PyWeek Diary Entries

Networking Tutorial Progress

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:06:35 -0600

My networking tutorial is coming along. If you're interested in making a network-aware game, please read it (and give me feedback)
sjbrown's Guide to Writing Games
-- sjbrown of Eyebrows Are Attractive

Just entered PyWeek September 2008!

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:47:17 -0600

Just got back from the Nozstock festival, which was about the best of any I can remember. Feeling a bit knackered, and can't write much code. Instead, I've just entered the compo for September 2008. Hurray!

I'm working on a hobby project which requires me to get to grips with game programming technology. I'm using Pyglet 1.1. I'm having to write my own game engine, and PyWeek is a way of testing that engine (as well as pointing up my lack of game design expertise).

My plan is to release the library a month before the start date, to comply with the rules. By my reckoning, that means on or before 7th August.

The library is called GEFFA (Good Enough For a First Attempt), and will be published under GPL version 3. Here's what's working so far:

homogeneous coordinates
resource file loader
camera control
debug console

So, the work I've got left before August is

animation framework
simple shading effects
documentation

I wouldn't be surprised if my PyWeek entry ends up being a bit lame, but if it gets some testing for GEFFA, I'll be happy. Best get on with it then...

-- tundish of Tundish

CompoGameLoader

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:41:20 -0600

I didn't know where to post this, so I made it a diary page. Also posted at LudumDare. Over the last few days I've been working on a program to manage the playing and judging of games during the competition. I've reached the beta stage and need your help. Here is the full link - http://keeyai.com/2008/07/16/compo-game-loader/ - please give it a read.
-- keeyai of MUA

Assembly Line 0.5 - Post-Comp Pre-Pyggy Release

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:57:06 -0600

I have uploaded a new version of Assembly Line. As a potential Pyggy entry, I'm keen to get some testing and feedback on it.

This version is greatly expanded. Some of the new features include:

More machine types and enhanced machine functionality
Simulation of a market that's buying your products
Multiple factories
Extensive reports showing what's going on with sales and finances
Sales and profit targets to aim for, and salary raises to seek after

Note that not all the products and machines are available at once now. The new machines will become available as the game progresses (about one every two months of game time) and you need to spend money to research new products.

I still haven't done much playtesting or balancing -- I've verified that the Phunky Phrisbee, Mojo Mallet and Supa Slice can be manufactured and sold at a profit, but I don't know about the others yet.
-- gcewing of Assembly Line

Dancing Block 2.0 release

Wed, 07 May 2008 04:28:51 -0600

Thank you for your care and play.

I hope that, you will like it.
-- milker of Sea War

Gamasutra: "How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days"

Wed, 07 May 2008 01:34:13 -0600

This article is chock-full of advice for everyone :)

Read it.

Bookmark it.

Return to it before the next PyWeek :)
-- richard of Flat Bot

Continuing Development

Thu, 01 May 2008 17:28:05 -0600

As we've said before, it will probably be a while before the next Robot Underground release. However, you can now follow development at our website, www.supereffective.org.

We also have Windows and Mac binaries of the latest release, so if you've been having trouble getting things to run up until now, or you'd like to share Robot Underground with your less Python-inclined friends, now you can.

-- Martin of Robot Underground

Dancing Block 1.5 (Keybroad Support)

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:51:44 -0600

Dancing Blocks 1.5

Add Keybroad Support. ^^

-- milker of Sea War

Plans for further SMASHING...er, I mean DEVELOPMENT

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:20:35 -0600

Here is a rough outline of some future plans for Customer Service ROBOT!

More building types
Cars and Airplanes (Zach already drew graphics)
Make the lasers work.
- Do damage to buildings and burn trees
- Display a beam of light (using the quad code Brian wrote)
Customer log.
- Record a list of all the customers you have helped
- and an ui for viewing it
Body upgrades
- New legs (faster walking?)
- New arms (faster smashing, other animations?)
- New heads (different eye-lasers)
- New torsos (different ...?)
- New antennae (different navigation tools)
Alternate navigation tools
- ThermoNav - Display "Hot" or "Cold" depending on whether you are getting closer or further from the customer (disrupted by power plants and refrigerated warehouses?)
- MagnetoNav - Periodically recommend N, S, E, W (disrupted by iron foundries?)
- EchoNav - report distance from customer in nautical miles, but not direction. (disrupted by aquariums?)
- SataliteNav - (similar to current navigation) Show precise direction to the customer (disrupted by cell-towers?)
- PigeonNav - A pigeon flies back and forth between you and the customer (undisruptable!)
- www.map.nav - A modal map of the city showing your position and the customer's position. Can't move while looking at it.

Also, nobody has reported any further information about the crashes on Windows. I hope that means that we already solved them in the last update ;)
-- Bob the Hamster of Jazaian

Dancing Block (post pyweek#6)

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:19:37 -0600

It is a post pyweek#6 game.

You will like it.
Now: it require a dancing-pad.

:) it will support keybroad, later.

Project Home: http://code.google.com/p/wormstory/
-- milker of Sea War

Robot Underground 1.0.4

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:09:21 -0600

Another release!

Mostly bugfixes this time around, although there are a few little content tweaks, and an extra super-secret weapon, which I'm sure all you RU completists will want to try out.

The big change in this release, from a development standpoint, is that we've included a lot more logging, to help with balance issues. As such, it would be really great if you could send us copies of your savegames. Eventually we'll have an automated system for this, but for now, we'd appreciate having copies of your save/game0.sav, etc. emailed to savegames@supereffective.org. Only savegames from this version (or later) are useful, so don't worry about old savegames. However, we're particularly interested in receiving savegames from people who had trouble with the game, or who didn't really enjoy it.

Anyway, enough talk, here's Robot Underground 1.0.4.

-- Martin of Robot Underground

I love you, HanClinto

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:30:59 -0600

For whom it might concern: I uploaded a recent windows binary here. It is far slower than running the code directly through python, but hey, it's Windows, so I'm not surprised.

