Okay wow, length of a piece of string won. Weird too, I expected fog to win, with OpenGL fog support basically making it over-easy for all the competitors to integrate fog. Then again, maybe we all just don't like the idea of making stuff too easy. Currently, I'm reading up on the help page and re-reading the rules.

I'm just sitting around, not really doing any brainstorming. Once Forrest gets on though, we'll probably use the rest of our night to think of ideas.

Andrew and I have fleshed out the basic ideas of our game (hint: RTS with string building material) and we have started coding.

We really wish there was a more real-time way to collaborate... We are often working on the same thing and want to watch each other. After PyWeek, we're planning to work on a networked Python IDE showing other's changes @ progress in real-time.

Well, Forrest went to sleep three hours ago and I'm useless as a programmer (curse you time zones!). I've been thinking about some gameplay ideas. The basic concept is similar to the Tower Defense line of flash games, but with a few twists, some to accommodate the theme and some for originality. You start with a limited number of string and then select the starting spool to place another endpoint at. Then, you have string stretching from Point A to Point B. Enemy gets near string, string attacks enemy. Enemy touches string, enemy attacks string. String has cooldown. Enemy doesn't. New segments can be built from either the main spool or each successive endpoint.

So far, we're gonna get a blank map with a generic background texture working first. Afterwards, we'll add snow and water to slow and stop enemy movement, respectively. Some challenges will be writing a pure Python pathfinding engine that's efficient, drawing the sprites (neither of us are graphics guys), and lots more. Stay tuned for details.

Day 7, and I haven't written any code. All I've been doing has been a giant learning exercise via reading Forrest's genius at work. I did screw around a _little_ bit with the graphics, and I could probably write something now that I realize what each line does, but we're basically feature complete and just fixing bugs. D:

I give up perhaps the happiest day of my life in a long time to help my family move furniture around, and what do I get for it? I get locked out of my own house. Which sucks about twice as hard as it sounds because that was in the closing hours of PyWeek, and I had to walk quite a bit to my mom's workplace just to be babysat until my dad came back.

Seriously, I was really looking forward to the coding crunch of today, but I guess not. What the heck. Maybe next time...

I just realized in the last second frenzy that Forrest stopped me from uploading my copy of the game. My most up-to-date copy. So the main thing lacking from the game is the README.txt, which in Forrest's version doesn't have a license or a title. The title is... (quick Forrest, gimme a title)... umm.... String Defense! Yeah! And the licenses used would be the GPLv2 for all code and the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License for all artwork and music.

Have fun playing it guys!

Don't know why for sure, but Forrest just told me to write an entry detailing gameplay. Umm, it's probably in the README.txt, but I'll do it anyways. Protect the spool. Right click to place hub. String attacks enemy. Left click to select a hub to build from. Enemies get stronger with each successive foe. Hubs heal at a small rate. Eventually, you're gonna get raped, and we didn't put on a kill counter, so you never know how many you defeated. I've personally got to the point where enemies make one hit KOs on my hubs, and i still survived through sheer number of hubs killing the enemies before they even touched me. Soon enough, their health increased enough to get past my defenses and rape me some more. So yeah, that's gameplay.