PyWeek - Mop and Bucket

Forever End is about the aftermath of a devastating impact by a mysterious artifact, which fractured time in three areas of the planet. In each level, three time periods are starting to merge together, and you must shift between them to reach your goal of finding pieces of the mysterious artifact, and uncover what it was that crashed into Earth.

Throughout the game, you'll have to figure out how to make use of the conditions and items of each time period to accomplish your goals and progress through the level. It's like an old-style game where you must explore and figure it out. The game will not tell you what to do.

Each time period is meant to have its own atmosphere, while staying in the theme of the level (though, there is much room for improvement here). You'll see fluctuations from the time distortions as parts of the other time periods flicker in and out of your active time period. This brings a sort of frantic atmosphere to the game as you know things "just aren't right."

This is a solo entry, and my first PyWeek!

Instructions:

  • Solve levels by platforming and using items across time periods.
  • In each level, there's a flotaing yellow artifact you need to pick up.
  • Arrow keys to move, space bar to jump/hover.
  • Shift activates the tractor beam to pick up items.
  • 1, 2 and 3 keys for shifting to alternate time periods in the same level.

There are a few debug modes:

  • F2 - Coordinates and FPS.
  • F3 - Bounding boxes and event boxes.
  • F4 - God mode. Cannot die, and can fly forever.
  • F5 - Switch to next level.

This is a solo entry by ChipX86.
Flamethrower and hoverboard in 2300 AD

Awards


Most creative skateboard riding techniques
Presented by gcewing

Gave me goosebumps
Presented by superjoe

Give this entry an award

Ratings (show detail)
Fun: 3
Production: 3.3
Innovation: 3.8
3% respondents marked the game as not working.
Respondents: 26
Files: Uploader Date
forever_end_bin_0.3.zip — final 4.68 Mbytes ChipX86 2011/04/10 00:12
Windows .exe version of the game.
forever_end-0.3.tar.gz — final 1.55 Mbytes ChipX86 2011/04/10 00:06
Linux Tarball for Forever End.
forever_end-0.3.zip — final 1.59 Mbytes ChipX86 2011/04/10 00:05
Zip file for Forever End.
forever_end-0.2.tar.gz — final 1.55 Mbytes ChipX86 2011/04/09 14:14
Forever End, the final (for PyWeek) release.
forever_end-0.1.tar.gz 1.47 Mbytes ChipX86 2011/04/09 09:28
A pre-release of Forever End. Still needs some graphics work on a couple levels, and I'm still developing a few features and a tutorial.
forever_end_11.png 59.83 Kbytes ChipX86 2011/04/09 07:42
Flamethrower and hoverboard in 2300 AD
forever_end_7.png 20.42 Kbytes ChipX86 2011/04/09 07:37
Ice boulder in 12,000 BC
forever_end_9.png 97.99 Kbytes ChipX86 2011/04/09 07:37
Damaged pyramid in 2300 AD.

Sunday 24 April, 2011

[ ChipX86 @ 06:23 ] Final thoughts on the competition

So now that the PyWeek judging is over, I thought I'd give a few final notes on PyWeek and my game.

So PyWeek was definitely a blast. So much fun, and a great opportunity to start learning game development.

Looking bad, I realized there were things I could have done much better:

  • Make it more clear when an effect was an effect. A lot of people rated my game as graphically glitchy, but those weren't glitches they saw. It was the "time is merging together!" effect. Oh well. If I had the time to finish the effect, it would have been very obvious. Frankly, I liked how it ended up, though would definitely go further if I decide to continue the game.
  • Add a tutorial! I planned this but couldn't fit it in.
  • Level design could have been better. I knew this, but again, didn't have the time. If I had a month, this game would have been wayyy different, with more interesting ways to use multiple time periods.
  • Sounds! Animation! I almost had sound, actually, but it felt too much like I was trying to shove existing things in. Next time I'm going to see about getting someone who can spend their time on the sound. As for animation, the main problem was that the main guy didn't animate. I have a few versions of his animation but didn't like any of them and didn't get to fine-tune them in time. Next time, that's a priority.
So room for improvement, but to be honest, I did this for myself. Never written a real game before and wanted to learn what it would take. For a week's worth, I'm thrilled how this turned out, and am looking forward to the next PyWeek, with the opportunity to make use of some of the feedback from this PyWeek.

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Saturday 09 April, 2011

[ ChipX86 @ 14:17 ] And it's submitted!

7:15 AM, and I'm still awake. Been working on bug fixes, polish, some tweaks, some new effects. At some point I accidentally made an earthquake effect. It works well. I don't remember doing it, but I'm rather tired so who can tell.

Anyway, it's submitted! I hope people enjoy it. There's definitely a lot more I would love to do (such as fine-tune the graphics in level 1 and 3, which I didn't have time for, and add sound). However, considering it's a solo project and I spent a week on it, and have never written anything more than a super basic puzzle game before, I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

Please give it a try, and do not hesitate to let me know of areas I can improve (things I did well would be nice to hear too!). There's a lot of puzzle elements involving time travel I would have loved to spend more time on, but couldn't get to, so I plan to continue this game and turn it into something a bit more in-depth.

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[ ChipX86 @ 07:36 ] Who am I? What am I doing here?!

Wow, what a week. This has been my first PyWeek and it's been crazy. I took the week off work, hardly slept, and have been having a blast putting together my first real game. I made a couple small things in the past, but nothing major, so there was a lot of learning this time around.

So, 9 Times. This is the category I was dreading at first, but loved once I figured it out. The "obvious" game mechanic is doing something 9 times, in some form, but I didn't want to go there. I instead decided 9 time periods would be far more interesting.

So I put together a puzzle/platformer called Forever End. It's a game about the aftermath of a devastating impact by some sort of unknown artifact, which scientists have dubbed the Omega 13. The impact fractured time in several areas, causing time to blend together. Any human entering the area suffers death.

Based on their research of the time fractures, scientists put together a probe that can withstand the time distortions and sent it in to collect the pieces of this artifact. The probe is capable of shifting between the affected time periods in each level. Each level has three time periods, with a total of nine.

The main game mechanic is the time shifting. In each time period on each level, the location is the same, but of course things have changed over time.

I think there's a lot I could do with this in the future. Unfortunately, it's difficult to learn such things as collision detection and quad trees while putting together a time-shifting platforming game engine and doing the art and levels and everything. I'm a one-person team, so something had to give. That's not to say that the levels are *bad*. I just would love to polish them more :) I'll probably continue with it after pyweek, flesh out the game some more.

I sprinkled references to other games and movies dealing with time travel throughout the game. The time periods, for example, mostly come from Chrono Trigger (we have 65,000,000 BC, 12,000 BC, 600 AD, 1000 AD, 1999 AD, 2300 AD, and then 40,000,000 AD, 1 NE (New Era) and 300 NE). There are a few other items and references as well. If you play them, you'll get it.

There's also a twist ending.

All in all, this has been a blast, and I'll probably work through the night to polish it up a bit more.

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