Today I worked on some of the missing actions: the player may now shoot back when it's called for. It's a bit fiddly, and I'm not sure it's player-friendly. We'll see.

I also got some help to sort out some of the niggling bits of the plot.

And then I watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure instead of PyWeek'ing tonight :-)

At this point I'm hoping to complete one or two branches of the plot at a minimum, and all of it if I'm lucky.

Customer behaviour is starting to come together. In the shot below, the coloured houses have decided to subscribe to newspapers based on what they see at the newsstand (the building in the bottom left corner). Blue houses are subscribed to the Nine Times, red to the opposition. The newspaper on the ground in front of the blue house has just been delivered by the runner.

The coloured bars under the houses represent the customer's loyalty. It increases when you deliver news and decays over time. If it drops too low, the customer may cancel his subscription or switch to the opposition.

I've just pushed a serie of commits adding a sketch for all the screens will need, including basic navigation between them. Also, in the game screen, a first version of our hud can be checked. It has some operation buttons, timer and scores.
Operations input is handled just highlighting the hud buttons.

Much more need to be done =D

To make you laugh a bit, check our screenshots. Yeah, yeah, it's fugly, I know...

Finally! Finished all the character animations! My code has gotten out of control, and has become almost unintelligible - Next time i will work on the code structure a bit longer.

I  only have the enemies left to code and the random generation for the level and enemies (I have decided it will be faster to do it somewhat randomly as opposed to making levels and it does not require IO or lots of hard coding).

Well, after my internet crashed on Tuesday (taking my daily post with it), I think it's time to give a status update.

First of all, and most important, I ALREADY HAVE A GAME! A boring one, not truly exciting, but at least something playable - all I have to do to save face on the contest is create 10 random levels and call it a day - let's just hope I won't have to settle for that :)

Onto the details, the graphics are by far what is killing me. For instance, I just changed the way transparency is handled (it just looked too blocky), but now I have to re-resize at least 40 animation frames, each by hand, and my character still can't walk up :-\ . Same thing with the status bar: it works, but I just can't make it look nice...

Talking about useless stuff, I also had an epiphany, and now I have a title for my game! It will be called either "City Nine News" or "Nine City News", and the logo may or may not look similar to the one of a certain news network (you may have already guessed which one). Sound, unfortunately, will suffer a lot: first, because tomorrow I'll spend my entire morning (and half my afternoon) with a client who lives 100 miles away from home; second, because it turns out the tickets I bought in January for Roxette are for tomorrow night, so goodbye Thursday :P . I guess I'll have to settle for some random Creative Commons tune.

Last, and probably least, I'm adding a new screenshot, this time from the game. You can see that my guy is surrounded by a dark square. That's not because he's in front of a trans-dimensional door (because, among other things, that would have been awesome, so naturally I never thought about that), but because that's what I meant when I said I messed up the transparency :-\

Good luck, everyone! See you on Friday, I hope. In the meanwhile, please try not to do much, or you'll leave me behind, and you don't want that, right?

Right?

DAY 5

5:00 PM - Wednesday is my busiest day of the week. I haven't gotten any work in yet.

7:00 PM - The cpu now has a face, which changes with the voices.

10:30 PM - Just added the condition that if 8 big spaces are taken and the 9th one ties, you clear the whole board. Otherwise, you'll end up fighting with the computer forever; or two computers will go forever.

12:30 PM - I redesigned all the faces for the cpu. The original faces didn't look computer-like enough. I'll post a picture of all the faces and stop for the night.

The name of the game has been finalised - 
 
 Super Salaryman!!!!

 Partially inspired by Super Karoshi (Go play that game, now!), and Kings of Power 4 billion % (Go watch it, now!)

It's difficult working full time and doing grad school while trying to build a game - I am definitely not getting as much done as I would like to. Tonight I finished most of the squad routines and hopefully will finish threat range tonight. The combat system also shouldn't be a problem but I am a little ways off from having squads fight each other.

Although one member of our team has been laid low by the lurgi, the rest of us bravely faced latent infection and got together for a hacking session in the evening (and so the mead was broken out purely as a medicinal precaution). The session was fairly productive, and the game is almost, but not quite, at the stage where the first level is playable.

Numerous tweaks and fixes were made, and some of the code moved from marginally OK to horribly hack'ish but kinda works, but overall the results are starting to look good. Basic support for attacks, some support for interacting with items, various tweaks to the game to behave more like a tradional platform game, and a whole lot of work on the NPC's happened, and we've also started with the design of the final game levels.

There are still a few key features to iron out, but we should be able to add those quickly now. Then we just need to fill in all the planned content before the deadline, and everything will be fine.

Planning on a nice stint of coding on the train home only to find train delayed and standing room only.

Put in some late hours tonight to make progress on "Bunker!"

"Bunking" of "Bunking-off" is English slang for missing school.  As Ferris missed school 9 times this is my game.  Therefore "Bunker" is about covering your tracks.

You need to pass over the numbered squares nine times to erase any record of Ferris' missed attendances.

Clearly still missing a lot,sound, music, enemies, scores, lives etc.  The gap on the right is where this info will go.  Using some Mario inspired pipe graphics that are freely available.  Mental note to add reference to source of graphics..