images/game play coming together

Team Quicksilver

A Pyweek 4 entry by Team Quicksilver (RB[0], Narianim, X.plosion)

This a team consisting of RB[0], Narianim, and X.plosion

Yay! we finished

Read our "instructions on running the game" post before trying to play( http://pyweek.org/d/868/)!!!!!!!

Awards

Give this entry an award

Scores

Ratings (show detail)

Overall: 3.3
Fun: 2.8
Production: 3.7
Innovation: 3.6

3% respondents marked the game as not working.
Respondents: 27

Files

File Uploader Date
TeamQuicksilver1.25.zip — final
our final final! 		RB[0] 2007/04/08 01:27
TeamQuicksilver1.0.zip — final
our final entry, short of anything else ;) 		RB[0] 2007/04/07 22:18
TeamQuicksilver0.75.zip — final
our fall-back release 		RB[0] 2007/04/07 03:49
screenie4.bmp
images/game play coming together 		RB[0] 2007/04/06 05:27
screenie3.bmp
hud almost finished, game-play better 		RB[0] 2007/04/05 20:13
screenie2.bmp
Now the tile changes color, and urgency, when a plant on it is mature :D 		RB[0] 2007/04/04 22:47
screenie.bmp
you must now "buy" plots to place plants in them... 		RB[0] 2007/04/04 21:59
first.jpg
placeholders that show our concept, lots of Plants! 		RB[0] 2007/04/04 04:36
TeamQuicksilver-0.2.zip
Player with particle effects/jumping 		RB[0] 2007/04/03 03:34
TeamQuicksilver-0.1.zip
Version 0.1, bad camera... 		RB[0] 2007/04/02 00:46

Diary Entries

Hi again - and my question ;)

RB[0] on 2007-03-04 20:29

So far I'm the only one back for TLP this go around, so if anyone wants to join a team, I would love to have you :)

Now for the question,
Richard, I'm working on yet another lib, and I was wondering how long until I must release my code,
with docs, so I can use it.
I think you let me go until 2 weeks prior to the compo last time, but I'm not sure.

5 comments

I am looking for...

RB[0] on 2007-03-06 22:55

anyone who would like to join a team, especially an artist or musician,
as I lack much experience in either ;)

1 comment

Balloon Ballistics

RB[0] on 2007-03-23 20:11

Well, it looks like my pre-game does have some bugs :/

I thought I had them fixed, but I accidentally "undid" them :P
Oh well.

I'm planning on continuing this project, and getting a proper sourceforge page up soon :)

Any suggestions would be welcome :D

1 comment

Hey Richard...

RB[0] on 2007-03-28 02:59

It seems that there is a bug or something with the site,
several of the diary entries/threads say that the person who started the thread has had the latest post, when this is not alwas the case, am I just seeing things?

http://pyweek.org/d/580/
http://pyweek.org/d/578/
http://pyweek.org/d/559/

Among others...
These all say that whoever started the entry had the last post, but it is actually someone else who had posted last

4 comments

Testing...

RB[0] on 2007-03-31 02:52

I'm working on my socket skills in the hope that we'll actually go multi-player this time :)

Anyone care to try this out and tell me what they think?
What works, what could be done better, what errors you got, etc.

http://upload2.net/page/download/XPi9huhaNmKpPBS/version-0.2.zip.html

Add a comment

Is multi-player...

RB[0] on 2007-04-01 00:15

...worth the effort to you guys??

We were planning it, but it appears that multi-player games havent faired so well in the past, and if no-one really cares, then we'll save ourselves the trouble I think...

By multi-player I mean network, not same computer, multi-player.

So what is your preference,
A: multi-player
B: single-player
C: dont really care

5 comments

Day1

RB[0] on 2007-04-01 12:37

I got a few hours programming done last night before I crashed, so heres what we've got...

