(I will once again attempt to use Halo references as diary entry titles, the first part of this one is from the cover of the original Halo:CE)

This is going to be a challenge.  I'm not going to lie, I probably shouldn't be competing.  But I want to do something more productive with the time that I'm not completing schoolwork or already engaged in other activities.  

I can count off at least 25 hours that I did have last attempt (MEEG - PyWeek 13) and I will likely have even less time than that.  I will counter this lack of time by implementing a much simpler engine.  No scrolling, top down or completely flat, and most importantly, minimal collision detection! That's what really killed me last time, that and my animation system, would have been easier to draw out each frame as it's own picture.

Enough blathering about a year and a half ago, I am going to be striving to complete something.  It will be short and simple, both from gameplay and code standpoints.  Elegantly simple code is beautiful, and python allows for simple code if used correctly.  I will be aiming for only one or two mechanics, and a similarly small number of objectives.  Toss in a nice GUI (pray for my sanity there) and you have a strong pyweek entry...

Why does it always seem so simple?

I thought for some reason that the challenge started tomorrow.  oops.  I was in the middle of a five hour mini challenge I made for myself, so I'll have to rewrite a bunch of boilerplate code I just wrote. oh well!

Nemesis... My idea was vauge for this one, I'll need to hammer it down quickly then get a skeletal engine, in two to three hours, sounds reasonable. 

Python Jedi

Day 0.5: (competition starts at 20 00 here, so I took a bit of time to see where I could get)

I managed to nail down a fun mechanic, write out a UML, sketch out the core classes, and then code roughly 3/4 of the engine in 3 hours.  Now I understand why I failed to complete my entry last time, I was working on too much.  Depending on free time tomorrow I might have a first demo up.

Goal for tomorrow:
Event Handling (skipped to work on other classes)
code an entity update function
create temp pictures
upload demo

I'm going for a game that will likely be fun to jump in for 5-10 minutes at a time, but fun enough to play a couple times.

enough blathering, I'm too tired and excited to think coherently.  Can't wait to see everyone's progress by the end of tomorrow.

...but let us not forget those who went into the howling depths, and did not come back.
(Halo 3 Epilouge, best cliffhanger ever)

I probably won't get a chance to do any more tweaking to this submission.  I was hoping to put in a few more effects, but I had a bunch of stuff pop up right when i had planned my final coding session.  As it stands, I have a working game that is fun to mess around with and I'm proud of how clean my code is.  I might actually take on some projects now that I have a pretty good engine.

(oddly enough the beginning cutscene to Halo:Reach)

Congrats to petraszd (Balancer of Circles), zsombor, bejus, Forevian, Alex, hayalci, and cyhawk (The Sea of Good and Bad)  I didn't play either of those games, but both look very well done, as the scores would suggest.

I'm actually thrilled that I scored as well as I did, having an uncompleted, clunky engine, with no sfx or animation.  To get above 2.0 in each category is exciting and encouraging for my skills with theme and basic concept design.  I was planning on animating the targets, adding in a few more methods to eliminate them (zeus's fury and schism of hades came to mind), and changing the viepoint to be completely overhead.  Overall, I'm getting better at wrapping my head around the concept of a game engine, and I hope to have some time in the fall for PyWeek 17, with a few projects under my belt in the meantime.  See y'all then!

Shoutout to flyingfox for the humorous award.  Wish I had time for such wit.