Many thanks to HanClinto and his auto-exe-script. I suppose that Richard is allready aware of the problems with skellington's setup.py, but I found that it was not able to run it from its current directory, and had a buggy handling of many-levelled subdirectories in data/. I merged Clinto's script with setup.py and made some smaller modifications to address this; feel free to check it out in the SVN repository!

This about concludes it for this time, but the Ghetto Viking Killer Robot is not dead! We might just show up for the Pyggy awards. Check out the SVN repository regularly to see our progress. See you!
-- j-1 of Ghetto VIking: The prophecy

library before challenge

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:14:26 -0600

I am sorry,I want to ask another question:

some people can use some library, that create before the challenge, and some people cann't.

Why they can? why the cannot??

-- milker of Sea War

PyWeek judging idea

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:04:26 -0600

Some issues came up this last PyWeek:

Two people appeared to abuse the ratings system,
Not all games were rated an equal number of times,
There should have been DNW ratings when there weren't, and
There should have been DQ flags when there weren't.

To this end, I'm two changes:

Allowing comments to be posted against games, even outside the judging period, and
Altering judging to have it be performed by a smaller group of people. Each person would rate a smaller number of games, and we'd make sure that each game was rated by someone using each of the three major platforms.

Thoughts?
-- richard of Administrivia

"gather" update and postmortem

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:37:16 -0600

Wow, I'm honored and humbled by the responses to "gather". I had fun and will be back for sure. The pyweek upload system is giving me trouble, so if you want the most recent versions of the game (the post-pyweek release) at my personal site. There really aren't many changes. I fixed the level-end crash bug and added survival mode and a conversion animation so the moment of conversion is a little more obvious.

src : http://static.adambachman.org/games/gather-2008-04-24_src.zip
Windows .exe : http://static.adambachman.org/games/gather-2008-04-24.zip

On with the postmortem...

What I think went right:

All sound and graphics were from somewhere else. This is not for everyone, but besides some minor tweaking to shrink file sizes (cutting music into smaller loopable chunks and increasing compression), I didn't have to do anything to make the media work. That saved a ton of time for tweaking gameplay.
Start with big ideas, cut mercilessly. This was originally going to be an RPG/story based game with a sci-fi story running through everything. Didn't happen. There was going to be flocking, heatmaps, procedural content and other complex algorithmic stuff, but I found that I didn't have the chops to bring it together in one week. So I cut everything that wasn't necessary for playing and added back just enough to make it finished. I came very close to ignoring levels, score keeping, and the whole little HUD thing, but managed to slip them in on Friday.
Standing on the shoulders of giants. From the first moment I opened my editor, pygame and the Splush package meant I could see something happening. I'd never used the pygame Sprite library before this week, but it came easily once I got started. Not having to ever worry about collision algorithms alone was worth the learning curve. Feedback is key to keeping up my motivation, so being able to rely on other people's tools meant almost all my own changes were high level, substantive changes that actually effected the way the game played instead of rewriting a framework.
Polish. Little changes add together for big effects. Little changes are also easier to get right than big changes. Most of Friday and Saturday were spent polishing. With only one week to design and develop, I'm including bugfixes in the category of polish.

What needs improvement:

Barking up the wrong tree. Wednesday was a total day off, no game code touched, because I almost burned myself out Tuesday trying to lever a trigonometry based flocking algorithm into an 8-way movement system. On top of the fact that I've never written boids code, I tried to retrofit it into what I already had. This resulted in pretty much a day and a half wasted. I could've been more merciless in feature cutting on that one.
No practice or preparation. I promised myself I would try writing a game in the weeks leading up to pyweek. FAIL. This didn't kill me in the week of the comp, but it meant I had to learn as I went. Related to this, I would've liked to figure out in advance what I could rip out of Splush to avoid mental clutter. In general, I wish my tool use abilities had been a little more honed getting into the week of coding.

All in all, I enjoyed it making and playing the game, and I'm glad some other folks did too. I hope to do a small set of tutorials while pulling the game apart and re-writing most of it. At this point I can't imagine adding features without coming at it fresh. I think there's potential here, but I don't envision turning this into a power-up heavy 2D action shooter. I like the design constraints of a five-minute casual shooter, so I think whatever changes, it'll still be pretty much the same game.

Huge thanks to Richard and everyone else involved for keeping pyweek rolling, I look forward to 7!

-- abachman of gather

C.A.T.B.O.T. says "Thank you!" hummm

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:52:24 -0600

Looking at the ratings for all of zK's Pyweek entries, I'd conclude that our games become more innovative while production goes up and down. And with each Pyweek we make less fun games! ;)

(Ok, you shouldn't compare ratings from different Pyweeks, but it's fun to speculate about the quality of our (hypothetical) next game.. Less fun, more innovation and better production?))

I guess logo-like games arent't for everyone (especially after one week of programming? ^^), so I'd say we did fine this time. Now, to summarise Pyweek 6 for us:

Good:

I learned a lot (again). C.A.T.:B.O.T. has the most complex interface I ever made (and the worst and buggiest too - I'll use my lack of experience and patience as an excuse), so I found it hard not to learn anything new.
Zahme improved his pixel art (esp. for UI elements).
The game feels complete (although it needs some fine-tuning and fixes).

Bad:

I think we were a bit slothful during the first days
A lot of bugs creeped in during the last days as I hastily squeezed new (vital!) features into the game.
Some bugs remained in our final submission - probably new bugs were added during last-minute bug fixing.
I suspect the game doesn't run on Pygame 1.8 because of something pygsear does and I still didn't have time to fix this (yet).
The click-on-empty-macroline crashbug is just embarrasing and sorry for all the flickering stuff.

A new version of C.A.T.:B.O.T. (with less bugs) and a Windows .exe will be uploaded soon..... All in all, we had a lot of fun and we really enjoyed playtesting the other games, too. Mostly. ^^

I could list all the stuff we want to do/learn until next Pyweek, but that would be exactly the same as last time. Maybe we'll get around to it this time.. The only addition would be that we shouldn't do another puzzle-game next Pyweek. We already have three - it's about time to try something new. Anything.

