Sunday, October 24, 2021

PyWeek32: Temporal Anomaly

"Temporal Anomaly" was my solo entry for PyWeek 32 (September 2021), 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 "Neverending", and I made a sci-fi story-driven 2D action game in which the main character is stuck in a never-ending time loop. The game requires you to guide your character around the inside of a derelict science vessel in deep space, using your laser gun recoil in the zero-G environment. As you experience and re-experience the same events through several iterations of the time loop, you pick-up clues that allow you to out-smart your arch-nemesis, the evil Dr. Ubel and save the day by avoiding a catastrophe that tears a hole in the fabric of space-time itself.

This was a really fun entry to make: I ended up using the python arcade library (instead of my usual pygame), which was quite nice and made a lot of things more convenient. I also made heavy use of PyMunk for 2D collision physics. Voice acting for the story was also a big feature for this one: I recruited me wife to play one of the roles and I did the other two: it was really fun, we had a full script and everything. 

  


I was super chuffed to win the solo division and overall winner with a score of 4.44/5.0, which makes it the highest overall rated game in PyWeek history! Super excited :) ... 

You can download the game in source version here (requires python, python arcade, pygame and pymunk).

Playthrough Video: