Jack Whitham - 20,000 Light Years Into Space

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20,000 Light Years Into Space is a steampunk-themed strategy game where you have to manage a steam supply network. It is written in Python and runs on Windows and Linux. It was first released in 2006, and won second prize in the Pyweek game programming competition. It is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL version 2. It is now being distributed with the Debian and Ubuntu operating systems, and you can download it here too. There is a story for the game. Light Years includes an interactive tutorial; you can also read the instructions and a bit of history about Light Years.

Comments from a Light Years player:

Man this is a fun game! ... thanks for writing it!

-- Shae Matijs Erisson

Files


	A small steam network in Light Years.

There are three ways to play Light Years:

On a Windows computer, you can:
Download Windows version 1.2 (4.8Mb)
Open the ZIP file and copy the contents to a suitable place on your hard disk, then click on LightYears.exe to play.
On recent Debian or Ubuntu Linux systems, you can enter the following command (as root):
apt-get install lightyears
This automatically installs the game. Enter lightyears to play. (APT package web page)
On other versions of Linux, and possibly MacOS, you can download and install the source code:
Download source code version 1.3a (0.6Mb)
If you want to run the source release, you must install the Python and Pygame software first.

When all else fails, check the instructions!

Contributors

This official version of Light Years continues to be managed by Jack Whitham, but it now includes code contributions and suggestions from a number of other people:

Tom Dalton, who suggested the steam flow visualisation and a number of other improvements,
Matthew Marshall, who contributed a patch for a different version of the same visualisation feature,
Alexandru Toma, Terrence Brannon, Andrew Wilkinson, Neil Mitchell, James Wells and Jillian who tested the game and provided bug reports.
Ivo Anjo, Enrico Zini, Denilson Sa and Jan Niemeyer who sent in feature suggestions.
Richard Jones, who organised the competition that inspired this game.
Siegfried-A. Gevatter, who maintains the Debian package, wrote the man page, and contributed code to make the game suitable for Debian distribution.

The next version of the game will include code written by the following people:

David M. Marti, who has been working on several improvements,
Anne Archibald, who made a feature suggestion, wrote a patch to implement it and made some new graphics.

There is no official public code repository for Light Years, so the only way to contribute to the official version is to send your code, graphics, suggestions etc. to Jack Whitham by email. However, because this is free software (GNU GPL version 2), you are welcome to make your own unofficial version or set up your own code repository. Jack would be pleased to link to unofficial versions, and/or merge their content into the official version; if this happens, you always get full credit and retain copyright on your code or artwork.


		Copyright (C) Jack Whitham 1997-2010