So, thanks and hope to see you next time!
-Serval

PS: Btw, our game was indeed inspired by a mini-game in The Lost Mind of Dr.Brain.

Oh, and C.A.T.B.O.T. says to Zahmekoses: "Thank you for making me myself!" :)

-- ServalKatze of C.A.T.:B.O.T. - Cat Academy of Technology: Beyond ODS' Techdog [by Team zahmeKatzen]

Robot Underground 1.0.2

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:44:30 -0600

Here it is, our first post-pyweek release. There've been a lot of cosmetic changes and I don't know what they are anymore but I'll mention some key differences here:

Item names are more interesting than they used to be.
The inventory menu is new and improved.
Targeting enemies is easier now.
Balance has been tweaked.
We added a new weapon. :-)
A million little things.

Basically, it works better now. Feel free to post feedback to this diary. Our next release (a couple of months away I would estimate) will be a massive content upgrade.

Get it!

-- Chard of Robot Underground

Bot Builder 2000 Post Mortem

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:20:58 -0600

Well, I really feel that I accomplished the goal I had set at the beginning - a working game at the end. Next pyweek I intend to be a bit more ambitious, but since it was a first crack at python for my teammates I feel we did really well.

Having said that, the scores were not quite as high as I was expecting, but after I read the comments I felt better. Disregaurding the several 1,1,1 - apparently did not work but they didn't check the DNW box - type ratings might put the numbers right where I would expect them.

Most of the issues people encountered we were already aware of, just ran out of time to do any gameplay balancing at the end. I'll have to make sure and save a day for that next time

So now for the standard-ish response to specific feedback:

I'm impressed. A complete game that follows the theme and works without fiddling!

Thanks!

it is hard.

Actually, it's far too easy. I had a hard time too at first (level 2 was too tough), but once you get the hang of it there's unfortunately very little challenge.

Very nice job on the game! It was quite a bit of fun, and though I had to read the README to learn how to play, it was a real blast once I got the hang of it! I got to level 7 before I even started to get a little bored, and I continued on to level 9 just to see if there was any more of the storyline to be revealed. All told, very well done! :) I liked the premise -- it was cute. The graphics and music were very good, and I *really* liked how smoothly the gripper-hand moved -- timing the placement of the hand is a pretty good strategy element, and so it's fun to optimize. You guys did a good job of balancing the game and not making it too hard or too easy -- well done!

Yes, next time I'm going to aim to have a tutorial so it's not necesarry to read the readme to figure out how to play. We weren't really happy with the lack of intuitiveness of what to do when the robot is complete either, but we will be fixing that in a post pyweek version. (there were just a few things that we really just can't let stand in whatevr final version it comes to)

It didn't work: IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'data/story01.png'

Ok, then please rate it DNW instead of the 1,1,1 you gave it :P (if you'd checked my bug diary entry or the wiki you'd have found this was trivial to fix)

Hey, guys: you should make clear which version of pyglet you're using :) I forgot to set up the path with pyglet1.0 and it worked quite bad.

Sorry. I didn't bother including that because pyglet 1.1 is supposed to be backward compatible! That'll teach me to just assume it works as documented :)

I couldn't select an option @ menu. Linux user.

That's odd. You did try using the mouse didn't you? (there's no keyboard support in menu besides the esc key).

this type of game just isnt fun at all for me.

Fair enough, me neither :D. I believe the main demographic for this game type is middle aged women.

The game don´t work, but i don´t know why! I am a graphic artist.

Surely there was a stack trace? I hear python provides those even for graphic artists.

Creative and pretty fun!

Good, we were hoping it'd be fun :)

Well done. I played through to level 12. Things should speed up as you go along!

Agreed. We didn't have time to balance gameplay. Ideally it should eventually get impossibly hard - either that or at some point you "win".

Odd: The game seems to get easier with each level you reach. But I bet younger ones will have fun with this game.

Yep. Post pyweek release will get harder w/ each level. . . somehow.

Decent game but not my style, not nearly enough challenge

Actually, I expected more of this sort of reaction; didn't figure there'd be a lot of overlap between the people that liked this sort of game and the types who think writing a game is fun.

Good game, well designed , decent gameplay

:)

Interesting concept. I'd like to see more balance to the gameplay though -- waiting for parts just doesn't pay off very well. A suggestion: the ability to pick up a piece and put it back down without having to build it on something. Would add a 'conveyor management' element of gameplay so you keep the parts around you want to work with, allowing faster conveyor belt speed and more action for the user.

Actually, you can put the piece back down on the conveyor, or drop it in the recycle. The tough part is you have to find enough space on the conveyor because you can't overlap pieces. Turning up the conveyor speed would actually have the side effect of having more empty space for putting pieces down on, so I'll try that and see how it feels. The other option is generating random parts slower.

Kinda tough to control. Took a while to figure out that I could place the stuff back on the conveyor because sometimes it wouldn't let me.

Yea, I chose to not let pieces overlap on the conveyor - I think mostly because it looked better. Maybe the gameplay suffers for that, I'm not sure.

File "C:\Users\saluk\Downloads\pyweek6games\BotBuilder2000-1.1\lib\credits.py", line 20, in __init__ self.textList.append(pygletfont.Text(self.font, line, x = 800 / 2, y = sy, halign = pygletfont.Text.CENTER)) ... File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/pyglet/text/layout.py", line 854, in _get_left TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for //: 'NoneType' and 'int'

We seem to have quite a few crashes related to the fonts on the credit screen, but all the stack traces are different (I deleted the other two because they were lengthy). And I haven't seen it on any of our machines, so it's going to be hard to fix. I wonder though if it has to do with the pyglet version. . .

Got the game to work by deleting the halaign argument. The game ran really slow, and clicking on parts didn't seem to work very well (sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.)

We didn't get to spend any time optimizing - I know it doesn't run very well on slow hardware.