    I started and finished the physics engine(unless it has bugs)

    Wrote a texture script that will load images and convert them to textures, automatically scaling the image to avoid a glError

    downloaded Richards OBJ loader from the pygame cookbook and customized it for my texture class and my resource mananger

    Finished at least part of the particle effects engine

    And we finished hammering out our idea!

We werent planning for this theme, but in retrospect we already had an idea, and this theme fits it best :)
We also decided against going for multiplayer, unless I finish the programming in an insanely short amount of time ;)

We arent going to reveal the game idea yet though, you'll just have to wait until we get a working version up going...

1 comment

Day 2:

RB[0] on 2007-04-01 22:25

Well, its not really over yet, but I dont expect to do much more tonight.

Today was no where near as productive as yesterday but here is what we've accomplished...

I found our physics engine was buggy, cumbersome, and way too slow(I'm not sure why...), so I gutted it and only kept the collision detection stuff.

Created some asset managers and edited the obj loader to gather BBox data, and other things...

I also created the basic object classes(player, enemy, etc.)

Now we just need a level/world loader, some art, and to integrate all of things that are finished into an actual game.

After that we'll get to work on a menu system.

All-in-all, I expect we shall finish, but how well done the game will be I dont know.

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I have uploaded...

RB[0] on 2007-04-02 00:51

Our first snap-shot of the game, the green cylinder is you, the red ones are enemies and the green platforms are platforms.

There seems to be a problem though, with the camera, if you dont move the player at all, the camera will circle it as planned, but if you move at all it does weird stuff.

You move the camera with the left-right arrow keys, and you move the player with the up-down arrow keys, you can also jump with the space bar.

I think there might also be a prob with the math3d module, but that might just be the bad camera again.
Would anyone mind looking at it?
The camera stuff is in the main GAME.py file, lines 80 through 87

1 comment

Day 2, in progress...

RB[0] on 2007-04-02 15:16

I finished gutting the game, but now it doesnt look like the fault was with my stuff :(

My biggest problem is that even though I'm getting 300+ fps, the key responses are choppy, after you press you have to wait a little while before the player moves.
The program still possesses this behavior, even though every thing is "simplified"

I have uploaded an example to our diary, use the arrows to move, the space bar to "jump", note, you dont fall back down ;)


Any one care to look, it requires glut, and I havent inited it, sorry :(, so you may get a weird error that can only be fixed by downgrading your glut.

5 comments

End of day 2...

RB[0] on 2007-04-03 03:48

well, I got more done today than i thought I would, you can download what we have so far from our diary page ;)

Thanks to saluk's suggestion I was able to keep my physics,player stuff :)

What is done so far...
collision detection is finished, i think...
model loading is working
particle effects are running
player physics(movement, jumping) are finished

Still to do,
get some descent graphics going(akk, we're still using all place-holders!)
Add 'blocks' that the player must go around or jump on
add enemies
add fighting
add items
add level-loading
add level victory conditions
and get the rest of the physics worked out :(

We are trying to decide whether or not to go with the current idea, which will be very difficult to finish, and is similar to many other games here.
Or, we have a backup plan, which I think might be more fun, but will be harder to balance...

Either way we still have loads to do, but it looks like we may actually finish :)

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End of 3rd day...

RB[0] on 2007-04-04 04:48

Well, I have been really busy today, and have only had about 4-5 hours to code, but in that time I accomplished more than the previous days combined :)

Here is what we've got now:
    A new game idea!
    some placeholder graphics
    isometric map
    plants that grow, and then die
Schedule for rest of compo:
    tomorrow:
      Finish game-play aspects(buying of plots, planting, harvesting, enemies, random attacks, enemy/player interaction(think ughlympics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveman_Ughlympics)
      and get level-loading going...
    Thursday:
      implement new graphics, maybe make some myself...
      add menus, inter-level graphics, tutorial
    Friday:
      finish game-play,
      tweak everything to perfection
      finish anything else that comes up!
    Saturday:
      add sfx/music
      test it all
      fix anything that is broken
      and finally, add whatever else is needed, like saved games, to the game until it is over-flowing with goodness :D

Well, that is going to be a very busy schedule, but it looks like it is definitely feasible, Good night all, and good luck. :D

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End of day 4...

