The Pyweek team I joined this time around, Hole in the Head Studios, received a 16th place standing overall in the Teams category. See the final results here. Looking on the bright side, our teams highest score was in the production category, and we ended up with the 9th highest production score in the Teams category. Not nearly as good as I’ve done in the past, but certainly better than nothing.

In my opinion, the reason we received mostly low scores was because our team’s idea was overly ambitious for only a week of development time. They wanted a full-fledged isometric Real-Time Strategy game, with nearly a dozen races to choose from. In the end, our submitted entry was minimally playable, and players didn’t get to see many of the other races available. It wasn’t from lack of trying, though! The lead programmer in our team actually was sick on the last day from staying awake for too long. Yikes!

After taking the first couple days of Pyweek off to get married, I spent the remaining days working solely on unit graphics for the different races. All in all, I completed 4 races for the game, plus a few extras. On the left you can see one of my favorite units, the “Frostlen Captain”, in action!
You can download the game and take a look at the resources to see them all if you’re really curious. I’m looking into making a nice page for them and releasing them under a free license for everyone to use.

EDIT: I also want to add a quick message to everyone: If you haven’t yet tried Disk Field, go do it! It’s super fun and totally fulfills the theme, too! The game totally deserves the first place it received!

I recently added buggyGame to the pygame.org game registry. It has received the following comments:

“Funny game! Good art.. And the music is superb. Did you make it yourself?” – Jasper Stolte

“HAHA! That was great! … AWESOME. That is what Pygaming is all about!” – Kurt Dekker

“Ahahaha! This is a blast… I’m still playing it an hour later… Oh noes!” – Shaun Cordingley

It appears that people are enjoying the game! Hooray! Perhaps this will motivate me to make more levels for it.

Also, if you haven’t yet tried it, you can download the game right here!

Well, since the pyweek website is currently down at the moment (and looks like it will be that way for a little while) I figured now would be a good time to publicly release my Ludum Dare warmup entry, buggyGame.

I still want to improve it a little bit, add more levels and clean up the code. I figured in the meantime, everyone might enjoy it. So, have fun. Let me know what you think.

Yay! Pyweek results are in!

My team (Fluffy Menace) received 3rd Place overall in the team category. We also tied for 1st Place for Production ratings. Interestingly enough, the other team that is tied for 1st in Production is The Olde Battleaxe, who I worked with in my spare time during the competition. They recently released a Deluxe version of their game, and it’s looking great.

For those not in the know, the following is in regards to my recent entry to Pyweek, entitled Up the Chain of Evolution. I worked in a team of three, with Richard and JDruid. Richard did the majority of the coding, JDruid handled all the music and some of the sound effects, and I was responsible for all of the art files and the majority of sound effects.

First off I’d like to give a huge thanks to Richard, not only for being a great teammate, but for organizing everything and making Pyweek possible. (JDruid, you rock too )
I’m amazed that he managed to not only code up the game in a week, but also find a job, get accepted for the job AND shop for machines that wash things.

Things started off quite well, I think. The first day was a bit of a write-off, as I spent my time making a bunch of graphics, but finding out the next day that they weren’t really the style we were going for.
I managed to finish almost all the in-game art by around wednesday/thursday.

I really didn’t know what to do at this point, but knew that one thing we were lacking was a strong connection to the theme (The only way is up), so I decided to try my hand at making a real-time cinematic cutscene/intro for the game. First, just to test things out (and ensure it would work with richard’s existing code) I made a funny little team logo animation using just straight Python + pygame.

Richard took some time out of his busy schedule and updated my code for the logo sequence to work with pyOpenGL and the texture classes he had made. I learned much from this, and used my newfound knowledge to code up the main menu screen.
(I’m really hoping someone noticed the awesome effect on the main menu screen with the moving stars in the background )

Then I began on the story cutscene… first I wrote up a little script (the original is on the fluffymenace googlecode wiki if you’re interested) and then recorded the voiceovers. I think I did a pretty good ‘movie voice guy‘ impression for the voiceovers )

For those who were wondering: yes, the narrator and the scientist are *supposed* to have very similar voices. You know, for comedic effect.
After this I started making the textures for the story cutscene and coding everything up. I did have some plans for things that didn’t quite make it. For instance, take a look at the scene2.png texture in the data directory, you’ll see a little rocket and smoke puff there that was going to be flying past the window in the second scene.

JDruid‘s music really added a lot to the intro (actually the entire game!) and he also improved (by quite a bit) a couple of the in-game sound effects too.

Anyways, I had a lot of fun on this project, and I’m totally looking forward to playing everyone else’s games. YAY PYWEEK!

– fydo

P.S. Also, you might have noticed that I have released all the art for the game under the Free Art License, so I’d be curious to see what other uses for the game art you might come up with (let me know) I’ll likely have some or most of it here on my website in the near future.

P.S.S. Whenever I needed a little break from working on Evolution, I spent some time in the #toba channel working with their team on their game, which was then known as ‘Barbie Seahorse Adventure‘ (which I think is a totally cooler name)
I contributed the original art for the little fireball guy that you can find on the volcano levels (it’s been improved by someone else on the team). I also contributed a level which you can see as the first volcano level.
I think their game turned out really well, and I’m proud to be a part of it too.