Nice idea and story, but the game is not very challenging after all. Especially as you can get a negative bank balance, you could just build all robots by yourself by buying all parts - this could also be done fast enough to earn a lot of money in the end (especially as you get $5 per completed robot, while it only costs you $3 to construct one)...

yea, the $1 per part and $5 for sale was just what we started with and never did have a chance to find the right values. you're right though, there's little incentive to use the random parts when it's so cheap to just buy them.

A neat idea. Way to slow to play (hand moves like molasses) and it's rather boring. Great use of the theme, and nice story intro.

I'd kind of like to have a more integrated story next time, but thanks.

Fun: I played the first 4 levels with joy but after level 5 there wasn't enough challenge to keep me playing. Maybe you could made the time limit a little bit tougher or introduce a point limit the player has to reach. But so every level was as the one before but with more robots to build, which was initialy fun. Innovation: Nice idea to make a puzzle game where you have to construct robots out of different parts. Production: You have nice graphics and sound effects that does not become annoying. They fit very well. Also i encountered no bugs and the help in the README.txt did a good job. Overall: Nice game which was fun for the first levels.

Thank you. You've summed it up quite well I think
-- bjorn of Bot Builder 2000

Aerobotics: Feedback

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:08:06 -0600

Foreword

Well first off all let me express our appreciation to Richard for organizing this great challange from time to time. We've enjoyed working on this project even if we were very tired at the end.

Ratings

Yes, you're right: we came up with this idea for the Formation theme but we felt that it would fit the Robot theme more-or-less. Unfortunately we didn't have time for new ideas. In fact we didn't even have time for coding till wednesday.
There were speculations that we created the game before the competition. That's not the case. We simply felt that the idea fit both themes. We were wrong, sorry for that. :)
There were complaints about the game speed. Well that's really a strange issue. If the game runs slowly in fullscreen try to run in windowed mode (-w command line switch). We'll investigate in that matter.
Some of you found controlling a little hard. We admit: it's not easy. But if you knew we planned 5 by 5 formations... ;)
"Impossible to play with french keyboard": you're absolutely right. Unfortunately we couldn't figure out how to access the scancode of a keypress. That's why we planned to implement a keyboard calibration feature but we dropped it because lack of time. Nevertheless it's an important issue which we'll fix in the next release.

-- kukkerman of Aerobotics

Game to OLPC

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:04:18 -0600

I ported our game to OLPC[1], it can be download from http://humitos.homelinux.net/~humitos/robotfactory-1.xo

Instalation: unzip this file into ~/Activities directory

[1] http://laptop.org/
-- humitos of 10 Roboticists from Santa Fe

Wat happen?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:40:24 -0600

Uhh, now that I am sufficiently burned out of programming for the rest of my life, what with pyweek, and then ludum dare 11 (which i am fairly positive I spent more hours on than I did pyweek) I suppose I may as well see what I can learn from the experience. Those of us in the industry may call this brain dump a "post mortem". I call it blarfing.

I would say that I basically failed pyweek. I'm partially talking about the scores, but I think I would be more upset about the scores if I didn't agree with many of them. I made several large mistakes, and I'm sorry to say, most of them I have made before. I am going to print these out and post them in 100pt font on my wall.

Unclear vision - I took an idea that has been inside me for a game for years and tried to force it into the theme. This was a mistake for several reasons. First, the idea itself has never been clear. Something that takes years to form is probably not a good candidate for a time limit. Secondly, the idea never had anything to do with robots. Trying to force it into a robot game just looked bad. As a result, my game lacked spirit, and development was slow
Technology above means - Halfway through the week, I should have scrapped the code I had been working on and re-scoped the project. The skeletal animation system was a good idea, however it took the entire week to get right. In the future, I plan on having a timeline for anything I do, and a plan B if I can't get something working right. I attempted this for ludumdare, and while my process can still be improved, it worked MUCH better. To not at least attempt some new technology in a compo would be to miss an opportunity, but to sacrifice the game to a tech is just as bad. Attempt the impossible, but know when to move on!
Too ambitious - related to the above, but not the same. All in all, I am always too ambitious. I never try to make something simple, I always want to make the complete package. Whether working alone or with my friend, there just isn't a lot of manpower to realize what I can dream up. I think I could do much better if I could dream a bit smaller. Instead, I always manage to express in my games a small slice of what I meant to say, and the result is no one understands what I am going for.

Not to be too hard on myself or anything :) I am just tired of continually making the same mistakes. I think I would find the experience more rewarding and fun if I were less ambitious and not so technology focused.

Now to respond to a few comments!

