Here's a little something I've been working on, its a framework for game development based on Pyglet. It's based off of Skellington but I've added a few useful development features. I won't go in to great detail here because I've already written a large amount of documentation which is bundled with it.

It's intended as a starting point, not as a library of any kind. Inevitably in a project of any size written in only a week things can end up a bit of a mess. A little structure from the start helps, and that's what this is.

I will note again that this has been written for Pyglet. Software architecutre is often influenced by the architecture of the libraries being used, in this case Pyglet's event framework shows through.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, I've mentioned a couple of things in the docs that I'm planning. Hopefully some new ideas will come out of PyWeek 7 too.

pgf-0.1.tar.gz

As some of you may know, last PyWeek, as part of our entry, Robot Underground, I wrote a fairly minimal Pyglet-based SVG parser and renderer. Since then, I've seen a number of people do similar things for their Pyglet projects.

Rather than have people continually reinvent the wheel, I've taken the parser from RU, and spruced it up a bit. I'm releasing it under a BSD license, similar to that used for Pyglet itself. You can read about it and download a copy from the Super Effective website. It's not perfect, and it's by no means complete, but as far as I'm aware, it's the best pure-Python solution out there to the problem.

I'd appreciate any comments, and particularly any bug reports or patches.

Restructuring some of the stuff that I did for Robot Underground last PyWeek I've come up with a simple structure for interface components. I've posted a little library of the two components that we'd used for RU, text boxes and text menus. Its very straightforward and there's an example that should hopefully clarify what it can do and how.

Check out the Super Effective site to read about it and download it or just click here to download it directly.

Version 0.2 of our Pyglet SVG mini-library, Squirtle has been released.

Changes include a new tesselator (with holes!) and a few bugfixes. Thanks to everyone who gave feedback and bug reports. As always, comments, bug reports, etc, welcome.

richard: I know this is quite a long way after the library deadline, but will people be able to use Squirtle 0.2 this Pyweek, given that the API hasn't changed since the initial release?

Hi everyone! Just moved house this week and have been frantic decorating it so sorry for lack of participation in the comment threads. Internet just got connected so I'm back now. This house will serve as our team's base of operations for the September competition so its a good thing we're all up and running. Stuff's still a bit of a mess, cardboard boxes everywhere (thanks, Ikea!) but I'm really excited about the challenge now.

Allow me to plug Squirtle one more time, Martin's vector graphics library for Python. Excellent stuff, Martin! I guess we're going to see lots of SVGs flying around now, guess we'll have to come up with yet more exciting gimmicks :-). Seriously though, this is what PyWeek is great for: out of our desire to render vector graphics for PyWeek 6, Martin wrote this nifty little SVG parser. A scant 5 months later its stable and improved a great deal and packaged as a mini-library that everyone can use. Through PyWeek we are not only building a community but also developing the tools we work with; who knows what we'll have next PyWeek... Anyway, check out Squirtle.

According to the rules page:

Judging will be done in three categories rated 1-5:

• Fun
• Innovation
• Production (graphics, sound, polish)
• Overall

Gold, silver and bronze awards will be given for each category.

Do these gold, silver and bronze awards get recorded anywhere? It seems like it would be nice to have some more recognition for those games which didn't win, but did make an impression in one category or another. Perhaps a little button or banner that people could add to their websites, advertising these awards.

In anticipation of the competition, I've done a final release of Squirtle, our SVG mini-library for Pyglet. This fixes a few bugs which were found since the last release. I'd recommend that all users upgrade. You can find the new version here. As usual, I'd appreciate any bug reports. If you find anything during Pyweek, please let me know, and I'll do my best to fix things. Just send all reports, along with relevant SVG files to martin@supereffective.org.

Oops. We really did mean to make more diary entries this time around, and here I am on day six, making our first. We've pretty much finished the main coding parts of our game, and we're going to spend the next day and a half polishing, designing levels, and recording sound and music. To whet your appetites, here's a screenshot. It's not a diving game, honest.

Well, with the new uploading system we really did work right down to the wire: I had to hit the enter key halfway through typing my final commit message in order to get it in before the stroke of one. As ever, there's plenty we wish we'd had more time to fix, but as far as we can tell, we've managed to put together a playable, somewhat polished and hopefully even fairly fun game.

The Space Adventures of Digby Marshmallow, Space Burglar Extraordinaire ...In Space! is a puzzle action game chronicling the exploits of its eponymous hero across eighteen levels and six different worlds, as he struggles to fill his swag-bag with precious treasures while remaining tethered to his even more precious oxygen supply. It features some really rather nice SVG artwork and a lively ragtime soundtrack. Here's a preview:

Now it's time to get some sleep; we look forward to checking out everyone else's entries in the days to come!

It's becoming apparent that some people's experience of our game is inducing motion sickness, if you suffer from motion sickness please run the game in windowed mode (change it in options and then restart the game). If you still feel nauseous then you probably should stay clear of it, sorry :-(.

Thanks everyone for a great competition. The standard of games was once again excellent, which is good as it means the competition is stronger. I will admit a shred of disappointment that we didn't win, but we can never really improve unless we are challenged can we? Besides I'm still somewhat delirious about our 4.83 average production score! Seriously, I never expected anything so much. :-)

Also thanks everyone for playing our game, especially those of you who were brave enough to carry on once nausea started to set in ;-). I'm sure the motion sickness thing did not do our "fun" rating any favours, I guess that's a lesson learnt: the players have to be physically capable of playing the game.

Congratulations to the winners and to everyone really. This writing a game in a week thing is not easy but its extremely rewarding. Now we can settle back for seven months, honing our skills for next time...

Oh, and a special congratulations to Gondola and Mr Fuze: loved 'em both!