Pyo Pyo

Wha wha what?

Pyo pyo is a python / pygame falling blobs game, inspired by the Puyo Puyo series made by Compile. Pyo Pyo aims to (eventually) be a better Puyo Puyo than Puyo Puyo, incorporating many different features that have appeared throughout the series and adding a few extras.

Still have no clue what Puyo Puyo is? That's probably because they didn't release the game in many countries besides Japan. There were a few clones with names like "Kirby's Avalanche", and "Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine"...if those ring any bells.

Superficially, Puyo Puyo resembles the various tetris clones, because it involves falling pieces that you rotate and place on the board. I know what you're thinking, "Ugh, not another tetris clone!". Well, good news. That's about all tetris and Puyo Puyo have in common. In Puyo Puyo if you horizontally or vertically line up 4 or more Puyos of the same color, they explode and anything above the explosion drops. The falling pieces can then line up and possibly trigger more explosions and drops. The more chain reactions you can trigger, the more "ojama" or garbage puyos you then drop on your opponent. It's deceptively simple, and extremely addictive. I highly recommend picking up a copy if you can find one.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Dependencies

You'll need python (I'm using 2.2), and pygame (I'm using 1.5), along with the dependencies they require. (Most likely SDL and a few SDL extras like SDL image). Things should work smoothly for you if you're using: Linux, FreeBSD, IRIX, MacOS, OSX, BeOS, or Windows.

Download

You can use the pserver:anonymous cvs for now, since the game is really early in development. If you don't know how to do this, there's documentation on the project's cvs page. The module is named pyo-pyo. Once you check it out, you'll also want to grab the images, which are being kept out of cvs, and are in a separate tarball named pyopyo-images-XXX.tar.gz, on the project's file page. Just unpack them into the images directory of your cvs snapshot. Fire it up using "python main.py".

Once the game is more mature there will be proper releases available. Until that time, it'll be cvs only.

Help

Act now! For a limited time only you can see your name in blinking text on this prestigious web page. But wait, there's more! If you contribute in the next 10 minutes you will show up in the game credits. This looks great on a resume! And chicks love it. *cough*

Um yeah. Pyopyo could really use an overhaul. It'd be nice to have some good sounding music and/or sound effects. Graphics are needed too. If you're a coder, you can help out as well. Currently this includes networking, AI, and just about anything you see as a flaw. Patches are always welcome from anyone. Be forewarned: The code is currently a complete mess, and is being rewritten.

If any of this is up your alley, by all means send an email to the address below.

Screenshots

Status

Jan 31, 2003:
Rewrite time. Yeah baybee. After basically giving up on the project for almost a half a year I'm back to work on it some more. This time I know a little more about what I'm doing.

Older stuff:

• Most of the board mechanics are finished.
• The controls feel pretty good, so that's mostly finished. I want to add joystick support, but for some reason (sdl? pygame? driver?) my logitech joypad hat never triggers hat right events.
• Blitting layers: On a 400mhz pII it's painfully slow, especially when the board begins to fill up. Main reason: I do collision detection using pygame's spritecollide between each exploding particle and each puyo on the board. I'm looking at ways to map pixel coordinates to board coordinates to do this very quickly. This would have been easy if I thought about it before I wrote all the other code. It's currently on the back burner though. If you download a cvs snapshot and it's way too slow, just start it up using the -noparticles flag until this is fixed.
• The graphics need a serious overhaul. I'm planning to do away with gifs and stick to pngs. Animations need to be done, and the way adjacent puyos link together now looks pretty cheesy (the lollipop sticks must go!). I've been toying with ways to animate them jiggling and squashing convincingly. And I really don't want to use any 3d software to do this. Hand drawn is the look I'm going for.
• Scoring and computing the number of ojamas to drop. How does this sound: (numchains-1)*numcolumns + sum[i = 1 to numchains](i*(length(chain_i)-length_to_explode)) or 1. If you know a better way, please tell me about it.
• Multiplayer! I haven't touched this yet, but have planned: multiplayer on the same machine, network multiplayer.
• AI: none yet. Lots of ideas sketched out though. The goal is to have multiple "personalities", each with varying degrees of difficulty.

Blah blah

More here as it evolves.