Wiki Warrior
ExciteMike’s right, an actual post would make commenting easier!
Wiki Warrior is a generic top-down shooter with elements pulled from random Featured Articles on Wikipedia. The enemies in-game are generated from the article’s links, and the background is pulled from the article, too; in the case where an image couldn’t be found associated with the article, a random image in the Cityscapes category at the WikiMedia Commons is used instead (I happen to think that, for the most part, random city panoramas make for okay background images in this context).
I used python and pygame to create this, with sounds made with DrPetter’s sfxr, along with python-wikitools to handle all of the MediaWiki API stuff. Of course, I didn’t discover it until after I had already learned most of the details of the API, but it was still nice to not have to implement all of it myself.
This was my first LD, mini or otherwise, and I have to say, it was quite enjoyable. This project ended up being my first real pygame project, and all in all, I’m pretty satisfied with the results. The code is very unorganized and kind of thrown together haphazardly, but the fact that it works and is still manageable enough that I can still extend it further is enough to make me happy. Dead simple gameplay, to the point of being almost too shallow is probably the biggest problem I have with it at this point, with the relative lack of polish coming in a close second.
Two things I learned this weekend:
- 48 hours is actually a really long amount of time.
- Despite that, it’s never as long as you think it is.
I’d like to polish the game up, implement a few more complex features, etc., but we’ll see how well that idea holds up after future consideration.
Any thoughts, comments, or questions regarding the game? Problems running the Windows executable? I tested the py2exe build process as best as I could, but I figure there’s always an outside chance of failure.
Thanks for reading and/or playing, and my apologies for rambling.