The premise of this game is that you have a flying island high above a windswept planet. On your island you must gather the precious gas resource and defeat your rivals for control over it all. You have the choice of whether to build gas gathering buildings, defensive turrets (pictured), offensive missiles, or stability buildings.

The chain reaction is that when your island is hit with missiles neighboring areas begin to weaken. If there is too much weight on a weakened area from your buildings, whole parts of your island may crumble.

Ok, time for some shuteye and then the final push!

I thought it would be nifty if instead of directly building units, you had to attract units with various buildings. So you start with a base and 1 swarm. There are resource buildings (Apple, Flower, and Metal) that you can hover over that will give you various resources. You also have a base. You can build either Apple or Nectar huts in your base. These increase your attraction rates for food or nectar. (It was originally going to be food and sex, if you read the code. I guess bees have sex with flowers or something.) Once bugs are attracted to your base, you can add them to existing swarms, or break them off into new swarms. You can also build Radar to increase your attraction range, or buildings to increase the power or speed of your bugs.

Initially this was going to be swarm vs. swarm warfare, but I ran out of time pretty quickly. (I’ll go into my mistakes below.) So instead the computer just sent a specified number of waves with a specified strength at you at regular periods, and you needed to have swarms built up and ready to fight when they came.

Obviously one of my largest problems was art. As you can tell from my screenshot, It’s ugly. Really really ugly. All the art in the game was ‘placeholder’ art that I was going to go back and fix. That never happened. Secondly, I panicked at about 30 hours. I barely had an engine, and the deadline was closing in. I actually ‘gave up.’ I came back to it, and finished up later. Thirdly I didn’t have a good plan. I know I wanted an RTS, but I didn’t have a good execution plan. I also bit off WAY more then I could chew back then.

My tips for beginners are:

1. Make a plan – Seriously, take that first hour, and may out some code to get rid of the urge. THen take the next hour or two, and make a task list. What code does your idea need? Divide it up into tasks. As you go along, check things off that you’ve put in.
2. Take breaks – This is always a newbie mistake too, but, make sure you take regular breaks. 48 hours, even with a couple of sleep periods, is plenty of time to get something done.
3. Start Small – It’s much easier to add to a simple game then it is to try and cram in everything a more complex game needs.

The title screen.

An in-game shot. Basically, you can order bats to dig (build the level you play), and in the new cave room build different structures for hatching worker and soldier bats and providing food to them. At fixed intervals, a wave of most horrific enemies will attack the battery – so you better have enough soldiers by then.

The title screen

The gnomes will run towards the green pillar, and avoid the red pillar.

But only if they feel like it.

The original download is mirrored here – no idea if the game itself still works: download link

Featuring 10 levels, 8 bit palette graphics awesomeness, developed for DOS using Allegro and DJGPP, it placed about 14th. Its shortcomings seemed to be that people had trouble figuring it out, had real trouble passing level 3 (The Holy Cactuses, which was pretty hard), had trouble running DOS games, and also found ‘hold out for X seconds’ extremely annoying (because it sucks to fail at ’2 seconds left’ and have to replay the level).

You can download a newer, slightly improved version (for Windows) of Save The Hut as a .zip archive, or as an installer. Or, you could get the old compo version (for DOS).

On the tech side I realized I needed to up my production going beyond what can be done with pygame. I used pyplus and swig to build C extensions for my game so that I could do some cool graphic and swarming techniques not possible within python. However this caused some trouble, I was able to submit my linux source of the game for the deadline, but due to the craziness of python extensions for windows it took me another full day of work to get it ported to windows.

After the compo I made a shareware version of the game:

Check it out.