Stoic's entry to the LudumDare Oct 04 48 hour game programming extravagansa.

This is the third game I have written since being inspired to learn python and pygame after the March compo earlier this year. The focus therefore was very much on getting a finished game out there.

I ranked random 3rd in the second round and voted for it in the 1st round, but when it comes to thinking of game ideas what you really want is structure and by its definition randomness doesn't have much so its hard to define the experience for the player.
[Aside: Next time perhaps the competitors should be encouraged to supply 4/5 game ideas for each theme they vote for. Then we might focus on what's important about a theme more.]

I had expected this weekend to be free, but of course I was interupted and delayed. Although I was helped in the end by having got a new kitten on Friday (the day before the compo started here in the UK) and although he was reaking havoc, when a kitten goes to sleep on your lap whilst programming its much easier to prevent yourself getting up to do something else.

I nearly gave up 12 hours in having thought of no ideas and having had no time to implement them anyway. But then I wrote a little code to draw a 'random' background (its still there) and pink balloons had featured in all my ideas so the game just came together.

The game is very simple:
- Balloons scroll up the screen (from random points at random times)
- Pins and 'Stars' appear to pop them (pins only pop them if the pointy side is facing the balloon, otherwise they bounce off (this sort-of-ish works))
- You, controlling a hand with your arrow keys must catch the balloons before they scroll off the screen or get popped
- You can catch the Pins and Stars as well to stop them popping the balloons
- Every 10 seconds the difficulty increases
	Balloons appear more as do pins and stars and the pins and stars move faster
- You lose after you have failed to catch 10 balloons

I coded on an old 180mhz apple powerbook 2400c running Debian/GNU Linux testing.
But I can't get pygame to output sound on that, so the final test was done as I was creating the windows binary on an xp machine. py2exe is effective though buggy, but a quick google search told me how to fix the distribution it made.

Conclusion
The game is simple, but it works, so I have acheived my objectives.
Next time I will be more ambitious. Now that I know pygame better I want to try a warcraft/command & conquor/total annihilation clone (always wanted to do one of them) so I might be better for the next compo.

Looking forward to judging.

Stoic
