ok, I have done lot of basic physics, but graphics are still crapy. now I will need a participation of maral to help rendering some parts (he had so more work than me! so he has not free time for challenging pyweek! I would not work so hard! :D)

I'm starting today, yesterday I had forgot that pyWeek had started, so I've already had my first blunder. Oops.  I don't even have a game idea yet.

You will assume the role of Doctor How Inhell, an unfamous alcoholic scientist.

One stormy monday, while he was playing Billiard with some friends something strange happened... He had been caught into a chaotic ray shoot by Professor Lyapunov, an unknown mad pseudoscientist, and sent to a strange interdimensionless place called Chaos Pool (somewhere not so far from this universe).

During his epic adventure he will have to understand the chaotic behaviour of several billiard shapes, and adapt his play skills... only empirical knowledge, luck and you will save him from an uncertain destiny...

Do not try to integrate them.

So I got much further today than I thought I would, now I have enemies with some simple AI behaviour working, I have also added a whole bunch of items and a prefix-suffix system like in Diablo, I also added some sound effects. Basically I'm pretty close to having a somewhat working roguelike.

I'm starting to get really annoyed at some parts of Python though, I keep forgetting the : after if-statements, loops and functions..  oh well, hopefully I will get used to it before the week is over.


Tomorrow I should be able to finish the combat system, handle level transitions, add more enemy behaviour and make more levels, with the way this is going I'm starting to rethink my choice of not making a level editor. It took surprisingly long time to finish the first level, and I had planned on making the other levels a lot larger. 
Maybe I'll make an editor, considering the amount of items I have I will need a lot of levels to spread them out good.

Day one has come to an end (actually that was about 13 hours ago), here is the report:

I have decided on a game idea, it is way to ambitious for the competition, but I thought it would be fun anyway: People trapped in a house.

Here's an outline of the plot:
1. X crooks break into a house in the middle of the winter (the winter of 2010 preferrably) it has been snowing A LOT.
2. Someone (I don't know who' supposed to do this sort of thing) creates a mini avalanche to prevent a bigger one from happening later.
3. House gets covered in snow.
4. Crooks realize they can't get out
5. Crooks realize they must call for help, thus inevitably getting CAUGHT
6. Phone seems to work
7. The authorities say they'll be there in X days
8. Crooks realize that there will be a whole lot of starvation and death going on as there isn't enough food for all of them.
9. betrayal and other mean stuff
10. The Cops arrive and arrest the survivors.

The player is one of the crooks, his job is to survive by... How shall I put this... Killing a few of the others. Problem is, that's what everybody is trying to do as well.

So how far have I come? Well, I have a menu and menu options like "information" and "credits" working.

The hardest part for me with starting any game is having a good enough idea about the game that I want to create to start. I am sure every has had this feeling before. The feeling of knowing just enough about the game you want to create that you can almost taste it, but not knowing enough to determine what ingredients are needed for its construction. 

Thankfully, tonight, after some beer and a lb of burgers, I think I have finally found my game. Hipsters, in the cyclist sense, is a growing part of the San Diego culture. Critical Mass, a monthly event, has been gaining in numbers. Track racing, done primarily on fixies, has also been growing. 

So, for this challenge, I will use this local culture mashed together with pac man and pipe dream to create a monstrosity! Let the frankenstein work begin!  

I've got a few things working on Hazard. First, the player can move and fire their gun. There are also baddies, and there is terrain in a world structure.

There is a factory that can build a test world as well.

At the time of writing, there is no sound, but I will work on that in a bit. Despite the late start, I may actually finish!

Screenie is up on my entry page, for the curious.

EDIT: I have also posted a demo on my entry page, check it out!
ANOTHER EDIT: Fixed the demo zip, should work now!

I made some progress. What I hate about game development is how hard it is to get a feeling for where you are. You can program various routines for hours and hours, and feel like you have got nothing done. But then, you keep adding a little bit after a little bit, and suddenly that feeling starts to show itself. Up until a few hours ago, all I saw was random code bits and some mockup art. Now, while technically not much has changed, I do start to see the bits and pieces of a game, or at least the faint shimmering silhouette of one.

With some projects (in fact, the majority of them) I don't really reach that tipping point. The number one reason I have for canceling a project is that I never get that gameplay I have in my imagination to emerge from the bits. I'm not quite there with this one yet. But I have hope.


Here's a screenshot of the current battle engine. It might be hard to see what's going on, but basically all of the army guys are aiming at me (I'm the identical army dude in the upper right corner), and I'm about to die. It's a turn based system, with the option to basically move, aim (pick a target), or shoot at them.

In this scene all of the enemies are armed with knives (because melee ai requires just a bit more work), so they follow you around if you move and try and get in and stab you. The turns for combat works reasonably well, and the interface works great.

One other feature, is that the game transitions between exploration mode and battles fairly seamlessly. Enemies will all be in the same positions they were on the exploration screen, and the scenery will be the same as well. The only difference is the spacing in battle mode is more rigid, while exploration has pixel perfect movement. It's sort of an anachronox/chrono trigger ish system.

Upcoming tasks: map out story, figure out character stats/skills, add randomness to combat, and then take a break from that to do some iterations on the art. After that is just build build build.

I have a couple of screenshots with bad filenames (One with quotes, the other with spaces and quotes), and neither will work. They also will not delete.

richard, could you delete those for me. Sorry to be a bother ^^;

The title of my game will be "Hazard". It will be a top-down shooter in which you must complete small levels in very short time limits or else you will be trapped in that room and will Lose The Game.

I don't have much else yet, though.