After a few false starts I finally got something working around about day three. The kind of game I decided to make was a top-down scrolling shooter. I was a bit dubious about this as I have tried this style for other games, and pygame just seems to go awfully slow with it. However once I got a tiled background and could place objects over the top I could see the game was running fine. Hooray!

As for the setting - it sounds a bit generic, but i think it works well - you are zooming around inside a giant space vehicle, which is divided up into different floors, or decks. There is the fire deck, the steam deck and the main deck. All the action takes place on the main deck, with different machines venting power up from the steam deck. Normally this works fine, but as Murphey's Law will have it, things go wrong. A malfunction in the machines causes some of the normally happy worker drones to turn mad, acting violently towards some of the more vital parts of the ship's mechanisms. First of all, the ventilation system goes kaput: so as steam is draws into the main deck, it's trapped and starts building up the pressure - cooking everything inside. All you can do to prevent this is manually vent the deck from dedicated control points.

Also, drones are continually produced up on deck and will fire on anything that still functions. Dangerous! Now, while these droid producing factories are active, they channel resources away from the main doors so travel between rooms is impossible.

So to get out of the room you are stuck in you need to take out the bad guys, get to the machine that makes them and destroy it. Sounds easy? Well, once the machine is destroyed an open shaft to the steam deck continually pumps the room full of scalding steam. Now, there are a few of these factories in each room, so soon steam is billowing in and you must run back to the vent system to manually release the pressure to survive.

That's basically it. Running from room to room shooting everything that is against you, while trying to survive against the hazards.

At the moment all there is besides the tiles and walls is a little copter that flies around. Time to add some enemies I think! Got the spawn points working and added steam to them, as well as a ventilation system to save you from being overrun with steam. Also, I put some shields in which you can move through, but the bad guys have to shoot them down to get past. The enemies are pretty stupid (they're not designed to be smart) but still produce interesting behaviour.

Phew!

On top of that, add a few animated explosions for death animations, projectiles and random events to mix it up. The temperature guage at the moment is just the red rectangle on the bottom right. Very crude, but effective.

Then add the ability to pause, a crude level editor, the ability to switch between levels and restart levels, death and game over and a unique scroll-over menu system.

We're looking more and more like a real game, baby!

Ok, well at the moment there is only one-and-a-half levels and no sound. Hopefully I can get these fixed by submission time. If anyone could recomend some sounds that may be used for the purposes of pyweek, that would be fantastic.

Well, I'm really happy with what I've got so far, and from the look of the other screenshots everybody is doing really well. Congratulations! This is certainly the best Pyweek since the last!

The final time is here already. Luckily what I have at the moment is playable and quite fun. On the down side, much of what I hoped for isn't included.

What I do have for you is two levels of steam-powered mayhem, where you live and die by your actions.

What i don't have, but would like to add in the future (post-pyweek) is a more intricate menu, splash screens, more detailed objects and, of course, more levels.

For now, however, I hope you enjoy playing what i guess i will have to call Untitled II. (see pyweek 1 for the original Untitled)

As an aside, while on the topic of the first pyweek, I'm sure I'm eligible for the title of 'most improved,' since i ranked second last. It was well deserved, though, and from it i learned much about time management.

Relating to the current game, I haven't been able to test it on anything other that windoze xp, so I'm expecting a range of bugs to come through. Please, if you have any trouble e-mail me smokin_josh@hotmail.com and I will fix it and repost the game. Thanks.

Also, if you feel daring, take a look at the level files and see if you can make your own levels! I'm more than happy to add your content in :)

Well, thats about it. All I can do for the immediate moment is to sit back and wait for the inevitable bugs and crashes. Hopefully windows users should be fine, and I've included a py2exe'd build for you to play as well.

Happy Steaming!

Thanks for everyone on the net who posts their art and music for public use.

I have used tiles and graphics from the Lost Garden www.lostgarden.com

Music and sound came from the Partners in Rhyme www.partnersinrhyme.com

Thanks guys. I couldn't have done it without you!

Sorry for calling the upload pyweek06, It makes it really hard to identify. Also having some problems with case sensitivity. Will fix asap.

Sorry for calling the upload pyweek06, it makes it really hard to identify. Also having some problems with case sensitivity. Will fix asap.