"Seems like it could have used a bit more graphics and gameplay, but I liked the rock'em sock'em feel of it." - Glad someone liked it!
"incomplete." - True!
"Too hard!" - I get this response often. I usually balance for myself, which may make the games lean a little harder than they should (since I will have the most practice). Still, this feeling isn't unanimous:
"This was really well tuned in terms of difficulty - it was exceptionally fun to play and win. Sadly no replay value, but a very worthwhile endeavor." - so I guess it was well balanced for one other player.
"bad game ?" - you'll really have to give me more to go on here.
"Interesting grpahics style (still there is something missing to be great). Nice idea of making a fight game, but it is a bit too repetitive and movements are too slow to allow the player dodge properly (i.e., you get hit a lot even if you have fast reflexes)" - Graphics were mostly temporary from the beginning that I meant to update. Didn't have the time unfortunately. To dodge you have to hold the duck button down. I can win without getting hit if I am lucky, so there may be a timing issue on your computer
"I'm afraid I could not beat it even once :( But I like the way the robots move." - I think it's safe to say the animation worked, too bad it's all I've got.
"The robot looks neat but it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the scene." - Well they are meant to be giant robots that meet on the battlefield. I agree the art was not that good. No comments on the rest of the game?
"EXTREME" - TO THE MAX
"the skeletal animation was an interesting touch, but this entry didnt have much else going for it. i eventually beat it by tapping nothing but the space bar." - Yep, I didn't realize the game would be so hard for some other people because to me it seems crazy easy.
"jajajajajajaja...." - the rogue judge strikes again
"hahahaha" - the rogue judge's sidekick
"never had it for street-fighter games, and i had to take extra innovation points for not really using the theme." - I'd argue it is innovative in other areas. How does it not use the theme exactly?
"Not everyone uses qwerty keyboards, or like to use our left hands for movement, so supporting arrow keys would be nice. Also, being able to hit escape to quit is a good feature." - Noted. Multiple input options are a good thing!
"Fun for a while, but got bored fast." - At which point the game was SUPPOSED to hit you with the next cool thing. Oh well.
"WASD on my dvorak keyboard (,aoe) kept switching it to a red screen with the robot parts and weird behavior. If you're a dvorak user, switch it to qwerty to get the real gameplay." - Yeah, I hear you. In my ludum dare game I support wasd and arrows. Thanks for pointing this out.
"What's going on?" - Not really fair to rate 1/1/1 for not understanding a game. Next time please either ask for help or don't rate. This goes for playing other games as well, not just for me :)
"Good attempt, pretty amusing. Love the wacky robot hobble." - Lol. The hobble was the temp animation that was going to be replaced. At least someone enjoyed it.
"didnt like it" - I didn't much either.
"I liked the animations. The game was too hard, though." - Another too hard? Game balance is a beast.
"Well.. music and sound is nice but the game is rather unifnished. ;)" - I should have used the time I spent finding the sounds to rewrite the game.
"Nice game, although it is a bit too short - and nicer graphics would also have been.. um.. nice? ^^" - Well, I can't do much nicer graphics than these even if I try, but I could have made a better game, for sure. But I wasted time on silly things like graphics and animation.
"Ehhh .... too hard. Graphics need some work as well. The key bindings are also very awkward for this type of game - it's not an FPS. Try arrow keys and space bar in the future." - Alright already, control config is a must. This is the last bad rating I get for poor default controls!
"Cool skeletal animation, but the robots look like cardboard cutouts? Also the oversized FPS counter in the counter can be distracting. Is it possible to win? I keep getting hit with fireballs (I try to duck but it doesn't happen in time) " - It is possible to win actually, you have to hold the duck key to duck. It may be that there is a timing issue but I'm not sure. One thing you might not be doing is moving left - if you move left it gives you more time to duck or at least see the shots coming at you
"Fun: After several tries to defeat the boss i had to hacked myself 100 extra health and so i could kill him :) Playing was a nice 5 minute lasting fun. Innovation: Besides the skeletal animation thing there is no innovation. Production: The skeletal animation looks really good and is a nice feature in your game. Besides that the graphics are stylish programmers art. The only thing to do when defeating the boss or get killed is to start again (using [p]). That made me wonder a little. Overall: A funny shorty." - Glad you liked this experiment. Stylish programmer art is a compliment for me!

Finally, I think the final comment I received really sums up my game and how I feel about it very nicely:
"This game has real potential. With different selectable characters using the skelatal system differently you could really pull off an interesting robot battle game here. (I imagine making the skeletal weapons like punching the main tool of damage with powerups like lasers and airstrikes and stuff.) Unfortunately it seems like the engine for this took much of your time and limited what you were able to do. I think what you probably have in your head is awesome."
What I have in my head is quite possibly the most amazing thing that could ever exist. My hope is that in the next pyweek this will be more obvious :)

Ciao!
-- saluk of Super Street Fighter 10 Turbo Edition

Provide Excellent Customer Service Through SMASHING!

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:33:10 -0600

Thank you to everyone who played and voted! I really appreciated the feedback given by most of the voters. Lots of compliments for the art-style, so extra kudos go to our lean-mean-art-producing-machine Zach.

I have uploaded a re-release with a few post-pyweek improvements. I do plan to continue development on this game. Suggestions for increasing the dept of gameplay would be greatly appreciated.

Also, a few of you had problems with "pygame parachute" crashes on Windows. We haven't been able reproduce these crashes ourselves, but we would greatly appreciate it if anyone who can would let us know, so hopefully we can figure out why it happens.

Here are the new features in the post-pyweek re-release:

Doesn't crash if pygame.mixer.init() fails (actually, I wonder if that is what caused the pygame parachute errors?)
Tweaked the difficulty (caller impatience speed)
Play completion sound effects when you reach a caller
Display count of fatalities
Generate random customer names (many of which are awesome)
Fix block editor
make the README file not suck
Tested and working Windows installer and Mac app bundle

Oh, yes, and in response to your questions, no, it does not matter whether or not you smash buildings. The important part is EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE!
-- Bob the Hamster of Jazaian

Another web site comment

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:58:24 -0600

When you follow a link to a diary entry from the main page, it's not clear which team/game the diary entry relates to. You can find out by following the author link of the first comment, but it would be better to have the team and game name displayed prominently at the top somewhere.

More generally, everywhere a team or team member is mentioned, it would be useful to have the game name displayed beside it as well. It can be hard to remember which people and teams go with which games.

Also, I have a general feeling that the whole site layout is somewhat confusing and hard to find one's way around, although I'm not sure exactly what needs to be done about it.

I'm thinking the diary entries list is the wrong thing to have for the main page. The main page should have a definite look of "main-ness" about it, with large prominent links to all the other areas and a small amount of descriptive text letting you know about each one.

As it is, the site doesn't really seem to have a "main" page at all, which makes me feel a bit lost and wondering whether there are parts of the site that exist but I haven't stumbled upon yet.

Another thing that would be useful is a page that lists all the entries for a particular challenge, but without the full size screen shots, just small thumbnails of them. This would be faster to load and make it much easier to browse through the whole list.
-- gcewing of Assembly Line

Robosub Wrap Up

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:45:32 -0600

Thanks so much for all the great feedback on the ratings! I know this game didn't turn out to be "fun" (seriously, i thought it was unbelievably boring too!), but i am glad the important part, my attempt to capture the atmosphere, got through! What a fun pyweek. I wish my Ludum Dare piece was coming together as well, but i seemed to have been distracted by real world fun, and responsiblities. See everyone next time around! And next time i will spend more time on fun!
-- nikolajbaer of Robosub

Make Me: Post-competition release

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:47:03 -0600

Hey, we wanted to thank everyone for their great comments on our game, and to congratulate all the winners (yknow, everyone!).

