After some brainstorming, and a reading session about the mars, i have some game ideas, although they are not really exciting.

One game idea is based on a one way mission to mars. It will be an exploration and survival game. Apparently i am not the only one who had the idea with mars :)

The other likely idea is based on these pokemon riddles similar to the ice levels. You have to go through one way passages, wich send you through the maze, which you have to try to escape.

Also i did some graphics for the main character. It is very tiny pixelart (8*8). The smaller the graphics, the less i could do wrong ;)
I'm quite satisfied with it's appearance. Even though i don't like the walking animation i stick with it for the moment.



(It's an astronaut)

Today i began coding the actual game and finished quite a bit. I implemented the astronaut, who can walk over a tilemap of the mars. The movement is tilebased like in the pokemon and early final fantasy games. Tomorrow i will try to come up with some content or mechanic, besides wandering around.

I wasted much time searching the web about opengl and pyglet as my game has a strange bug: As i am using pixelart i use GL_NEAREST for scaling. Although everything looks fine and scales pixely, the main character is scaled smoothly. When i am switching application, the hero is scaled correctly after switching back. Also does anyone know why you can't blit textures onto other textures, if they are loaded with pyglet.resource, but can if loaded with pyglet.image?

TIL the hard way that pyglet isn't the best choice for pixelart games. Now i have rewritten everything to use retrogamelib, which is based on pygame. It is much more easier if you don't have to fight with buggy scaling. Also i get a retro looking menu for free!

As i can't use pyglets animation anymore, i am know using pyganim. It was easy plug and play, although i can't use spritesheets anymore. I found nothing promising for handling spritesheets in a quick websearch, and i'm too lazy to write it myself ;)

If you are interested you can checkout my darcs repository at http://darcsden.com/lennart/retroMars.

So i finished the game, although there isn't much content in it. Tomorrow, after i will have slept, i will write something more about it, and how the development was going and so on …

Congratulations to everyone!