There is talk during each pyweek and ludumdare about a program that manages the playing and judging of the games. Apparently Unnheulu made a bash script last pyweek, but I’ve been wanting a GUI solution that works on any (or almost any) game, not just ones set up using the pyweek skellington, so I started the Compo Game Loader project.
The project is hosted at google code and you can see it here: http://code.google.com/p/compogameloader/
Here is a list of some interesting features:
- Load a directory and CGL creates a list of all the games inside
- CGL tracks which games you have already played so you can see what still needs to be judged
- CGL can track games in an unlimited number of folders in case there is an overlapping compo or similar situation
- Authors can add a lot of extra info by adding a simple CGL config file to their game folder. CGL can show author info and links, screenshots, dependencies, and a link to the judging page for that game
- Searches for a readme and displays it in CGL for your reference
- In python applications, CGL can test if the required dependencies are already installed
- Play games from inside CGL with console output shown at the bottom. No need to open consoles to get error info and trackbacks
Right now CGL is about 95% complete: Almost all the code is in, but it needs some testing and I’d like to get some user feedback. That’s where you come in.
First and foremost I need some sample games. I will download old pyweek games from the site if necessary, but I really would rather have games given to me by the authors. This allows me to
- test lots of different game structures
- get feedback on the config XML setup
I think the config file is extremely easy to use, but if nobody else thinks so the project will fail. Don’t be afraid though - you simple add your game info to the relevant tags in an already created file, as described here.
I also need some beta testers to find any bugs I missed and to test on linux and mac boxes.
If you want to help, leave me a comment here or find me on IRC in the ludumdare (irc.afternet.org #ludumdare) or pyweek (irc.freenode.net #pyweek) channels. LD #12 is just over 2 weeks away - with your help we can have CGL ready for it.
3 responses so far ↓
1 pansapiens // Jul 17, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Hey, great tool … I always meant to make one of these myself to streamline judging .. it’s fun but half my time is often spent unzipping & and installing etc, not just playing. I decided not to pursue it because I like the “limited rules, free-form style” of Ludum Dare, and felt a loader would be just formalizing things too much. But now that I see the result, I think you will find a lot of people would be happy to use it (I certainly will).
I’ve tested it quickly on Linux with a directory of ~30 random games from LD #11 …
Of those that actually had readme files, CGL found most, except those named “README.TXT” (all caps). No screenshots.
I made a gameinfo.xml with a screenshot for my game Mondrian, as a test, and it was pretty slick. I like the fact you can follow http links from the Overview and Readme tabs. The only part that failed was actually launching mondrian.py, since because it was being launched in a different working directory by the loader, it couldn’t find the data files using relative paths … that’s basically sloppy coding on my part, but it could be a ‘gotcha’ for other Pygamers. CGL could conceivably change working directories when launching to work around this ?
A “mark as unplayed” button would be handy too, just in case you want to leave a game to come back to it. And a being able to sort the list on played/unplayed status would be nice, but not essential.
I also have some long notes about some ideas to do with the XML format, and a Unicode (arghhh!) bug, but I’ll put those over on the Google Code project soon.
2 Keeyai // Jul 17, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Hey, thanks for trying it out, and great feedback! I DEFINITELY need to change the current directory — that totally slipped my mind. I’ll add that next. Having messed around with it a bit, I think a ‘mark as unplayed’ button is important as well. I’ll check on that readme - I thought I handled the all caps case…
Again - great feedback. Thank you and keep it up!
3 Ludum Dare #12 entry: The Siege of von Danken Tower | OMGWTF GAMES !!1! // Aug 10, 2008 at 6:03 pm
[...] Windows, (maybe Linux): Download this zip archive which contains the windows version of Stella and The Siege of von Danken Tower ROM, which is compatible with Keeyai’s Compo Game Loader [...]
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