We've put together a polished release of our game "Make Me", which we think addresses most of the comments brought up in the judging. Most of these we already knew about, and we've been working on fixing them this past week; but we also modified the game to address many respondents' complaints about the speed of the game and introduction to the blueprints screen.

I've uploaded source code and Mac OS X and Windows packages to my website at http://www.partiallydisassembled.net/make_me. The Mac OS X and Windows packages have no dependencies; the source code requires only Python and AVbin (pyglet's included).

This newer version features:

Many bug fixes, including graphics glitches on old and new cards, sound problems, memory leaks, collision bugs, and enemy A.I. bugs.
Saved games are now saved to disk.
A much larger world to explore, including some new robot parts to pick up with unique features.
Changes to the existing map to better introduce how to play the game.
Improvements to the menu interface to make the operation more clear.
Graphical improvements to some of the tiles.
Many new sound effects, and a new soundtrack.

We hope you enjoy this version of Make Me, and look forward to PyWeek 7!
-- alex of Make Me

Follow up

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:12:34 -0600

16 out of 29? Not bad, if I may say so; it is about what we expected. I'd like to thank everyone for their comments and suggestions. As you might have noticed/read in the wiki, the game was developed and tested on unix-like systems, so running it in Windows introduces some new bugs.

The following is a compilation of the bugs that you reported:

Fixed in SVN:
- Also , once you get past level 7 the list goes off the bottom.
- Crashes when I beat all cities above city 0.
- City 10 won't load either: Could not load song data\music\robot_ending_arr.ogg.ogg Couldn't read from 'data\music\robot_ending_arr.ogg.ogg'
- whenever i pressed left crtl, it would die saying it couldn't open data/images/bullet.png
- it crashed when try to show me the credits :(
Not fixed:
- The collision detection was glitchy, and I tended to snag on walls (We fought this beast for two days, and decided to leave it as soon as you could run through the levels in an (almost) non-spasmic manner.)
- It would also be good if you automatically could restart the level when you died (Never thought of that. Thanks)
- Make the game save your best times so that you could speedrun it as well (To much to do; to little time ;) )
- Addictive (This is a feature. Go to rehab if it gets worse ;) )

To download the latest version from svn, run the following command:

$ svn checkout http://ghettovikingprophecy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ghettovikingprophecy-read-only

If you like the music, please visit http://www.cp80.se for more.
-- j-1 of Ghetto VIking: The prophecy

Umm, weird...

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:54:40 -0600

What on earth? These have to be the weirdest rating I have ever seen.
Here follows a little rant, and some responses to comments:

With more entrants than ever - we only had 28 respondents?

This was our best game *ever* - yet we got pretty close to our worst score ever - approximately equal to our last entry which had zero game-play.

We had zero DQ's or DNW's - yet a sizable amount of our responses were 1/1/1 or "I did not understand the game", and "where were the robots?"... yet there were no DQ's/DNW's given!?!?

And our ratings were a huge roller coaster - we were given either a great score, or a really low one, but only a couple that were average from our respondents - and an awful lot of them were like "it's just a risk clone..." - so, why did you rank it so low for being a certain genre (it is not risk, and was actually inspired by a different game) - did you do that for all the platformers, or the rpgs, or...?

Also, it seems that several of the games got a lot of 1/1/1's with no DNW/DQ, but the top games only got those (if at all) with a DNW, so it didn't count to there score... I assume this the judging irregularity richard mentioned?

Some comment weirdness:
"It had a very intuitive control interface, and it was a joy to play" vs. "Couldn't figure out how to play":
First, I realize that most people don't like to read instruction screens before playing - but once you realized you didn't get it - couldn't you have read the ReadMe (which points to the ingame instruction screens)?

And now a response to most of the comments, or at least their general meanings:

"too long of load time made it unplayable":
Yes, we were planning on optimizing the map generation - but it isn't that bad - some of the other games were this way too, and I think the addition of random maps outweighs the long load time...

"Graphics needed work":
Which ones in particular? The tiles were planned that way from the beginning - and the units were done by DiamondGFX at the last minute, and are really nice.
The rest - yes, they could use some work.

"It is not really related to Robot":
How so? Did you look at the title, read the instructions or look at the units in-game? The game is about robot armies duking it out - not very innovative for the theme, perhaps, but definitely there...

"SFX for every battle were too long":
Yeah - those can get annoying, I was planning on shortening them to be better, and not wait at all if they were disabled, but no time :(

"Pretty good, really. Would be nice to be able to see a count of how many units are in each area - sometimes it's hard to count the robots. Could use some tweaking, and some prettying-up. Use pyglet and you could have the window dynamically resizable, which would've been nice. Not sure why there's such a huge chunk of the bottom bit taken over by black.":
The count of bots would have been nice - I never considered this really, thx :)
Tweaking? Always :)
Prettying up? Not sure where - the gui could have been nicer, and a few things laid out better, but if you mean the GFX style (except for the background ;) ), that was intentional.
You can make the windows dynamically resizable in pygame too - but that would have been unnecessary IMHO, jut change the settings in your options menu.
The big black area was going to hold a lot more gui elements when we added multiplayer - like a chatbox and stuff.

"I couldn't zoom because I don't have a scroll wheel, which made it more awkward to play that it should have been.":
Dang! I forgot about that, sorry. Will fix shortly ;)

"Cool ai":
Thanks, I'm really surprised how well it worked too.
We were planning that Markus would handle this - since he is really good at it, and I would do multiplayer.
It ended up opposite ;)
In the end, this ai was my first real one, and took only about 3 hours to do so I am very pleased :)

"Like TEG...":
Never played - but it looks like just a clone of Risk - which this is not - some of the more advanced features were cut to save time - which did make it look closer, it isn't actually IMO.

"It would be nice to be able to move 'some' but not all troops":
This was planned - but after some consideration I decided that it might take away some of the interesting parts of the game - that and there was no time to implement the gui, ai or rules to fit this.
Will probably be in a later version though.

