making the game playable.

Despite this, we are pretty happy with the results, given the limited time we managed to find to work on the entry. The game looks quite good, and we feel that it at least demonstrates the potential of the original idea.

What we managed to include:

• Vehicles: Roomba, Tank, Quadcopter (although it walks, rather than flies)
• Weapons: Both melee weapons (butter knife, crowbar) and ranged weapons (roach spit, the gun)
• Enemies: Rats, roaches and robots (although they're very similar under the hood)
• Serums: Intelligence, Strength and Speed (although only intelligence actually does anything)
• Doors and keypads
• A tunnel system (with a lot of logic about connecting tunnels nicely that nobody will notice)
• Roach recruiting
• A complete roach management system (like many management systems, this one is fully featured, but not practically very useful)
• Combat, including the ability to lose the game (winning is an overated goal)
• A nice floating HUD for the player state
• Sounds and animations
• A very fancy world state

Things we didn't get to:

• The credits
• Level generation: We implemented bits of our planned random level generator, and even used some of the results, but it never got far enough along to be the hoped-for labour-saving device that would generate actual content.
• Doing more interesting things with the tunnels.
• Doing more with the serum abilities.
• Better enemies. The current ones are very stupid and somewhat strange
• Saving and restoring of game state.
• A victory condition.

For this pyweek we used Daniel Pope's and Richard Jones' Pygame Zero. It was a lot of fun to use, and most of the issues we had were because we hadn't taken time to properly study it beforehand.

We may revisit this entry at some point and try flesh out more of our original vision, but that will only be after the judging ends.