PyWeek - Dandelion

Everything you wanted to know about the reproduction of dandelions. Now in an interactive illustrated form!
neuro Alex cyhawk
Dandelion teaser #1

Awards


The Circle of Life
Presented by Cosmologicon

Poetic Game Award
Presented by circusblatta

Give this entry an award

Ratings (show detail)

Overall: 4.1
Fun: 3.4
Production: 4.6
Innovation: 4.3

27% respondents marked the game as not working.
Respondents: 13
Files: Uploader Date
dandelion-1.1.zip 8.93 Mbytes cyhawk 2012/09/16 23:07
Windows executable
Dandelion-1.1.dmg 19.22 Mbytes cyhawk 2012/09/16 22:54
Mac bundle
dandelion-1.1.tgz — final 4.99 Mbytes cyhawk 2012/09/16 22:49
Source with crashfix, optimization and icon
dandelion-1.0.1.zip — final 4.64 Mbytes cyhawk 2012/09/16 00:34
Added README.txt
dandelion-1.0.zip — final 4.63 Mbytes cyhawk 2012/09/16 00:19
Source code and music
Screen Shot 2012-09-13 at 01.37.28.png 202.26 Kbytes cyhawk 2012/09/13 00:38
Growing roots
Dandelion-teaser-2.png 102.77 Kbytes Alex 2012/09/11 23:33
Dandelion teaser #1
Screen Shot 2012-09-09 at 15.59.19.png 50.48 Kbytes cyhawk 2012/09/09 23:38
Discarded design: Character sketch 2
Screen Shot 2012-09-09 at 15.22.10.png 73.99 Kbytes cyhawk 2012/09/09 23:38
Discarded design: Character sketch
Screen Shot 2012-09-09 at 15.24.50.png 188.01 Kbytes cyhawk 2012/09/09 23:37
Discarded design: Map detail
Screen Shot 2012-09-09 at 15.25.04.png 391.84 Kbytes cyhawk 2012/09/09 23:37
Discarded design: Map bird's eye view

Saturday 06 October, 2012

[ cyhawk @ 14:09 ] Dandelion: Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the kind comments and generous ratings! It seems undecided whether mini-games are a good idea for PyWeek. From the production perspective they definitely are — you can always add more if you have time or drop some if you don't. It's not easy to make them satisfying but since they are short, we hoped the player would not mind that much.
  • SO PRETTY, a beautifully crafted game, unfortunately the fun apsect was let down by it being really easy with no way to lose
Hah! You just did not try hard enough! You can actually avoid collecting any fairies and lose. It's easy to make a mistake and get one by accident, so this is a more challenging way to play the game.
  • Beautiful. No frustratingly difficult sections you have to master to get past. Just pretty things to look at, pleasant varied tasks to attempt, and more shinies the better you do instead of a numerical score. The only negative thing is it took me an hour of installing non-free Nvidia drivers, breaking my X11 setup catastrophically, booting a previous kernel version, manually editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and finally getting the PC working again, before the thing would actually run. Actually, it was STILL worth it. I will be plundering the code shamelessly to learn how to do OpenGL properly.
Wow, thanks for the perseverance and the praise! It's a shame we couldn't make the game more portable. Video drivers offer a surprising diversity of OpenGL implementations... As for learning from our code, know that it is the product of a struggle between Alex and myself :). One thing we couldn't agree on for example is whether to have the simulation depend on the frame rate. He says it's more correct, I say it's more error-prone. What do you think?

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Tuesday 11 September, 2012

[ Alex @ 23:47 ] Starting screen of the other design

We spent all of Sunday arguing about how exactly we were going to implement the flight of the dandelion seed, and only today did we really have the idea fully fleshed out (at least to the point where I feel that if we implement it all, we will have a coherent game).

I don't want to give away all of what we're doing yet, but as a bit of a teaser, this is the title screen, the starting point of the journey:




(Procedural vector graphics ftw. >400fps full-screen, animated; dealing with GLSL versions and driver/ctypes/OpenGL-wrapper issues is a bit of a pain, though...)

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Sunday 09 September, 2012

[ cyhawk @ 23:55 ] One design down, one more to go

We planned ahead this time and came up with ideas for each theme last week. For One Way Trip it was "an artsy game about a dandelion seed". Apparently there is more than one possible implementation of that, and we spent today arguing the merits of two. One you will see later and I'll describe now the one you won't.



It would be a flight simulator for a dandelion seed. Wind would be very important and you could see the streams from the motion of fellow dandelion seeds. In a way you would be navigating this 3D maze in a tranquil valley. You would see "drops of sunshine" from afar and could collect them for points. They would each be located by a diorama and the narrator would say something wise when you reach them.

The grave above would be a diorama. Also these guys:

  

Flying up high would give a unique perspective too:



(You can see the grave in the top right.)

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