Competition Diary - Grover

Quick response to some comment:

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 17:24:04 +1000

Thanks to all whom thought it a humerous little jab :)

max out the accelleration of the ball. Might help keep it in control.
There is code in there already to do this - currently commented out. You are welcome to put it back in.

One of the most important things in a pinball game is physics, IMO, and yours seems a bit off. The bumpers seem to hit the ball far too hard, and the flippers feel all soft and mushy. Bonus points for letting us pound our leaders heads with pinball balls though.
This is pretty personal preference thing. In the readme, it explains how you can adjust the 'forcefactor' variable. This will modify the physics response forces. Also adjusting the TableAngle can help too. Essentially play with these until you find the combo you like. It is currently set for simple and quick gameplay.

Decent but bland pinball game, pretty good work though.
With a week, you dont get alot of time to put every effect in :) .. we had alot lined up :) And myself and paul actually only ended up with 4 days work on it, due to other commitments. Ideally a bigger team with more artists would have helped, but we did what we could in the 4 days we had - There are extra layers, and more effects that were going to be put in, but as with anything.. time constraints.

Shoulda made it easy to hit Johnny! :) A few Bush and Johnny quotes woulda made it a classic! ;)
You read our minds!! We actually had _alot_ of bush and johnny wavs for putting in the game. But ran out of time - I was making a cyclic wav playback scheduler so that we could have the comments come out a little random and such (like the ball launch comment, gets a little on yer nerves after the 50th ball.. :) ). I'll put it all in when I get some spare time.
And I apologise for hiding Johnny away :) I might fix that - remove the barrier in the middle :)

Thanks for all the comments, and I'll post an updated link to a new version once the competition is over - dont really wanna confuse people with different exe's.

Judging - just an odd thought.

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 23:45:32 +1000

Isnt it going to be in everyones best interest (competition wise) to vote as low as possible for the other teams :) .. It seems also that teams like Soya have a decided advantage, because they get to influence the result more than the single people teams.

Just wondering if this is an expected judging outcome. I, for one, will vote as unbiased as I can. Also should consideration of the gameplay, innovation, and production for only 7 days work be taken into account with the voting? Or should we be comparing to current games? Ie, does a 5 rate as perfect, cannot be better. Or 5 rates as amazing effort for the time available.

Im finding it hard to even decide on votes for some games, since you can sort of see what they were trying to do, and that it should get a good vote, but its incomplete so does it get scores deducted? To be honest I think the games are awesome, for a single week of work.. maybe I'll just give everyone 5 :)

Or is this like Big Brother.. and I wasnt allowed to say that? :)

B52 bomer.. unlockable feature..

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 20:47:10 +1000

Heres a piccy of a neat little hidden feature. Took me about 30 mins to manage to unlock it :)

Missing MSVCR71.dll

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 17:47:34 +1000

Adding a link to missing MSVCR71.dll file for people without python installed.

This is a redistributable dll part of the runtime library from MS.
MSVCR71.zip

Thats pretty much it.

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 07:11:43 +1000

I hope people find DubyaPinball somewhat enjoyable - even though its missing alot of planned features. Only managed 4 days out of the 7.. to work on it sadly. Im very keen on seeing some of the other posted entries, they are looking pretty amazing.

Here is a link to the complete zip

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 19:40:10 +1000

Tried to upload the full build, so heres a link to the build. Will upload only source.

Source and executable - read the included Readme.txt file. DubyaPinball.zip
MD5 - 4d72249110a2e17a46516e63d6c5d94a
Source only - just in case that doesnt go up either. DubyaPinballSrc.zip
MD5 - d0bc5a75b358f159c3452a7eb8cf66b5

Putting up a playable version

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 18:31:23 +1000

Tried to put up a 9.1MB version - no good. Not enough space? Help please?

Much is done.. added screeny of progress

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 05:53:11 +1000

Most of the physics is complete (ball returns to be completed in next few hours). Effects still need to be completes - simple particle emitters and such. Sound and Music needs to be added - have tracked down some free samples. Player scoring is in, but not being rendered yet (easy one).
Current screenshot - including collision vectors:
Progress Screeny

In the beginning...

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:17:07 +1000

So we're underway finally, and we've settled on a pinball game.

I've fleshed out the major classes, and have them drawing with Pygame's inbuilt draw functions. Sure, it's line art, but retro's in right? Everything looks better through a haze of Canadian Club and Coke, so I'm going to down another mixer and incorporate the input handler.

So far, this is going far better than all my other game development so far. Viva la GameDev!

And so it begins...

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 12:09:32 +1000

Team Coopers is official. :)
Let the games begin.. already..