PyWeek 23: My Enemy's Enemy is my Friend

"My Enemy's Enemy is my Friend" was my solo entry for PyWeek 23 (February 2017), a twice yearly video game development competition that gets competitors to build a complete game from scratch in seven days using the python programming language. This competition's theme was "The Lesser of Two Evils" and I made a 3D tactical space shooter in which you work for an insurgency against an oppressive colonial government after your family is killed in a government attack; your character reflects on your retaliation against government civilians and is forced to question what action should be taken when faced with two evils. This comp I went solo for the first time since my first entry back in 2014 (my usual wingman for Team Chimera, Lucid, was taking a break).

The game was inspired by 1990's space shooters such as Colony Wars and X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter. Instead of using 3D hardware acceleration via graphics libraries such as opengl (or the pyopengl python bindings), I decided to experiment with the idea of doing 3D all on the CPU, in python. I was keen on this idea because installing 3D library dependancies in python can be a bit of a pain, with slightly unpredictable results ... also, I just got stuck on the idea early in the process, and I'm stubborn :). I managed to implement a basic engine for rendering 3D flat shaded graphics by performing camera projection and lighting calculations for triangular faced models using numpy and rendering faces using "pygame.draw.polygon". I added to this a basic horizon texture mapping (using numpy and "pygame.draw.surfarray" and rendering of circular particles using "pygame.draw.circle" and circle radius computed based on camera depth using numpy. The array of resulting 3D effects was pretty simple, but I think it worked pretty well: I had something that looked at about the same level (maybe a touch better?) as Starfox did on the SNES.

I ended up ranking second in the individual entries and third overall, a result I was very happy with. I received a fairly high "production" score (4.8 out of 5.0), so I was pretty miffed that players thought the graphics were decent enough.

Playthroughs:

Here you can find a full playthrough of the game, broken up into three parts (with a fourth showing an alternative ending to the game):

I'm currently working on getting a binary release/installer for OSX/Windows, but for now you can play them game by installing the source distribution (requires python, pygame and numpy) by downloading the game from the pyweek page: My Enemy's Enemy is my Friend.