So first day we all gathered together and spent about 6 hours only with pencils, paper and our storming brains. First there was an idea of a planet and its moons. Since we all like platformers, we decided to make a platformer, that would be played in space. The game map (2D) will contain several planets (circle shape), each with it's own gravity, and player can run and jump around those planets on its edges, just like this:



Player should be able to jump from one planet to another using some sort of platforms, thing to be invented yet.

We also came up with even more amazing idea - that if you fall in a pit on the planet, you get to the INSIDE planet, where the gravitation is opposite - you can walk on the inner edge of the planet. The inner world should also be more Earth-like, something like jungle, outside should be, on the other hand, Moon-like. This inner world idea is sort of extra, we will implement it only if we manage to make the outside world very soon...

First day finished without single line coded, that means, second day and coding is to come!

So the second day we actually made great progress. The day began very early, I went to donate blood along with a friend of mine, who was to become our chief graphics designer (I need to put him in the team once he registers). I showed him our concepts, and here he came with first amazing graphics:




Today me and wary spent whole day coding, and used some linear algebra and physics, as we tried to make realistic gravity and movement on planets (moons). I must say I was surprised by the fun of jumping around the planets itself.

The trickies part was the controls. Since when you're heads down it's pretty hard to hit the correct arrows (that are opposite of the direction), I decided to change the behavior of the keys depending on the angle player has against the closest planet. The resulting code of the function was a big mess, but the desired behavior is reached, so I forget about the function now and will never look back at it :)

Today was a bit lazier, I put together pretty cool and working camera, which I have never done before, but I found it so much fun. Wary did an amazing job with our platform engine, which required loads of math, physics and hack, and we're almost there.

Martin, our designer did very well with graphics, so far I absolutely love it! He created the main character and several monsters in vectors, and Honza (jakkoli) managed to create from them several animations, here is our main character and some evil inhabitant:

        


We still need to work on the gravity and acceleration to make it as enjoyable as possible. Next step is to implement the graphics, add some enviroment objects (spikes..), add monsters, sounds, make music... We have lot of things to do!

It's way too late, so just briefly: we almost finished work on the gravity, decided to make a visible circle showing, where the gravity works, and also we made gravity constant in the whole circle, so the levels would be more enjoyable.

We finally put some nice clothes on our engine:



You can see our hero in action. We actually found out, that the black outline is very hard to see on the dark background, so we need to remake most of our character animations (that means loads of images). Another thing you notice is the ugly blue circle. I found out there is no way in pygame to render nice aa circle, so maybe we let it as it is, or will try to make some kind of dashed ring...

Next step: animations, enemies, pickups and other enviroment objects!

So it's finally over. Last two days I coded in a row, 43 hours awake, and we actually made it, almost exactly how we planned it. Last three days we already had the movement sorted out (that turned out to be the greatest challenge of this week), so we could start making game logic, such as checkpoints, geysers, and the monsters.

A small note to our monsters and creatures. The first idea we got about our main character (Xoxoan) was, that it should have legs, arms and eyes. So we came with our version of a stickman, just without body, and it looked like an X letter just with eyes. And we thought, well, let's do other letters. It was very easy, so we came with O (side-moving hedgehog-like creature), I (vertical jumping monster), Q (flying rounded beast with a machine gun), C (moves like slug and spits his own eye that quickly grows again). We really liked the idea of eyes on feelers (antennas) like our hero, so we gave them to most of our monsters, and we also made single eye on an antenna as a spike thingy.

For the graphics, Martin (Bosvi) did most of the graphics in Illustrator, all stable images, then he sent it to us and Honza (jakkoli) made them move in Illustrator and Photoshop. Martin unfortunately had to leave on Thursday (he went for a holiday to Greece :) ) so he actually made it all in about 3 days, and I must say it really is awesome!

On Friday I spent an hour or two with my keyboard and put together the music. It was actually pretty easy, because space-like music is very intuitive for me, and the ideas came together very quickly (I haven't composed for a long time, so I simply took some ideas from last few months). On Saturday I managed to get the music from my keyboard and edit it slightly, and 4 background songs came to life, right on time. I also wanted to do some sound for the creatures, I even recorded 3 minutes of creeking, grumbling and growling, but I didn't have time and energy to follow through and finish it (I recorded it 3 hours before deadline).

Last day was a lot about designing levels, most of them was made by Honza (jakkoli) and one by Fanda (wary). It was a challenge, because we didn't have time to make an editor (which would be awesome), so we had to manually type all the levels, planet positions etc. Even though under pressure, I think Honza did pretty good job and designed all the levels with appropriate difficulty and with lot of cool ideas (such as micro planets or a goal outside the gravity area). Also the story was mostly written by Honza.

I must say I really enjoyed the whole week, it was hard and of course not always without bugs and long debugging, but the idea, the art work and also the vision of ready game was firing us up, so we spent really most of our time on making the game and stayed motivated the whole time.

I would like to say big thanks to all of my teammates, they did terrific job, especially with my never ending list of remarks and complaints about graphics and animations. Special thanks to Fanda (who already participated in pyweek with me before), who this time really took big part of the coding and really improved in organization, and as always exceled in physics and math formulas and functions, and really worked hard in making the game perfect.

For myself, I personaly enjoyed this pyweek the most (out of my 4 successful participations), especially thanks to the growth of our team (it was Martin's and Honza's first time). The feeling of completing a game is a reward itself!

Marek (maral)