Looking at the topics, a lethagic Hammer didn't see much to interest him. "I have no idea what to do with any of those topics." In fact, he was so unenthusiastic, he used a simple python snippet to make his choices :

import random
x = [1,2,3,4,5]
random.shuffle(x)
print x

By chance, he chose as #1, "Talin's Tower" (which, coincidentally, was awong's choice). I asked him, "Well, do you know what Tatlin's Tower is?" He didn't. "Do you know what scuppers are?" He didn't. "What does half a sovereign mean?" He guessed wrong."So what are are you going to do?" The Hammer didn't know? "Why don't you try Google," I suggested, trying to kickstart Hammer into action...

"Hmm, so it was a tower that the Communists wanted to build, I still don't know what to do about it"

"Well, let's talk about it" and I put on my James Burke cap on and started making connections...

...an hour later, the Hammer was raring to go. In fact, he went from the least enthusiasm to the most enthusiasm I've seen in any of the pygame challenges, We had found a game idea could encompass all of the topic ideas. It was a wild idea and we weren't sure if we could do it but were going to be a lot of fun to trying...

As I had told the Hammer before, everything is interesting if you look deep enough, you just need to be creative about it.

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...