fydo.net

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.

I made these traditional-looking game pieces for a friend of mine, Treeform, for use in an online boardgame that he is making (I think it is somewhat RISK-like) but you can use them for your game if you like! These images are licensed under the Free Art License. Enjoy!

Download these sprites: game-tokens.zip

As of today, registration for Pyweek is now open! Tell your friends and family! I am, of course, planning on entering again. In case you missed it on their website, the competition runs from April 1st to the 8th. Yay!

For those of you eagerly awaiting the release of my moon buggy game, called buggyGame, It seems to have developed a slight case of feature-creep. I’m hoping to have it ready for general consumption soon.

Also, I’d like to mention that I am completely enjoying the new Sam and Max episodes from Telltale Games. I think they’ve done a wonderful job of bringing the old classic back to life again and anyone who was a fan of the classic Lucasarts Sam and Max game should try at least one episode.
… and no, they didn’t pay me to say that.

As you can tell by some of my recent entries, I’ve been busy with 30-minute drawing competitions. They’re a lot of fun.

And as for bigger news, I’ve entered the Ludum Dare game development competition warm-up (Ludum Dare 8.5) where entrants are required to create a full fledged game within 24 hours over this past weekend. The competition is very similar to Pyweek, with the exception (of course) that you don’t get a whole week.
The themes to choose from were ‘anti-textmode’ and ‘the moon’, so I created a moon buggy game where you must travel across the treacherous moon landscape in safety. It was the first time working by myself in a game development competition, so I’ve learned quite a bit about the process, and I’m very happy with the resulting game that came out of it.

I’ve still got some bugs to work out and some polish to add to my entry, after which I’ll be releasing it to the general public here.

Another Ludum Dare entrant created a web application, called Imageboard.net. I just wanted to mention it here, as it is absolutely hilarious and fun to use. Basically it’s an anonymous messageboard that deals not with text, but with small pixelated images. There’s even an option to play back an animation from the contents of a forum thread!

NOTE: I should warn that since the board is anonymous, some not-so-mature people post offensive things. So, please be careful when visiting.

Here’s an example of a thread I started that someone else responded to:

. . .

Have a great day, interweb people.