Beware the Droid!

Moonbase Apollo

A Pyweek 17 entry by Moonbase Apollo (mauve, arnav)

Take command of Moonbase Apollo's orbital shuttle and help the fledgling moonbase obtain supplies - and whatever else they might need you to do.

Windows Post-release release notes
Apparently there may be problems in the Windows package. I don't have a clean machine to test this on. It may help to install AVBin - maybe even drop c:\Windows\system32\avbin.dll into the unpacked directory. You may also need to cd into the same directory as run_game.exe before running it.

64-bit post-release release notes
If you are running 64-bit Python but have lepton installed from a distro or a previous Pyweek, the particles will probably come out wrong. Flickery particles or weird cross-shapes in the explosions are symptoms of this. I found and fixed more 64-bit bugs in Lepton during this competition. The updated version is in the package or my lepton repo.

Any information or bug reports would be appreciated; please leave a message in the comments below.

Awards

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Scores

Ratings (show detail)

Overall: 3.7
Fun: 3.7
Production: 4.2
Innovation: 3.2

17% respondents marked the game as not working.
Respondents: 14

Files

File Uploader Date
moonbaseapollo-1.0.1.zip — final
Windows Binary 		mauve 2013/09/08 22:44
droid-day7.png
Beware the Droid! 		arnav 2013/09/08 00:33
moonbase_apollo.zip — final
Moonbase Apollo 1.0.0 		arnav 2013/09/08 00:10
day6-3.png
Debris field 		mauve 2013/09/07 00:20
day6-2.png
Deploying a satellite 		mauve 2013/09/07 00:19
day4-3.png
Mining some metal 		mauve 2013/09/05 01:29
day4-2.png
Giving a friend a lift to work 		mauve 2013/09/05 01:28
day1-4.png
Blasting rocks into chunks 		mauve 2013/09/02 00:10
day1-3.png
Tractor Beam 		mauve 2013/09/02 00:09
day1-1.png
Moonbase 		mauve 2013/09/02 00:08

Diary Entries

Moonbase Miner - Day 1

mauve on 2013-09-02 00:34

We've made excellent progress today after a late start. Though we had brainstormed we hadn't really decided on a game idea beforehand this time so it was 12 hours into the contest before we finally had something workable.

Having been ambitious in the last couple of Pyweeks we decided to change strategy and pick a much simpler game idea this time around, something that will let us get a good solid game under our belts early on and leave plenty of time for tweaking and making it fun.

This seems to have worked well because progress has been rapid today. We quickly knocked up some basic asteroids-style graphics and physics:



I spent a while working on a tractor beam, which behaves like a damped spring:



Meanwhile Arnav worked on bullets, and ejecting the loot from the asteroids:



I'm missing the final day of the competition for a wedding, so it feels great that we're well ahead of schedule so early on.

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Moonbase Apollo - Day 6

mauve on 2013-09-07 00:28

Pyweek is over for me as I'm at a wedding tomorrow. Arnav will continue tomorrow, to add new missions and tweak and balance the game.

I've not diarised as much this week because we have had less visible progress to show without giving the missions away. We decided to work on creating missions first, with visual effects, menus and sounds coming later, so that we wouldn't run out of time with a pretty but unplayable game.

Despite the problems people had installing Lepton last Pyweek I've gone with Lepton again, but it's now a soft dependency, so if it isn't importable the game will mock it out and you just won't see any particles. There's a better chance I'll be able to get the game running on Windows and do a py2exe port too. Lepton provides our thrust effect:



And this debris field that makes the explosions much more fun:

1 comment

Moonbase Apollo - Day 7

arnav on 2013-09-08 00:40

Day 7 of PyWeek always feels like a very long day, but it is also the most fun. This time we did a lot of work early on, and so today I focussed most on ironing out the edges and bug fixing. I also added a fun mission featuring a "Droid gone berserk"...



Hope everyone likes our effort this time.

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Lepton on Linux

arnav on 2013-09-13 10:58

If you are facing problems trying to install Lepton on Linux, try installing these dependencies first (from Lepton README):

  • python-dev (if not already present)
  • xorg-dev
  • libg11-mesa-dev
  • libglu-mesa-dev
  • libxext-dev

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