10 Jul

Blood Valley

Filed under: Boardgames,PC Games 3 Responses

So I recently figured out how to use cx_Freeze to make a standalone distributable of a Python game made using the Pygame library. It turned out to be an embarrassingly simple fix (you just need to add “import pygame._view”). So I’m making available my adaptation of the Blood Valley gamebook, written by Mark Smith and Jamie Thompson.

Disclaimers: This is pretty much a faithful conversion of the entire gamebook and I obviously don’t own the property. This is a just a private, for fun programming project. If the property owners are upset about this I’ll take it down immediately. This is also a very rough, very buggy program currently. Expect crashes and typographical errors. Hopefully it won’t blow up your computer.

Usage notes:

  • I haven’t implemented Save / Load Game so those menu items do nothing.
  • I haven’t scanned the maps from the gamebooks too so that button does nothing too. There are no illustrations either.
  • The game runs in a window with a fixed resolution of 1,024 x 768.
  • You can view the character sheet by clicking the top part of the screen. If you’re playing the quarry, you can do this only after you’ve chosen a character class.
  • In the character sheet view, you can click on items in inventory to consume them, i.e. eat food and drink potions etc. If you have more than one weapon, you can also click on a weapon to equip it. The Priest can also use his healing spell from this screen. For the Archveult, the minion you decide to give the healing balm to will have the word “Balm” next to their name. Clicking on it will cause him to use it.
  • The AI is pretty crappy. The Archveult AI in particular doesn’t know how to hunt for the human player.
  • If anyone wants to send me bug reports, I’ll fix obvious errors and typos, but I probably won’t be adding new features.

Downloads

  • This is the standalone version of the program. Just unzip it somewhere and launch bloodvalley.exe.
  • This contains the Python sources, including the PGU components that I used for the UI. To run this, you’ll need the Python interpreter (version 3+) and the appropriate version of the Pygame library installed.

I can’t really guarantee that this will work. Other than my own workstation, I’ve only tested it on my wife’s laptop. So give me a holler if it works for you. I guess I’ll have to look into using cx_Freeze on my Caylus: Magna Carta implementation next.

Written on July 10 2012 and is filed under Boardgames, PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Blood Valley”

lee

it worked for me !! thanks !!!

wankongyew

Cool! I’m glad it works for you. But I recently got reminded what an gamebook conversion done by people who actually know what they are doing looks like and it puts mine to shame.

Check out Project Aon’s implementation of the complete Lone Wolf series if you’re so inclined. It’s amazingly slick and well-designed.

http://www.projectaon.org/staff/david/download.php

lee

no worries, they’re pros, full time working on the project, while you’re doing it as a hobby ! great job !! and thanks for the link !!

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