We appear to have gotten off to a reasonably smooth start. Given the Moon theme the team seemed to automatically gravitate towards science fiction themes and after much discussion we agreed on doing some sort of top-down puzzle action game with maybe light combat. To tie in the theme further, we made the protagonist a werewolf.



Having learned previously that physics engines are hard, we opted to use a physics engine library this time. After an extensive selection process (i.e. we found it first) we decided to use pymunk. Jerith attempted to convince us again that writing a physics engine wasn't actually that hard, but fortunately the memory of Nine Tales was still fresh in everyone's minds.

Having selected a vague genre, storyline and tool set, we got to work and ended the day with:

• a play area with bounding walls
• a protagonist that can change between human and werewolf forms
• the beginnings of a level editor
• the ability to change between game and menu screens
• a pressure sensitive switch on the floor
• reasonable first draft of player movement controls
• some code for loading resources
• artwork for the protagonist and a few aliens

Today was a work day, which meant much reduced pyweek productivity. Hodgestar spent the day sick in bed, so we're all hoping he recovers swiftly and gets back to game writing soon.

Despite this, we've made some solid progress:

• Prettier pictures. The protagonist's werewolf form shown in the screenshot above is actually older than the human form from yesterday. The tiled floor has been excised from the exterior of the level as well.
• More things to do. There are pressure switches (which existed in a very primitive form yesterday), indicator lights, a bunch of behind-the-scenes plumbing to hook them up and crates to push around the place. These are some of the building blocks we'll be using later to make the game interesting.
• Our level serialisation format changed and tumbleweed wrote a kind-of-YAML parser for it. (This is the kind of crazy thing one does during pyweek. He looked happy, so I didn't want to stop him. The results are good, though.)
• The level editor does more stuff and is easier to use. drnlm is our resident toolsmith and has built this kind of thing for most of our games, so he knows what he's doing here.

Another day spent on infrastructure, there's not much visible change from yesterday. We need to start building levels and a story, soon.

We now have a patrolling alien, who is quite fun to push around. It pushes back, but is otherwise mostly harmless.

We have a couple of new objects are present in the world:

• There are doors between levels, or teleporting around inside the level. They can be locked, and require a switch to unlock (like the one with the green light on it, in the screenshot).
• We have a new class of interior drywall, which doesn't need to be a closed polygon.
• And there are notes on the floor, that display when the protagonist is over them.

And, even less visible changes:

• Decoy has gone on a sound hunting spree, and apparently found us a mountain of background music and possible effects. Nothing has been hooked up, yet, though.
• Some code was tidied up, to avoid the game_object module collapsing under its own weight.
• New werewolf artwork landed. We now have 6 out of the possible 8 movement directions.

The level editor gained some features, but we're mostly still level-editing in a text editor. We'll need to allow it to add objects to the level, and then we can start building the game. I hope we haven't left that too late...

Work unfortantely still continues to distract us, so progress is still slower than I like.

Art continued to arrive and the game is looking very pretty.
 
The level editor learnt a few new tricks, and can now interact with the various objects we've created, which should make generating gameplay content a lot easier.

We also started working on the combat part. The aliens can now damage the player, although the player still shrugs off death as a minor inconvenience. We've also added simple, although rather idiosyncratic, bullets.

Decoy managed to find time to trawl through several lists of freely reusable audio files for sound effects, and we've started work on hooking those up, which will make sneaking in time to work on the game at the office a lot harder.

During the course of the day, we also added some global state to track various statistics, and this promtly led to a basic save game being implemented.

The underlying plumbing is now in decent shape. Several of the team will be in the same location tomorrow, so hopefully that will allow us to get some planning on content and story done, so we can push forward with the actual game.

The wolf claw attack was fixed early this morning -- no more scuff marks -- and also got some new art. We got new floor tiles in two colours, as well as two kinds of terrain: acid spills, which damage our intrepid heroine, and patches of moonlight which force her to turn into a werewolf. OK, moonlight isn't technically a terrain. I have also been informed that it is specifically Titanlight, which is why I have made it orange. Science!

Aliens now spit acid blobs, which makes them a lot more deadly. You can make the protagonist shoot or claw semi-automatically by holding down Z, so you don't have to keep mashing the keyboard.

We added the interior of the protagonist's spaceship as a starting level. There are now some coloured keycards for opening certain doors. Most of the level is reset when you leave and come back, but some things are persistent, like inventory and doors that you have already opened. Exactly how this should be implemented was the subject of some spirited debate. The inventory is currently invisible.

Of course a lot of framework expansion and refactoring happened in the background, including many physics tweaks and bugfixes. You can no longer be shot by an enemy on another level, for example.  Oh, and we also have a working title for the game: Werewolf Sonata.

Being a werewolf is generally pretty awesome right now, since clawing is easier than shooting and the werewolf barely registers damage. Of course you can't pick anything up without opposable thumbs. We're going to need to add some more downsides -- we should have a better idea of how to balance things when we make all the levels tomorrow. (All the levels! We totally have enough time. It'll be fine.)

Today was spent recovering from last night's frantic rush to the finish and sorting out packaging, which manages to be a source of constant surprises.

Ensuringt that pymunk was included correctly created a few issues which took time to sort out. I lost a couple of hours to some unexpected behaviour of py2exe, which took a long time to understand and work around. while jerith fought with the MacOS build, eventually declaring a partial victory, as the game runs, but insists on starting minimized for no apparant reason.

We were a bit careless with the branches, and so a handful of post-pyweek bugfixes snuck into the packaged versions. Some none of them should significantly affect the basic gameplay, we decided not to redo the uploads to exclude the fixes. People wanting to judge the final submission should use the nagslang-0.1.tgz upload.

The errant fixes are:

• Fix the acid animation which got lost in the last few minutes of pyweek
• Correctly cleanup on scene changes so we don't constantly leak memory
• Improve checks on the sound system so we don't crash if ogg files aren't read correctly