30-hour gamejam!

[Vivi Hill]

So this past weekend I was in a 30-hour long gamejam, where I and my team of 3 other people had to create a game in 30 hours with a given theme. The theme was alone.

After an hour or so of brainstorming, we decided on a game where you pilot a ship alone, trying to repair your warp drive and not crash into asteroids in the process. You have various tasks you can complete: piloting, harvesting, repairing the ship, and repairing the warp drive (to get back into hyperspace and win the game). There is also an emergency "deflector beam" you can activate in emergencies that uses up a third of your full fuel capacity.

Harvesting from the asteroids yields both fuel and resources you can use to repair either your ship or your warp drive, so you have to budget your resources in order to survive.

The main challenge of the game, however, is that you're only human, and you're the only one on the ship (alone!), so you have to choose wisely which task to do at every given moment. Switching to a task takes a varying amount of time. For instance, navigation takes 2 seconds to activate, and repairing 3 full seconds, while mining is only 1 second. The emergency beam is activated instantly, but it uses a lot of fuel as I mentioned.

Anyway the game was a total success and we won first place, a first for me in the 5 or so game jams I've gone to. I was disappointed at the other entries though. I was looking forward to something interesting but most people hadn't even completed their games or presented something playable. It was essentially the reverse of every other game jam I've been to. Instead of being the only ones NOT finished, we were the only ones who WERE finished!

We made the game in python with pyglet and pybox2d. It runs at a nice 60 or so FPS but I can't really show that off since Linux screen recorders suck. The sound effects are probably the best part (2 of my team did nothing but find sound effects) but I can't figure out how to record the game properly. I might find something later. The 3rd person on the team worked on visuals (like the HUD icons, stars, and the ship, and did the spawning of the asteroids (his first python program ever, so I was greatly impressed). I ended up doing a large chunk of the code, but it was what I expected.

Anyway here are a bunch of screenshots!

Void Star

Next Sunday I'm attending a general programming competition, too. So wish me luck!

[duck]

so this is were our donater moneys are going to :O


jk, good luck

[Vivi Hill]

My internet is absolutely horrendous right now for some reason, but I'm uploading a video.

[Techercizer]

I would so play that game.

[Vivi Hill]

Video up!

Since the game is written in python it would be a bit difficult to get running on windows. I can see about making a basic exe package or something if people are interested.

[Techercizer]

Video up!

Since the game is written in python it would be a bit difficult to get running on windows. I can see about making a basic exe package or something if people are interested.

Since when can windows not run python? I'm pretty sure I've been using the python distro of Blender for several years now.

Edit: also, in your intro/help screen: "noone" isn't a word Benny ^.^

[Failhorse]

Not to be knit-picky treky but gene roddenbery wrote the monologue not shatner.


Awesome game tho. I'd play it.

[Vivi Hill]

Yeah, my friend wrote the help screen. He attributed Shatner as a joke, and I noticed the "noone" but we were 20 mins away from release time so there was little to do. His game stories are always tongue in cheek.

As for the python on windows thing, I meant more that I couldn't pop a bunch of DLLs in a folder and have it work. Box2D is kind of annoying to install on Windows (and it's the dev version) and the pyglet installer basically doesn't work on windows.

[Techercizer]

Yeah, my friend wrote the help screen. He attributed Shatner as a joke, and I noticed the "noone" but we were 20 mins away from release time so there was little to do. His game stories are always tongue in cheek.

As for the python on windows thing, I meant more that I couldn't pop a bunch of DLLs in a folder and have it work. Box2D is kind of annoying to install on Windows (and it's the dev version) and the pyglet installer basically doesn't work on windows.

Ah, gotcha. I'm not very familiar with pyglet; does it work on unix/ubuntu/etc systems?

[jawsh]

Should have made a call for help key..

..that does NOTHING.

[Vivi Hill]

Ah, gotcha. I'm not very familiar with pyglet; does it work on unix/ubuntu/etc systems?

Yeah, I made the game with Vim under Ubuntu. My friend says he gets a crash when using 11.04 but it works all right for me on 11.10. The standard pyglet library in the repos is what I used, but I used the development version of pyBox2D compiled from source since it's what I'm used to.

[Failhorse]

any chance it can work webbased?

[Vivi Hill]

Well, not as a Python program. But the game itself ultimately isn't that complex. I might want to port it to my C++ engine as a sort of test I suppose, in which case it would run nicely on any platform once compiled.

I don't like writing in ActionScript (read: I don't know Actionscript very well), so don't expect it in Flash.