"Couldn't win because it would crash":
We have been trying to find this crash since before we released - no clue why it is crashing - could you give us a traceback?

"Will you work further on this?":
Absolutely :D

A few hints on game-play, for those having difficulty:
Read the instructions!
Guard you capitols and factories always
Try and grab other capitols/factories early
Play as several players, ie "players = 7", "ai = 5" or something
Wait for the map to load!!!

Other than that, thx again richard and everyone for a great pyweek.
The nice game we have now is more than worth the headaches from the site crashing, or the md5 uploading, or the weirdness in the ratings.

Cya all next time, and congrats to the winners :D
-- RB[0] of HoleInTheHeadStudios-1.9

Ooops, seems I forgot to include the source.

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:54:44 -0600

Sorry everyone. In the mad dash for submission before the deadline it seems I forgot to include the source code. I apologise for breaking the rules of the challenge and have submitted the source should anyone want to look at it.

On a related note, from seeing that I only got 5% disqualification votes I think that disqualification votes should have higher weighting. As the entry broke the rules it should have been disqualified. But because most people didn't notice this it went through uncontested anyway. This should perhaps be looked at for future contests.
-- tinman of Splades Akimbo

Thanks for a great pyweek

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 10:53:41 -0600

Hi there,
PyWeek is over and it was better than the last one. Although i am a bit disappointed that my last entry did better than this time (which i wouldn't expected) i'm overall pleased. It was fun working out a design concept, writing the code and i even had time for gfx. Next time there will be also sound :)

Playing the other entries i often wondered, what good games were created in just one week.

So i hope, you had also as much fun as i had and that we meet again at the next PyWeek. I look forward to it!
-- Trobadour of CQ Robot

Thanks alot!

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 08:53:56 -0600

Thank you all for the feedback! I'm sorry for the bug that makes previously killed enemies disappear. There is a bugfix in the wiki. However, it is possible to complete the level without cheating. Just kill the top-right enemy first, then step backwards and the rest is settled. :)

There is actually only one level, and it was just my test level for the development. I did not have time to make a good set of levels. I have plans on making other types of traps and gadgets, like moving ground, user terminals, pre-programmed macros etc. It will be more fun when it's ready. :D

-- Johey of The Ultimate World Domination Challenge: The Story of a Serial Killing Robot Dancer

Thank You for your respondents

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:53:33 -0600

I think: the game's logic isn't easy understand. and the game need two player and two joystick, maybe isn't good for you.
But I enjoy it.

Thank you for your respondent.
P.S. I will care the diff type joystick setting in next game. ^^
and keep it easy control from us keybroad.
Thank you for report it cann't running in XP.
I just test it in my linux ( debian ) .
-- milker of Sea War

Assembly Line - Response to Feedback

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:50:43 -0600

First of all, thanks to everyone who gave this game a good rating. Considering it was less than half finished, I was fully prepared for it not to attract much interest. Getting 4s and 5s was an unexpected bonus!

I'd like everyone to know that I'mn still working on it, and there will be a much improved and more complete version available to try out soon. And if the Pyggy Awards get off the ground, it'll definitely be making an appearance there!

Instructions Several people seem to have missed the fact that there was a tutorial, despite it being mentioned in the readme file under "Running the Game". Perhaps I didn't mention it prominently enough... I guess it could be easily missed in the heat of judging.

Interface I know there are several things about the interface that need to be improved, and they will be.

Making the rest of the products Most of the products were dreamed up in about an hour on Sunday morning, and I didn't get time to even try manufacturing them. With the limited machine types available, some of them may well be impossible to make. There are several more machines I intend to add, which should help with that -- although I don't want to make things too easy!

Sound I know. I know. One of the many things that I ran out of time for.

Vertical Conveyors There is actually a way of rotating some types machine, but it's totally non-obvious and I didn't get around to documenting it: you press the R key while in the midst of positioning or dragging a machine. It should be possible to build vertical conveyors that way, although I haven't tested it much.

Bigger Factory I'm thinking about whether to allow the factory to be bigger than the screen and scrolling around in it. However, one of the ideas I have is to let you build multiple factories, and allow parts produced in one factory to be used as input to another. That would give you a way of effectively building a larger factory without the need for scrolling.

No Numeric for 2.5 Sorry about that -- I've been doing development with Python 2.3, and I hadn't realised that there were no Numeric builds readily available for 2.5. I'll see what can be done about making it work with numpy as well/instead.

Any further comments or suggestions are welcome!
-- gcewing of Assembly Line

9 Judges

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:36:51 -0600

Ouch, only 9 people judged our game? :(
-- keeyai of MUA

"Even Robots have Bad Dreams" Postmortem

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 01:02:05 -0600

Well, I was away for two weeks so I wasn't able to judge any of your games, but later I'll look at whatever looks interesting to me. There are some that really look nice.

A very short postmortem for my game. I had said that my three goals were simplicity, planning, and having fun. I failed on the first two due to enthusiasm, but I had fun, even though I almost gave up on the game. :P That week in particular was a mess regarding my free time for Pyweek, so, coupled with my slow game coding (slowly improving though), I ended up with a game that was very rushed and quite buggy. But I'm happy I ended up with a game, and even more happy that some people liked it. :) Ratings-wise I fell quite a lot, but I expected that.

This is actually the first Pyweek game I kinda want to rewrite, since I feel the idea has some potential and this version is way too rushed (ugh, I did some things in the code that hurt to type :P). It's not too likely, though, but I'll let you know if I do.

Thanks to Richard for hosting Pyweek once more, and see you all next Pyweek! Congratulations to the winners!

Reply to comments below, as usual.

---
I didn't get the concept.

Due to rushing, the game ended a bit unpolished and without enough help. Sorry.

Nice idea, but it should have been developed a little further. The user interface is kind of messy.

I couldn't agree more. :)

Good puzzler, solid construction. I got stuck, which is always a good sign with a puzzle game. :)

Thanks. :) I have no clue how hard the game is, I rushed the levels too.