RB[0] on 2007-04-05 02:51

Well, I got off to a really late start today and ended up only getting about 2 1/2 hours of coding in :/

The game is beginning to take shape, we have all major elements thought out and ready to be made,
the plants now die if you leave them too long.
Buying plots now actually costs something :)
I created a nice gui system with some help from pyglibs
We also have our first 2 final sprites done, the player and the plot-marker :)

All-in-all, I am about 3/4 of a day behind schedule, but I did schedule a spot between now and friday to catch up about that much, so as long as we dont have any more set-backs we should be good to go :D

1 comment

Almost there...

RB[0] on 2007-04-06 00:38

Well, we had a bit of a rally today, and got the core "engine" of the game running.

I'm planning a late night now, and a long day tomorrow, to try and get this thing finished before saturday :)
That way if we are actually here on saturday, we can spend the time tweaking/testing/packaging the game up!

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end of day 5...

RB[0] on 2007-04-06 05:37

Well, we have started to finally move :)

You can now buy plots, choose which kind of plant to place, buy plants, and harvest plants :)

There is also now 1 enemy, it was farely easy to implement him, so I dont expect to much trouble with multiple enemies.

Tomorrow I hope to make a level-loader
implement player-enemy interaction
implement nourishing
create new tiles
allow win scenarios
add menus/between level pages.
and if I can, make a few more plants


It seems the frame-rate has now dropped to about 45-60, with and without psyco, would anyone with a slower comp please try this and tell me if it is doable?:
    http://media.pyweek.org/dl/4/TLP-2/TeamQuicksilver0.5.zip
BTW the music in the background was made in musagi, and is only a test, and will almost surely be changed, so if it makes you crazy you might want to turn off your sound :)



8 comments

Day 6

RB[0] on 2007-04-06 23:55

Well, game play is nearly finished :)

You can now select different types of plants to grow,
zap the enemy, and he zaps you too...
Removed encase button/cursor, and removed idea from game,
Narianim made some more wonderful plants, and some new wizards, you can actually tell who you are ;), I have yet to implement them though...
Fixed the renderer so that draws sprite in the proper order, that took some thought, but now works great :D


TODO: make menus
make in-between level graphics
make sfx/music(my offer still stand sfor sfx/music ppl, as I have no experience whatsoever in music, and little in sfx)
Add locusts
make levels advance, instead of quit :/
Make game keep track of last finished level
implement new graphics
add new tiles
and fix any errors that crop up!

If we finish that with time to spare, we'll work on packaging, art, levels, whatever

Add a comment

well, it comes done to the wire...

RB[0] on 2007-04-07 03:58

we got a lot done today, but we have a whole load of stuff to do tomorrow, currently the game just prints YouWon or YouLost and then crashes when the game ends :(
I'm going to bed early tonight, so I can get a jump-start on the day tomorrow :)

MUST HAVE ADDITIONS:
We still need a ReadMe,
a menu system,
level fade-ins/outs,
stringing scenarios together,
implement the last of the graphics(I hope that doesnt take more than an hour max),
and remove current music ;)

POSSIBLES include, in order,
making more/better tiles
getting/making sfx/music
addition of an endless game mode.

Whew, that might get tight.

Anyone have any particluar requests/comments/errors for the game?
Also, when you close the game, the fps will be printed, if ppl could tell me what they are getting, in case I need to optomize the game any.

Thanks! and good night :)

2 comments

Ohh, yeah!

RB[0] on 2007-04-07 13:44

Well, i woke up about an hour ago, and already have half of the things I wanted to get done, done :D :D :D

I'm taking a break to eat and wake up now, see you on irc when I get back!

3 comments

if anyone is wondering...

