You've Got COOTIES! (YGC) is a puzzle game with elements of Dr. Mario, samegame, and Bejeweled. The objective is to gain as many points as possible by clearing cooties from the game board, using cootie pills. If you slip up, the gray cooties will begin to take over the board, blocking your moves. When you have nowhere left to drop a pill, the game ends.

YGC is my first entry into a LD48 contest, and also my first completed pygame. I have to say that I'm extremely pleased with the entire LD48 experience, with Python and pygame, and with the way that YGC turned out. The graphics were all done in Paint Shop Pro 8 with a Wacom graphics tablet that I bought the night that the competition started, and the sounds were created with Audacity and a microphone.

I believe that Python+pygame is a brilliant platform for this kind of endeavor (which is not to say it isn't brilliant for normal development, too!) Even though I'm new to pygame, I spent no time at all wrestling with it. Everything worked according to the documentation. I spent the bulk of my time making graphics and tweaking the gameplay, which is exactly the way game development ought to be.

Snag is a fast paced recreation of the classic pencil game connecting dots to fill grid squares. You play head to head versus an AI opponent. You both place moves at the same time and each get one move during a short time period. Winner is the one with the most squares.

Overall this game went together pretty quick. Still not fast enough for me to get to everything I wanted. Yet this is by far my most complete 48 Hour Contest entry. It is a fully finished and playable game.

The AI opponent just fell together. It isn't doing any advanced prediction or deep tree testing. I actually had more trouble dumbing it down a bit do play well but still be beatable.

I was really hoping Sunday afternoon would give me the time to make a try at networked multiplayer. You just cannot account for how long it takes to get the final details in place. Overall I'm way pleased with my entry. Somehow I got through this one without needing to to much actual artwork.

LudumDare 48 Hour Contest #2

This was a small game where the user plays a scarecrow and attempts to defend a small farm from lots of birds. Initially development went very slow for me. It wasn't until the final hours that I was really got into my "Flying With Python" mode. This is basically when I am getting working final code into my game as fast as I can type it. For example, the animated skyline and dancing scarecrow. I didn't think I'd have any time for these sorts of things, but the code went in so fast I couldn't believe it. I love programming like this, and I was glad I got to experience it again for this contest. I also lucked out since my temporary artwork seemed to be good enough for release (as I had no time to redo them)

One other thing that completely surprised me was the actual performance of the game. I didn't get a chance to actually optimize anything, and parts of the rendering were sloppy. I had figured it would only run smoothly on something like my 1.3Ghz machine at home. Imagine my surprise as I tested it out on my 300mhz NT4 machine at work, it ran perfectly smooth. Score one for pygame and it's ability to snap along. So many sprites with fairly complex behavior zipping around the screen.

In the end I didn't get any time to do "play testing", so the game doesn't really play like a game. Everything works well enough, but I believe it's impossible to really lose, but it doesn't feel like you are in control enough to keep yourself from getting assaulted. I was disappointed in the fact I didn't have time to record my own soundeffects on the microphone, I had been practicing my sounds the entire day.

It's got see through walls (Diablo style), and z-order sprite sorting (so you can control which sprites are in front). I'm also using an interesting approach to fonts. I render the font in photoshop with the text tool plus any filters and effects I happen to like. I could even make a woodgrain font if I wanted to, or maybe scrabble style, etc., all with no extra programming.

I'm thinking of extending the concept to animated fonts too, using the same approach. I'll post these in PyGame when I get a chance; I'm behind on my web stuff in general right now (Pyx, etc.)

(ken went even further to create a full "72-hour" version with much more polish. see his site for that download.) The later version also has some maze traversal code that makes the camels smarter on higher levels, and makes it so that when you click on any square, the parrot will go there on the shortest path. And the speed potions help the game balance a lot.

This is an incredibly simple game of revolving the shields to protect against the missiles being fired from the hovering spaceships. The entry is a departure from the original concept which had to be simplified in order to have a chance of finishing. One of more interesting features that had to left out was the shields shrinking when hit and recharging/growing over time, I think this would have improved the gameplay by having the player balance out the use of the shields.

The power of Python combined with the ease of use of Pygame allowed me to develop a concept quickly while remaining flexible enough to try out different 'threads' of that concept, but a better grasp of Python would help to harness this power.

My game's based on the inverse of the typical RPG premise; normally at some point the heroes have to go out and defeat some guardian to get something important. In my game, you are that guardian.

I'd picked up Python for work a few months back and fell in love with it. I'd known SDL for even longer, and while I'd had my eye on Pygame for a while I'd never really come up with a project I wanted to do with it. The 48 hour compeition seemed like a golden opportunity. Going was slow at first, because I had to learn pygame - my familiarity with SDL helped at times, but also slowed me down when I'd have to stop and say "Okay, SDL does something this way, is it the same in Pygame?" and then look it up.

As the competition continued, however, and I figured how to convert usual C++/SDL idioms into Pygame idioms, the pace picked up rapidly. I added two features of the game (selling items and using health potions) in the last hour of the competition, for example.

Overall, I liked my Pygame experience. There were bugs in my game, sure, but they weren't the kind of memory-trashing bugs that I'd occasionally introduce into my C++ programs. On more than one occasion, I was glad that I was tracking down mundane errors rather than dealing with the agony of getting my pointers all in a row. In the end, there's a lot of things I'd fix about the game. Selling, for example, simply picks a random number for the value of an object (so you could buy a health potion and sell it back for more). Originally, my game had a plot. But it's still a playable and fun game, so I count it as a success :)

Unfortunately this game is far from finished, and doesn't allow you to do much.

My game uses no graphics, only sound and keyboard input. Description of game: aliens are after your baby. You need to escape from them. But you were blinded, and you only have your sense of hearing. Luckily you also have a stick! You can use it to avoid obstacles, danger. But also to hit aliens with grin

What went right: Using python. Great language for fast programming. I could type some code in and run it straight away, without compiling. With ipython there is argument completion, and all that other goodness. I had one python session open from the start to the finish of the comp. My game was running in there the whole time. Using pygame. Quite easy to use. Although I wish there was support for playing more than one .ogg/.mp3 at a time(an upcomming feature I hear). Even though there are no graphics in my game I used a number of its image features for my map loading.

What went wrong: Not knowing pygame sound enough. Before this project I'd never used pygame sound that much. So I didn't know what was possible. Which lead me to waste a bit of time exploring. Of course exploring is half the fun in programming so it was fun, just time wasting