A couple of weeks ago I participated in a 48-hour game jam hosted by PlayFab here in Seattle, with fellow procedural planet veteran Alex Peterson, my good friend and composer Leo Langinger, and the fortunate last minute addition of artist Brent Rawls.

We were both surprised and excited to have won this game jam, especially given the number and quality of competing entries.

I haven’t had much time to update here in a while, having been hard at work on an entry for the udevgames contest. If you read my earlier post, you may recall I was initially going to enter a pixel-art lemmings clone, but midway through development, I decided that the concept was basically not fun to play.

So I switched over to building a 3D space-sim, with only a single month remaining in the competition. The plus side was that I have much more experience with 3D graphics, but lack of time was still a killer. I can’t honestly say it is much more fun to play, given its unfinished state, but the core gameplay is certainly there.

The game is basically a prototype, and an example of a larger game produced with Python and Pyglet. As per the rules of the competition, the game is open source, although in its present state, it probably isn’t much use to anyone. When I have the time, I intend to cleanup and comment the code, which will hopefully be useful to others starting out with Python, Pyglet, or games development in general.

Despite the code being cross-platform, I only have a Mac binary up for now, as I have unable to coerce ODE into even a semblance of stability under Windows. When or if I manage to sort the crashes out, it will run fine on both platforms.

So if you have a Mac, and want to take the binary out for a spin, you can grab it from http://www.udevgames.com/games/entry/ashima_iv, or if you would like to browse the source, visit the project page at https://github.com/swiftcoder/ashima-iv. While you are about it, consider taking the time to check out the other entries to this year’s udevgames contest, and remember to vote for your favourites!