PyWright

PyWright - 0.976

patrick mullen (saluk)

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Description

The general architecture for PyWright, is a set of art assets, an interpreter/engine to run the games (which are written in a scripting language designed specifically for this type of game), and an update program to download more art, other people's games, or updates to the engine.

A game consists of a folder which contains "cases" or chapter folders; and the actual scripts and unique content are placed in these folders.

The engine contains many features, such as textboxes, lipsynced characters (lipsynced to the printing text, not to voiceover), special effects, logic, and the various engine features from the Ace Attorney games. It can be run in software or hardware rendering (using pygame or pyopengl respectively), in dual screen mode (emulating a DS) or single screen mode, as well as different resolutions.

The scripting language has evolved considerably since it was originally designed, although it hasn't fundamentally changed much. It will likely remain 99% backward compatible from this point on. The syntax is fairly simple - one command per line, with commands supporting different numbers of arguments. It feels somewhat like BASIC (including the use of GOTO), but with a few borrowed elements from other languages. It's not meant to be a general purpose language.

Requirements to run source:
pygame
numpy

On Windows, the windows exe version should work fine. On linux, the dependancies shouldn't be too hard to track down. On Mac, it is recommended to not go with system python but instead to use the mac port of python2.5 from this link: http://pythonmac.org/packages/py25-fat/ and the pygame package for python2.5 found on pygame.org. (A mac py2app port is available as well).

Changes

So many changes since the last version. Download it, download a couple of the games: Trials and Tribulations, and PW - Contempt of Court are spectacular. Mercurial repo at google: https://pywright.googlecode.com/hg/

Links

Home Page: http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/
Source: http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/updates3/engine_packages/PyWright_0.976.src.zip
Windows: http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/updates3/engine_packages/PyWright_0.976.win.zip
Mac: http://pywright.dawnsoft.org/updates3/engine_packages/PyWright_0.976.mac.zip

Screenshot

click to view original size

Releases

PyWright - 0.976 - Aug 5, 2010
PyWright - beta10.1 - Sep 30, 2008

Pygame.org account Comments

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August 5, 2010 8:23pm - patrick mullen - nickname: (saluk)
Just posting one of the more recent releases. I can't believe it's been 2 years since posting it here! Anyway, the different teams working on PyWright games have made a lot of progress in that time, and there are 4 rather good games available now: Trials after Justice, PW - The Contempt of Court, AJAA Justice's Memoirs, and Turnabout Substitution. Not to mention the engine hums along much more smoothly than it used to, although fundamentally it is not that different. Check it out and play some of the games, they are really great. I'm blown away by what people have been able to accomplish.
October 1, 2008 12:48am - patrick mullen - nickname: (saluk)
Yeah, the updater needs work. So does the editor. (Actually the listed bug was a last minute mistake!). The engine is pretty far along though. The general idea is for games to actually include their own dependencies, leaving the resource downloads more for authors who are looking for something to use. Eventually I would expect an author to want to build a zip file or whatever and not require that someone has the engine. But dependency resolution is not a bad idea. <br><br> None of the sample games are good examples of the genre, they are really just tests for various features of the engine. The best examples are of course the DS games, but those can be a bit hard to get a hold of if you don't have one. This style of adventure game is popular in Japan, but not so big in english speaking countries. Generally they contain a lot of text and story, with enough interaction (barely) to still consider it a game. The main gameplay in the Ace Attourney games consists of showing the right evidence at the right time in court, but the writing and characters are so well done the simplicity is easy to overlook. And then of course, when you try and emulate the game, you find out how much more complex it was than you realized :) <br><br>Goto is a bit ugly, but for some reason it just felt right. There are also macros that can be used, and I will probably add more programy features to the scripting language as time goes on. However my target audience was non-programmer (not people who haven't looked at a language before who might have some inclination to learn, rather, people who think the only way they can make a game is with a gui). I wanted to make it as non-scary as possible. Also, the logic required to emulate the series is extremely minimal. <br><br>Oh, and I have been accused of rambling, so I'll stop now!
September 30, 2008 10:20pm - Claudio Canepa - nickname: (claxo)
A-ha, on rereading this page I used updater.py to get games. Also, updated the engine. A problem is that the updater dont fetch the dependencies for the game, ie, you will run, at certain point you get a message or traceback complainning for a missing resource, then you download whatever it was, repeat...
September 30, 2008 9:07pm - ffao - nickname: (ffao)
If you're not familiar with the genre, you don't know what you're missing :) In the windows distribution, at least, there is an editor and a doc.txt file which make it somewhat easier. goto is a bit ugly, but I see how it was probably easiest this way. I keep getting one error though: File "core\gui.py", line 375, in click_down_over getattr(tob,f)() AttributeError: 'case_menu' object has no attribute '_New_Case' (reopen a case in editor)
September 30, 2008 8:50pm - Claudio Canepa - nickname: (claxo)
saluk, can you give a link to some sample script (game?). the current download doenst include any, and I'm not familiar with the genre ( and your engine ) to know where to look.