fydo.net

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.

Game Dev

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.