I did it! I actually managed to submit an entry for PyWeek 40, which finished at 1am this morning. My game is called Loco Lift Rush, and it's a simple puzzle-action game (I think?) in which you control a lift in an ever-growing skyscraper, picking up and dropping off a continuous stream of motley passengers.

Play Loco Lift Rush

Time well spent

I was very pleased with how I managed my time this week, this was largely thanks to a ruthless focus on keeping the scope of the game manageable. Sometimes it really pays to "Murder your darlings".

For instance, my original plan was to have the building grow dynamically during play. My vision was for the top floor to be a perpetual construction site, complete with animated workers. I'd even sourced a whole library of construction sound effects to bring it to life. But my first draft of the art looked so janky without any animation and I realised there just wasn't time to do the idea justice.

Cutting that feature was the right decision, as it let me focus on the core game loop and get it mostly done by the second day, which gave me a huge boost of momentum that carried through the rest of the week.

Outsourcing art direction

To start with, I was struggling with the visual theme of the game - in my head I saw 1930s New York, art-deco skyscrapers and uniformed elevator operators. But then my 6 year old daughter Romilly started drawing her own ideas for the game's passengers. Her characters were so imaginative and fun that I decided to use them unchanged with only a light cleanup in GIMP. They give the game a charming, quirky style that I never could have designed myself.

The sound effects were all taken from Pixabay, and I edited them with Audacity - particularly the lift moving sound, which I chopped up to make it fit with the lift starting and stopping.

The final boss that I couldn't defeat was the music. I'm not a musician (yet), and composing even a single looping track filled me with dread, so I put it off until I ran out of time. This is definitely the first thing I want to tackle in the post-jam version. I have been experimenting with Bosca Ceoil, which is really simple and fun to use, so lets see what I can come up with.

What next?

The list of ideas for improvements and new features is as long as my arm, and we're only just over a week into the second month of my one game a month challenge. So I will continue to work on Loco Lift Rush, and release an updated version. Some upgrades I have in mind are:

• Music
• More passenger types, with different behaviours and patience levels - partcularly passengers who add buffs and debuffs to the lift (e.g. a rocket man who makes the lift go faster, or an elephant who makes it go slower)
• Dynamic difficulty progression - reinstating the mechanic of adding floors during play - maybe after you serve a certain number of passengers, or after a time limit.
• Animations
• And of course, bug fixes and polish

I'll also be writing a post-mortem, after the PyWeek judging results are in. I hope you'll give Loco Lift Rush a play and enjoy this little game that was built in just one week!