mat-tina wrote:r1chard wrote:Haragorn wrote:The platformer engine took me about a month of classtime to do, but with how it is now, it would take very little time to design more stages.
PyWeek forbids the use of existing game engines

Wait, what? Don't you mean engines published less than a month before the competition, or does all code have to be written from scratch?
Obviously, one must enter machine language directly to the CPU with a toggle switch. Oh wait, at least we can use Python. What exactly is a "game engine" anyway?
This seems to spell it out clearly enough. It can't implement "game logic". Oops. Whatever that means. There is a
wiki page with examples of accepted libraries. Also, no "personal libraries"; all code that isn't written during the challenge must have been publicly available for at least a month beforehand. Oh, and they are supposed to be "well documented" as well.
So, I've thrown my hat in as well. I've been coding Python professionally for eight years or so. I don't have any game writing experience, but I work a lot with data visualization, including some 3D stuff. I probably won't have time for a lot of hardcore coding, but I can be a sounding board and provide tips, guidance, and support code.
Another one to check out is
Visual Python. It really makes a lot of 3D work simple, but you do give up flexibility. It was designed for physics education. Also, my favorite open source platformer, not in Python:
Blob Wars. Accept no imitations. Wow, it used to be the only one that google found, honest

Oh, and I'm GMT-6...well -5 actually, due to that silly Daylight Savings Time stuff.
EDIT: Another tool I was going to mention is
Paint.NET. It's a photo editing/bitmap oriented tool, not as bulky as the GIMP, and way better than MS Paint. Still fairly bulky though, if you count the dotNET 3 runtime

Inkscape rocks, but if you need to play with bitmaps, I'd use this.