A couple weeks ago, an RPG development forum I hang out on held a “game in a weekend” contest, challenging people to create a complete game in two days. It’s a bit like the “three-day novel contest”, in that you have to be slightly nutty to enter.
I decided to enter, and I’m not one to be nutty alone, so I roped Gaelan into working on it with me. Starting with some code I’d previously written and one generic grass tile, our aim was to produce a small-scale RPG in the time allowed (which was eventually extended by three days. Yeah, the two day contest turned into a five day contest. Weird, but useful…). Both being antiquity buffs, we decided to set our game in Ancient Greece, and drew some inspiration (i.e., outright stole a few things) from the Odyssey. Thus, The Trials of Soscarides was born.
The contest is over now, and “Soscarides”, reasonably complete by the deadline, tied for first-place with another entry. We are both quite proud of our little game.
I’d been holding off on posting it here because I was hoping to finish it first (the contest submission only has a little of the game content in place), but that is starting to look like it will take a bit longer than anticipated, so I’m posting it now. You can follow the link above and download the limited (and slightly buggy) contest entry, but you’ll have to wait a little while for the final release. Gaelan and I are both plugging away at it. I think the story is about 40% implemented and nearly all the art and mapping is done. I’m working on a few refinements to combat (which I wrote from scratch in 12 hours on day two of the contest) and a few other aspects of the game as well.
If you try it out, let me know what you think.
I’ll try it out soon! What did you use to develop it?
Never mind! I tried it, PyGame? I love it! Python is great for cranking off little game projects. Sucks figuring out how to make an array the first time, though.
Sadly I haven’t tried it enough to comment on it, but I’ll spam your comments again at that point, since that’s what I seem to do now.
Pygame rules. Spam away.
And is s = [] really so hard? =)
After programming in python for a while, I’m totally spoiled for other languages.
Oh, it’s on! :P I mean making a big 2d array of integers for the maps. I ended up using NumPy and zeros().
I finally beat the barbarians, only to get eaten by a fearsome green cyclops. But I haven’t given up!
Alright, I beat the green cyclops, visited the oracle, got the cryptic message about letting Mr. Hades swallow me, listened to her more sensical guard-fellow who told me just to go get some grain south. Now I’m totally locked out of everything! Did I hit the 40%? Am I going to have to patiently wait? I want to know what’s in the !ogre cave and the tower. Damn you, episodic gaming!
Haha, sorry, I just realized I hadn’t been that clear. You’ve hit the 10% mark that we completed for the contest. The other 30% we’ve not “released” yet. I suppose if I did post it, it really would be an episodic game… =)
Part of why I haven’t really put it up is that I’m still tweaking and changing things, especially the combat.
I beat the barbarians, equipped my healer with a bow, felt woozy while trying to talk to the oracle so I left to go kick some cyclops ass and give my shirtless tough-guy a sword. I upped the strength of both of my fighters once I realized I what the “advance” button did, and wasn’t sure what to do with the 3 points my healer had so I sailed of the east edge of the world. I can’t seem to do anything more than that. I have a party of three, my family is starving, I can land on other islands and walk around. I can sail 3 spaces above the top of the screen and I crash the game if I sail off of the south and east edges of the world. I get no cryptic message about hades… I even let my healer talk to the oracle instead of the main guy. I want to do more! I can give you the console reports that I get when I crash the game if that’s helpful.
Thanks for the feedback.
That’s a “known bug” that failed to get squashed in the rush to get the contest version finished in time. =)
I haven’t done anything more on the game in a while. If I don’t get going on it soon I might upload its current “half finished” incarnation, but ideally I’d like to completely wrap it up first.