Right now I am very busy with work and in my spare time competing in pyweek 8 . As you may or may not know pyweek is a competition where you, on your own or with a team, have one week to complete a game written from scratch in python. My team for this years pyweek is called campdivisible, which apart from myself consists of Colin Bean and Brad Busse. I competed in the last pyweek competition with a different team, campinvisible, the game we created was called fishing frenzy, what follows is a post that was made early on in the design process for that game. It outlines the basic concept and shows some concept art. You can download the original fishing frenzy, for OSX, windows or BSD/Linux from here.

Fishing Frenzy

PyGameSF Entry for the September 2008 pyweek competion. Team members: Casey Duncan, Colin Bean, Eric Bieschke, Harry Tormey.
Tools/Libraries

-Pyglet graphics, sprites, display, game

-Inkscape

-GIMP

-Vim, because it is awesome (settings et shiftwidth=4 set tabstop=4 set autoindent)

Concept

The concept of the game is that you play a fisherman sitting in a dinghy casting a line to catch fish swimming below. The viewport shows the boat in the top left corner with a fisherman sitting on top of it (top 20%) the rest of the screen shows a below surface view with fish and various objects. Casting is done by clicking one of the mouse buttons and moving the mouse about in a set arch. Moving the mouse causes the fisherman to move his rod up and down and causes the hook and line to swing back and forth The faster you move the mouse, the more velocity the swing has. Letting go of the button at any time casts, the line goes forward at the selected angle/speed.

Once the cast has been made the hook flies through the air and eventually hits the water and begins to sink beneath the surface. The water is full of layers of various moving objects which you need to avoid in order to try and catch what you wanted. You can control the speed of decent/ascent (reeling the line in/out) using the mouse or mouse wheel.

The objects in the layers only interact with the hook, they pass through the line (string) most of the time. But there may be fish with scissors that can cut it (eat through the line?), etc.

Score is influenced by the speed of catching fish, the number of fish caught and not dying.

The types of objects you can encounter are: Fridges, reeds/seaweed, submarines/ships, Televisions, shopping carts, other larger fishes/monsters (squids/octopus).

The fisherman can select various things to attach to his line such as large hooks, hooks with bait, dynamite or weights (makes line descend faster).

- submarine or some ship could come by and obscure the fish. These can be blown out of the way with dynamite.

- Fridges/Tvs can be pulled out of the way with large hooks.

- Larger fishes or crustaceans can eat/cut through your lines and cut off your bait, delaying you by making you cast again.

- Reeds/seaweed can snag your hook, causing you to have to wriggle free wasting time (i.e, scroll wheel move mouse).

- Larger fish can cut your line or if they eat your line drag you into the sea and kill you.

- Explosives can wake up octopuses which will come up and drag you in and kill you.

The game dynamic of the moving objects is inspired by the classic game frogger where: “The lower half of the screen contains a road with motor vehicles, which in various versions include cars, trucks, buses, taxis, bicyclists, and/or motorcycles, speeding along it horizontally.” and “the player must successfully guide the frog between opposing lanes of trucks, cars, and other vehicles, to avoid becoming roadkill.”

Apart from frogger other notable game dynamics include the use of a string line/hook to manipulate objects.

Screen shot