Well that was day one then. I stayed up waaaaay past my bed time to find out what the theme was (I live in the UK), and then I promptly went to bed, wondering what I was going to do with 'Nine Times'.

Inspiration came this morning in the form of some suggestions from my two sons, who both had some great ideas about using a game idea I was working on last year. I decided to go with it, strip it back because of the one week deadline and set about scribbling notes and cackling like a madman (OK, I lied about the cackling).

My idea is this: you control two ships at once. One on the bottom of the screen, and one on the side. Both fire when you hit the fire key. Yes, it may be tricky - time will tell how solid this idea is.

You have to defend a space ship filled with... oh I don't know, the last of humanity or something, from attacking alien scum, which need to be blasted to bits. 

The aliens will attack in formations of 9, and the shield of the ship you must protect can only take 9 direct hits before exploding and taking with it the last of humanity. Oh, and the name of the game: CrossFire... has nine letters. :-)

I have scribbled some 8 bit retro sprites, and plan to add some kind of neon glow effect to them before the week is through. I have tried to upload a screenshot of the game, but I keep getting a http 500 error. I'll try again in my next entry.

Day two flew by, mainly because of that pesky job thing they keep making me go to.

Anyway... long story short (because I have to get up for said job thing in around 5 and a bit hours) I have added a starfield, some chunky enemy sprites, some very chunky player bullets that work and everything, and am overall happy with the progress.

I have added yet another '9' element to the game: because I want the GFX to be chunky pixel type affairs I am limiting my palette for the whole game to 9 colours. I'm sure there are more ways to shoehorn '9' in somewhere.

I'm never going to win awards for my graphic design skills, but I'm confident it will be fun to play :)

5 days and 30 minutes to go. Eeek.

Day what?! Oh dear. Time is slipping through my grasp. Never mind. Onwards.

The game is taking shape nicely... the players missiles / bullets / whatever can now blow them scum sucking aliens out of the sky (or space or whatever... I'm rather tired), there is a scoring system, and three different types of aliens to blow away. I was hoping for 9 but that is stretching things a little given the current 3 day and 41 minute deadline. I have booked Friday off work to try and claw back some lovely precious wonderful time. 

I am having so much fun :-). It's refreshing after years of coding boring database applications to actually make something that involves exploding aliens and such.

Also... a tip. It's not a good idea to try to watch Boardwalk Empire while coding your PyWeek game. I found that out the hard way.
 
Righty. To bed.

I'm glad I booked a day off work today to work on my game or I'd never have got it ready. I have worked pretty much all day and evening fixing bugs and adding baddie collision detection. I have yet to implement: the players shields, the sound fx, titles and menu and (if I have time) a basic particle explosion system.

It's nice to see the game coming together after all my late nights and scribblings on the train. I have lost several game features along the way (such as the aim changing to just to blasting the aliens rather than protect a space ship, which imo wouldn't have worked).

I'm rather tired and I am pretty sure my Tux plush just moved on it's own so I reckon it's time for bed. See you for the final push tomorrow!

Wow. I just finished the tweaking that has gone on all evening and I have uploaded my final version. 

This week has been a huge amount of fun, and I really hope that you all enjoy my little game.

The idea is to defeat 9 waves of increasingly irate and difficult to kill aliens. The twist is that you control two ships at once.

Use the z and x keys to fire, and the cursor keys to move the ships.

I haven't created any binary executables, sorry, as I ran out of time. I have used the Skellington 2.3 structure though so just run_game.py and away you go.

I have learned a lot about Python this week, and have really fallen in love with the language. I discovered better ways to do a lot of things and as such my code is patchy with regards to quality and Pythonic-ness :-)

I think that's it. Right... I'll leave you all to it, and I'll look forward to taking a look at what everyone else has come up with.

Cheers,

Dave.