We have a game.  It's not very good, and it has only 3 levels.  But we have a level editor.
And we have monsters. Everything's better with monsters.

So yeah. I started this as a individual competitor, but I suddenly find myself with an artistic collaborator. I have art!!! I'm not going to have to ship with stick figures!!!! WOOOOO!!! Thanks Andy!

Programming wise I have a lot of the individual problems solved. Player action queuing, collision detection, click even handling, action menus... So, now I need to mush them together into one cohesive piece... by breaking them apart into separate base classes that I can then use as building blocks to create the hold.

You are a secret agent - as yet unnamed - captured by your (also currently unnamed) rival's henchmen and being escorted deep within your rival's lair. You keep breaking free and trying to escape, but are ultimately caught and continue to be escorted until you meet your nemesis. Epic battles yadda yadda heroic exploits blah blah running from exploding lair.

The play dynamic is odd. Think touch screen emulated by mouse. Kinda tower defense meets platformer. It is awesome in my head, hopefully it will be just as awesome on your machines. I'm hoping this is the prototype for an Android game, but only if it doesn't suck.

Just uploaded the first chaotic version of the game.

Also an intermediate stage with just some aesthetic issues and story.

Score 10 points for the first chaotic stage: The Stadium Billiard

Seems easy, doesn't it?

yesterday was totaly uneffective, no code was writed. but today, I have a day off in my job ...

I really want to talk about dev progress and art and story and plot because there are interesting things happening in our game all of those places...

But mostly I'm just exhausted -- between work all day and PyWeek all night I don't have much left for the diary. Suffice it to say that I'm a lot happier doing development work than the last game where my primary role was art.

Anyway, we're still having a blast, hope everybody else is learning stuff and making progress. Looking forward to some of the entries I've been hearing about here and over in #pyweek.

So figuratively today was very hit and miss. I DID a lot, but I don't know if very much of what I did actually moved the game towards completion status. So I feel like I exerted a lot of life energy without much to show for it. I don't think anything I did however could have been left undone, so I don't quite see myself going down the wrong road, which I guess is good.

I feel like there are basically two different types of development. There is the creation part, where you are actually implementing new systems, or rewriting significant algorithms. This is what I find the most fun. You sit down with a blank canvas, and an hour or two of dedicated hacking later, it DOES something that it didn't do before. I HAVE MADE FIRE, HEAR ME ROAR.

The other part is refinement. It's a lot of tweaking and integration. You take one of those pieces you built in step 1, and hammer it and shape it endlessly. I often find myself hammering these pieces for very large amounts of time, and not really enjoying myself doing so. In 10 minutes, I can make a character walk around a screen. It starts with nothing, and suddenly we have a cool little demo to play with. But then to figure out how fast he should move, what kind of collisions to use, etc, suddenly it turns into several hours of pretty boring stuff.

I think I will fare better if I spend a lot more time building, and a lot less time refining. My resolution at this point of the competition is to slap myself whenever I find myself hammering on something that is probably good enough. And if it's not good enough, maybe I should create a better piece instead of trying to make a bad piece fit.


Anyway, there is also the literal hit and miss I mentioned. One of the big components of my game is the hit detection during battles. You choose an enemy to aim at, but the actual detection of whether you hit them or not is based on line of sight. The angle you fire is randomized slightly based weapon accuracy and player skills. If the angle doesn't pass through the enemy, it is a miss. If you target someone on the far side of the room, but there are a bunch of people in the way, you're probably going to hit them instead of who you were aiming at. Eventually there is going to be cover to watch out for as well.


As you can see, in the right image, the shot was off target, and didn't connect. In the left image, it grazed the corner of the enemy and did some damage. Currently ai is pretty terrible, and they tend to kill each other off in a big group because they are trying to hit you :) I'm not sure how well I'll be able to overcome that, but I can probably get something that works well enough for what I'm going for. Since my game design has you fighting against hordes and hordes of enemies, even if they occasionally suffer friendly fire, it will probably still be quite a challenge to win.

Meh day :/ Lots of work done on the ui. Created some sprites Things are going well. Tomorrow I start working on the AI of the fairies.

Got PGU's (Thanks Phil!) isometric rendering bent to my will last night, and have some iso tiles painted up, but I think I am going to have to re-hack in the sprite handling to use floating point tile coordinate space.
Game concept in progress:
Defend the city from highly infectious Disco Fever! Once citizens have caught the fever they dance themselves to ruin, rather than buying digital wristwatches and completing paper work. As Mayor, you will not allow this to stand! Deploy stock ticker kiosks and adult-contemporary easy listening loudspeakers to ward off the disco apocalypse!

So, funky epidemiological isometric tower defense is the order. Time to deliver!

Well, the coding is starting to emerge as the commits in our top secret bitbucket repo piles up. I'm mainly working on the physics of the character and it's interaction with the environment. 


 
Everybody and their brother knows that jumping is an essential part of 2D platformers, so I'm trying hard to get this right. Jumping done right goes way back to the Super Mario series and it's strongly related to how pressing the button controls jump height. A lot of older games have fixed height jumps and they feel unnatural and hard to control. Even though I knew jumping could be done nice or painful, I've never really programmed a 2D platformer and when I tried I never got jumping right. It looks very simple, but I found it very tricky actually. But thanks to this awesome site dissecting the Sonic games physics – the classic ones, not the post 32 bit 3D crap –  jumping is looking good so far! Can't say the same about the game though:


Good ol' programmers art :)

Took a break yesterday to move some of my stuff to my new place. Very excited to get my own room soon! 

In terms of my game, I finally have something I can interact with. Great news in terms of hitting a development milestone. Downside is, I feel idiotic for some of my design decisions. When will I ever learn to not do speculative design.