RB[0] on 2007-04-08 03:52

...where exactly the theme is in our game, i can tell you its there :)

Technically the game makes use of the theme on several levels, but none of them are very good in the least IMO, but at least there enough to keep us from being DQ'd(I hope ;))

You must buy more plots/plants to win(for the plots, the only way is up, for the plants, the only way is up if you want to win ;)
The only way to win is to progress through the levels...
the enemy never runs out of gold, and his cash flow is almost always in the green(there might be a bug with this though...)

I cant really think of any others, except maybe that your plants only grow... upwards ;)

Just saying this because the game doesnt mention the theme very much at all(we had a mad dash for a completed game at the end there, and it was lost amongst the rest of the game)

Some of these entries though, definitely look like they'll get high innovation scores, and I cant wait to try them out!
I just hope ours compares :)

3 comments

Team Quicksilver:Readme!

RB[0] on 2007-04-08 18:31

There is one bug left in the game that I know about, if you are playing a level where the nourish spell costs less than any plants, and either you or the enemy cant buy anymore plants, and have none growing, the enemy will stop moving, and you will have to restart the level.

there is a 1-2 line fix for this:
    go to lib/modules and open "elements.py", go to lines 148 and 149, they should like this:
    l=[self.plot_cost, self.nourish_cost,
    self.locust_cost, self.lightning_bolt_cost]

    change that to l=[ ]
That should fix the problem :D

also if a level crashes, there is a file in lib/levels called "HOW TO MAKE A LEVEL.txt"
if you follow its instructions it should lead you to a fix for a level ;)

3 comments

Official run game instructions!!!

RB[0] on 2007-04-08 20:00

Alright!
so you downloaded our game, and it wouldnt run, right?

Well... at the end of the compo there, I had attempted to integrate the skellington into our game, in the hope that ppl would appreciate it, wrong!

To run the game simply move the 'data' and 'levels' folders out of lib, and into the top directory, this should fix it.

sorry about that :(

Add a comment

Team Fluffy Menace...

RB[0] on 2007-04-16 02:38

I cant run your game!

After telling the game to start at the main menu, it does the time machine sound and then "freezes".
the game doesnt crash, or raise an error, what it does do(if I'm in fullscreen) is kick me to windows, as if I had minimized the screen, which I didnt, and it wont let me back in.

After deciding to search around, and placing multiple print signals, I have found where the game seems to lock up at:
line 141 in map.py. It seems that the call to createCurve is somehow entering an infinite loop, or something. That probably isnt so, but that is the only way I can interpret it :/
It might also be a thing with using the stencil buffer, are you doing anything "un-orthodox" with it?
I dont think this is a driver issue, as I have run numerous games/programs that should be far more likely to barf at an opengl call ;) But then again, it could be I guess :P

Any ideas?

5 comments

Post-mortem and future

RB[0] on 2007-04-22 02:58

WARNING: long post :P

Well, first off, this has been a great pyweek, the number and quality of entries was astonding, and I was actually glad to lose to a few of them :)
We are very pleased with where we placed, even if it was lower than last time :P

What went wrong:
    1. Started out with way too fast of a pace(literally), and a so-so idea that was really meant for a different theme and. Ran with the idea, created a simple 3d physic engine and particle effects. Found a multitude of bugs in the physics..

    2. Spent 2nd and 3rd days trying to fix 3d physics to no effect. Finally scratched the whole thing, only to find that it was just moving too darn fast and losing events from pygame :(.

    3. Finally scratched our original idea late Tuesday, and started work on it late Wednesday. But by this time we really didn't have enough time to really finish a game as big as we were planning, but decided to stick it out.

    4. Our artist wasn't able to work on the game until Wednesday, so I spent 60% of the remaining time on graphics, instead of focusing on code :(

    5. Waited until last day to implement menus, sound, skellington, levels, between game screens.

    6. Our game designer wasn't able to do much after helping with the ideas(he was going to do levels/balancing).

    7. After switching ideas, I decided to use my pyglibs library, but I haven't worked on it for a while, and it really wasn't competition-ready, so I spent about 1/4 of my programming time re-writing it, and thinking up ways to do things that should have already been done :(.