Nicely done with the game! I'm impressed at the behavior and the puzzle design - it's very very good!

Thanks! The level design was a bit rushed actually, but I'm glad you liked it.

Very nice concept, loved the wifi idea! Some cool sound and music, and maybe bonus points or something for alternate solutions, and of course more levels, would make this game shine. Oh and add a tutorial :) Bug: can place more than one item on a square, if that is done it can't be erased.

Thanks, yeah, sound/music and extra features would be great, especially a tutorial. Would have put them if I had the time. Thanks for the bug report too.

Hmmm

Hmmm.

Seemed like a great concept, but the bugs were a bit much.

I'm glad you like the concept. If I had the time I would've fixed the bugs.

Nice little puzzle game - an interesting change from the usual PyWeek fare. Sadly, it ends just as it's getting interesting. Some more levels, and a little more polish and you'd have a real winner here.

Yay, someone who wants more. :)

Nice challenging puzzles! The last (real) level had me stumped for quite a while!

Thanks.

The idea is nice, and the robot is cute. The puzzles/levels get a bit repetitve, so the scor in fun is lower than it could be. But nice work

Yes, if I ever remake the game, I'll definitely add more features to make the levels more interesting.

I don't understund the game

Yeah, a tutorial would have been nice.

Cool concept

Thanks.

Bad.

Sorry.

nice idea, somewhat buggy gameplay, as you said yourself. one bug to fix: placing an item (kitty) on other (zappers), makes the other item disappear.

Thanks for the bug report.

It was great! Good gameplay and fun concept. I didn't run into any bugs (I avoided doubling things up, as suggested) and played it for a lot longer than I expected. Great work.

Thanks. :)

This game needs some spice!

I agree with that. Maybe in a future version.

Nice puzzle mechanic, good-looking implementation.

Good-looking implementation? Um, you won't want to look at the code. :P

I like it. Too bad you couldn't quit finish it. :)

Yeah, too bad. :)

I couldn't beat the first level. I did it exactly as you said in the readme, and he would never fall in love with the boot. Interesting idea, although seems very unrobotish.

That's odd. Maybe the level at that point was a bit bugged, the solution would have been to restart the level.

-- Tee of Even Robots have Bad Dreams

Hack on Pedro's Robot Factory to see The Happy Dance

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 01:00:04 -0600

Some guys in the rating comments said the couldn't complete the 3 leves and becouse of this they could't see the happy dance. A little hack:

In the game root directory:

touch .youwon
-- Juanj Conti of 10 Roboticists from Santa Fe

Robot Underground - The Future

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:39:05 -0600

Well, there's been a lot of positive comments in the feedback and a fair few neutral comments. I guess you can't write a game everyone'll like. I won't do a complete post-mortem on those comments because there isn't much to say, except thank you. There were some featurue suggestions/bug reports but most everything has been covered in the feedback thread we started earlier.

There'll be a post-pyweek release very shortly (Mon/Tue perhaps) with a lot of the major fixes and then an overhaul of the content and engine someway down the line. This is the plan anyway, we're still keen on this project and we hope to see it continue to do well. There may be some kind of website and bug reporting mechanism for players before long so watch this space!

-- Chard of Robot Underground

ADMIN: judging irregularities

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:29:11 -0600

It's pretty clear from the judging results that two users (from the same team) have gone through and given identical (word for word in most cases) ratings to many teams.

Please, if you're not going to spend the time and effort play and rate a game yourself then don't bother at all.
-- richard of Administrivia

Pedro's Robot Factory for OLPC

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:43:24 -0600

Dowload Here.

Thanks Humitos.
-- Juanj Conti of 10 Roboticists from Santa Fe

Post Compo - Pygerpugabot

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:07:25 -0600

Hi everyone,

I did a post-compo "robot" game, which was also my first game made with pyglet. You play as a robot called "Pygerpugabot", a creation of Wiz Kid, who must fight the evil "Chullus" who have recently invaded Earth.

This is a really simple platform shooter, with five levels and a boss. It also features sound effects, music, powerups, baddies, and a continue feature.

Requirements

Python 2.5
Pyglet 1.1 alpha 2

How To Play

Move: Arrow Keys
Jump: Z
Attack: X

Download (1.07 MB)
-- pymike of NanoBot

Download Mirror

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:48:26 -0600

Hi!

We mirrored the games from the original torrent to http://www.mindless-labs.com/pyweek6-games_04-07-2008/, in case your torrent usage is limited (my hostel filters it totally, so I was the first to download :)

Cheers, happy rating!
Ron
-- Ron of Aerobotics

PyWeek Diary Entries

Networking Tutorial Progress

Just entered PyWeek September 2008!

CompoGameLoader

Assembly Line 0.5 - Post-Comp Pre-Pyggy Release

Dancing Block 2.0 release

Gamasutra: "How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days"

Continuing Development

Dancing Block 1.5 (Keybroad Support)

Plans for further SMASHING...er, I mean DEVELOPMENT

Dancing Block (post pyweek#6)

Robot Underground 1.0.4

I love you, HanClinto

library before challenge

PyWeek judging idea

"gather" update and postmortem

C.A.T.B.O.T. says "Thank you!" *hummm*

Robot Underground 1.0.2

Bot Builder 2000 Post Mortem

Aerobotics: Feedback

Game to OLPC

Wat happen?

Provide Excellent Customer Service Through SMASHING!

Another web site comment

Robosub Wrap Up

Make Me: Post-competition release

Follow up

Umm, weird...

Ooops, seems I forgot to include the source.

Thanks for a great pyweek

Thanks alot!

Thank You for your respondents

Assembly Line - Response to Feedback

9 Judges

"Even Robots have Bad Dreams" Postmortem

Hack on Pedro's Robot Factory to see The Happy Dance

Robot Underground - The Future

ADMIN: judging irregularities

Pedro's Robot Factory for OLPC

Post Compo - Pygerpugabot

Download Mirror

C.A.T.B.O.T. says "Thank you!" hummm