The year is 2711. Incredible advance in physics have been made, technology has reached a point where a time-traveler from the year 2010 (a virtually impossible feat as crossing time-lines is a really bad idea) would find it indistinguishable from magic.

Until a few hours ago, everyone on Earth was happy. But not the colonists on Mars, ungrateful wretches who were supposedly struggling with the vast debts their ancestors had accrued. Nobody said colonization would be cheap and easy, but that's another story.

War has not been declared for over 300 years. Development in weapons technology has gone the way of analogue radio, windmill design, and nuclear fission.

Now, the colonies have attacked.

World-wide disarmament has left our planet virtually undefended. Our force-field systems ensure that the colonists can't just nuke the place from orbit, but they are useless against close-range fighters. The only warships left on Earth are two behemoth-class destroyers. Ridiculously expensive, impractical, and virtually indestructible, these vessels have been mothballed in museums; one in New York, and the other in a secret location not far from where you sit.

You have been chosen. You aren't perfect for the job, but nobody is. Post-ambulant society does not have pilots.

Your perverse interest in pre-mindlink arcade games means you are one of the few people on the planet with the muscular skills to handle the ship's primitive control system. And as fitness fanatic (who can walk half a mile without losing breath), you are the only person in this city who can climb the steps to reach the cockpit.

You must reach New York, destroy the first wave of colonist invaders, and secure the second ship. This will buy our planet enough time to begin the construction of a new fleet.

We have scrambled their communications systems (our defense matrix is not entirely useless), so they won't be able to attack you en-mass. Their ships are smaller, cheaper, and inferior to yours, so you have a chance.

Unfortunately, our scramblers will also disable your communications when you reach the city, so you will be as blind as you are. And be warned, the ships motion is not very steady. It's fast, and it's powerful, but it can't fly straight. Nor can it fly very high, these vessels tend to hover several meters above ground level. But so do the colonist ships - they seem to have poached designs from a similar error.

If you fail, our planet will be at the mercy of the colonists. Do you really expect them to show us compassion?

Got a separating axis theorem going. Not the theme i would have chosen, but we'll make it work. Going to take it easy today, figure out what I'm doing before i get to invested writing code I might not use.

EDIT: might have spoken too soon when i said "working", detection does but response does not yet.

So, this scientist will goes through some magitechnological mishap that destabilizes molecules in space-time. Now he's on a race against time to save himself from utter disintegration.

It's a man on a unicycle.  Hopefully this is placeholder art!  His legs IK properly with the pedal positions and it's all very wibbly-wobbly to control.  Next: plates on sticks. 

Urg. Once again my least favourite theme wins. :-(

I did come up with an idea for this theme last week, based on doing balancing acts with piles of objects, but it would require more physics than I'm comfortable about pulling off in the time available. Besides, I didn't like it very much.

I have another idea now. It'll require some physics too, but I think I know how I can do it fairly easily. Basically it'll be a platformer where the whole level is wobbling. Not sure exactly how that'll interact with the gameplay, but hopefully some offbeat things will suggest themselves once I start playing with it.

I've also decided that I'm going to have to use OpenGL to get it to perform acceptably. This is the first time that I've used OpenGL in a PyWeek entry, but I'll be using it in a very simple way, so I don't think it will cause too much trouble for either me or my players. Fortunately I added OpenGL support to Albow in the last release, so I'll still be able to use all my GUI stuff along with it.

Progress so far: Basic game framework is in place, and I have some texture mapping code working (not a trivial feat when there are about a dozen parameters, and you have to remember to set all of them in order to get off the ground!).

Task for tomorrow: Write code to simulate transverse waves in a two-dimensional elastic medium.

The first several hours of my first PyWeek were pretty brutal for me (psychologically). I'm normally a developer more than artist (which is to say I almost never do art) but wasn't expecting to have much free time to spend on coding so I'm filling in where there are gaps. And boy is there still a gap! I have sketches of what I want and I know what it should look like on the screen but for the life of me I can not make my ideas fit into the style we're going after. Just a reminder of where I actually belong on projects like this.

Anyway, after a few hours of frustration I finally gave up on the art side for the evening and threw together the beginnings of a cutscene framework and background music manager. Nothing fantastic but I was able to do it without stepping on Blake's toes and got a little bit of polish type work already started. Hopefully in a few days not having to worry about those details will be a bit of a reprieve.

All told I'm pretty happy with day1 progress and can't wait to see what the rest of the week holds.

Day 1 is over and I have no idea what game I'll write this PyWeek. Not even a vague idea.

So I did some scribbles and wrote some code to put something like the scribbles on screen.


(bigger)

It wasn't a total waste though: I re-discovered my love of the golden ratio :-)

Wibbly-wobbly was the theme I thought might win. The other themes were too specific - you either have an idea that works or you don't. Wibbly-wobbly on the other hand, is something that you can tie into any game that has springy animation or dynamics.

Fortunately it was also the idea I spent most of yesterday thinking about.

And so we begin!

(Maybe I shouldn't have wasted the first 6 hours playing Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey and watching 30 Rock. Sorry Jess!)

Wibbly Wobbly?!?!?!

I awoke to an unexpected choice of theme. Personally I was hoping for Cannine and had a few doggy themed things lined up in my head. First thoughts were around WW requiring some fancy physics which I don't have time to get into (even with a library). So onto Google for some inspiration, turns out Wibbly Wobbly has water connotations - there is even a pub called Wibbly Wobbly that is in a barge.

The idea I have settled on for now is based on the Wibbly Wobbly bridge over the Thames in London.
http://www.copyright-free-pictures.org.uk/london-england/47-wibbly-wobbly-bridge.htm
So today wil be an ideas day mostly due to other commitments but I think it can be done in a week!

Talk soon :-)