    8. And last, we didn't have a plan for the compo, we mostly did whatever came to mind next, so some things that should have been implemented weren't, and some things that really weren't important were given too much time.

What went right:
    1. I was able to do more graphics than I have ever done for any project in the past.

    2. Found lots of way to fix up pyglibs into a better package.

    3. Coded my first actual AI !!! :)

    4. Learned some music-making basic(didn't use this new-found skill though...)

    5. Have a better idea of what we'll need to next time to really accomplish whatever we plan.

The future...
Well, this is actually my favorite game that I have made to date, and we definitely will be planning on continuing its development :D

Here is a list of things that are planned for the next release(hopefully soon):
    1. Fix up ai a bit(it will stop moving sometimes, and doesnt always work right...)

    2. Add some more animation(especially for lightning bolt attacks)

    3. Add some hot-keys.

    4. Create an interactive tutorial.

    5. Create a level editor and a campaign system, so you can create tournaments.

    6. A trophy system(which thus requires a player-saving system)

    7. A better menu system.

    8. Add lots of levels(I'm really glad i was actually able to play through the entire game without it crashing because of levels :))

    9. Add a custom ai setting to the levels.

    10. Make the tile smaller(that should allow bigger map sizes, without hurting speed)

    11. Add some more sfx.

There are a few more things planned, but they will not likely be in the upcoming release.

If anyone has any requests/comments/ideas or anything else, feel free to post them here.

Well, I'm off to bed now, will maybe work on the game some tomorrow. ;)
Hope to see you all again next pyweek :)

6 comments

Some fun...

RB[0] on 2007-04-23 19:23

some fun facts from Pyweek, past and present that I have collected.
Pyweek1 is omitted from some things:

Pyweek 1:

Nothing here, because the script i created doesnt handle the format of the original page, sorry :(


Pyweek 2:
    Production was the most emphasized category, with 20 of the entires receiving it as there highest, or tied with the highest, rank.
    Innovation was next with 14.
    And fun was least, with only 4.
    overall averages were:
      fun was 2.6
      innovation was 2.8
      production was 2.9
      average was 2.75
      entrant voters was 29%
      DNW was 0%
      disqualifications were 0.3%

Pyweek 3:
    Production was the most emphasized category, with 15 of the entires receiving it as there highest, or tied with the highest, rank.
    Innovation was next with 11.
    And fun was least, with only 5.
    overall averages were:
      fun was 2.7
      innovation was 2.9
      production was 3.0
      average was 2.9(ruffly)
      entrant voters was 38%
      DNW was 0%
      disqualifications were 1.2%

Pyweek 4:
    Production was the most emphasized category, with 26 of the entires receiving it as there highest, or tied with the highest, rank.
    Innovation was next with 25.
    And fun was least, with only 10.
    overall averages were:
      fun was 2.8
      innovation was 3.0
      production was 3.0
      average was 2.9
      entrant voters was 35%
      DNW was 7%
      disqualifications were 0.3%

From all the competions:
Highest ever ranking was in Pyweek 2, by Rushed "Nelly's rooftop garden",
with 4.4 fun, 4.2 production, 4.6 innovation, 4.4 average, 36% voters, 0% DQ

Highest team average ranking has been the same every single competition,
with the winning team getting a 3.9 average:
philhassey-Pyweek1,Pekuja-Pyweek2,PyAr2-Pyweek3, toba4-pyweek4

eugman(Pyweek4-Awesome block game 2 -- return of the block: The story of one block against the world)
is the only entry ever to score the exact same in all categories(fun, innovation, production, average)
with a score of 2.6


I hope you enjoyed this, if you have any other interesting(or not ;)) facts from pyweek you wish to share, please post them here.
Or, if you find a flaw in any of my facts, please let me know, and post the fix here.

Thank you :)

10 comments