Day what?! Oh dear. Time is slipping through my grasp. Never mind. Onwards.

The game is taking shape nicely... the players missiles / bullets / whatever can now blow them scum sucking aliens out of the sky (or space or whatever... I'm rather tired), there is a scoring system, and three different types of aliens to blow away. I was hoping for 9 but that is stretching things a little given the current 3 day and 41 minute deadline. I have booked Friday off work to try and claw back some lovely precious wonderful time. 

I am having so much fun :-). It's refreshing after years of coding boring database applications to actually make something that involves exploding aliens and such.

Also... a tip. It's not a good idea to try to watch Boardwalk Empire while coding your PyWeek game. I found that out the hard way.
 
Righty. To bed.

Yeah -- I have playable game. You can win. You can lose. You can exit. Yay!
To take things seriously: game is unpolished as hell, but main concept is working. During this challenge I am trying to create funky game mechanics -- and I think I made quite interesting concept of  game. But it needs a lot of polishing and I am not sure if this week is enough for that.
But I am awesome -- my game is playable. Yay!

PROBLEM
After spending all of the week so far on a strange mathematical game I decided that enough was enough. Typesetting equations, recording lots of sound, drawing awesome graphics and all just didn't work for me in this time frame.

SOLUTION
I spent most of the day pondering over what I could possibly do in half a week to replace the math game. Many hours, cups of coffee and papers wasted (you can't imagine how many papers I can fill with dots interconnected with lines without actually coming up with anything or even realizing that I'm actually sketching out the same game over and over)  later, I came up with a solution.

I set out to make up for the time I had lost and could with ease finish most of the game I had just "thought out" (I'm sure there's a similar game out there that I just don't know about). Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the most obvious game to fit into the "Nine Times" theme:

That's right! Nine "Clocks" each showing it's own "time". Your job is to hit the corresponding button whenever a clock shows twelve. The more accurate you are, the higher the score. If you miss by more than 50%, or let it spin an entire lap, your score will decrease.

It's not easy to play, but with a bit of fine tuning I believe it can become highly addictive.

Iv'e been able to create about 6 levels that i think are pretty good for the game. So here is the deal.. you have to light the bulb using a ball which can pick up voltage as you bounce. As you might have guessed it, the bulb has a resistance of 9 ohms hence you have to bounce 9 times before you touch the bulb to light it up :) (assuming the current is 1Amp)
If you have less voltage the bulb doesn't glow and if there is too much voltage then the bulb breaks.

I need to start working on the menu and audio.
Here are the game screenshots


As you can see I've tried to embed the help into the level itself. I hope this will reduce entry barrier for the game. Also i tried to incorporate "Tangential Learning" by including the concepts of electric circuits (though vaguely) into the gameplay.

And here we go.... After 13 hours of work I have game with:

• Startup, How to play windows.
• Enemies, Asteroids and THE BOSS.
• Levels (and level files).
• Moving background.

Well, no sounds yet, maybe tomorrow... Maybe :)

Some bits appear to have rotted overnight. I made a few innocuous changes this morning, and now suddenly all my tiles are getting set to None when I start playing a level. HTF is that happening?

Good news and bad news. The bad news is that I got at best 55% on my statistics test yesterday. The good news is that I have all kinds of new stuff done for PyWeek. I think I have my priorities in the right place :-)



Video #1
Video #2

• 3:20am: more advanced collision detection which makes walls work
• 4:18am: ramps work
• 4:33am: text boxes work. (that was dead simple, thanks to pyglet!)
• 5:40am: belly flops work.
• 6:16am: ladders work
• 6:52am: decorations work; added house decoration
• 7:18am: add ladder animation
• 8:15am: add monster animations
• 8:51am: added monster who throws you
• 9:23am: explosions will break breakable stuff
• 9:39am: you can explode monsters
• 9:54am: add some tiles to make the level a little nicer
• 11:33am: implement buttons and bridges. level 1 works completely
• 12:21am: support reverse direction for monsters

I talked to my friend Tyler and he wants to make the music for the game, if only he can whip his computing situation into shape in time. I'm crossing my fingers.

I've formulated a plan for the rest of the days I have left:

Day 5:

• sound effects
• HUD
• menu system and title screen
• game over

Day 6:

• implement as many gameplay ideas as possible
• create as many levels as possible exploring those concepts
• bg music if it doesn't work out with tyler

Day 7:

• Dinner with family
• Party with friends
• Test on Mac and Windows and smooth out any glitches/bugs/problems with the experience.
• bug fixing only. no new features

Is it a bird? NO!
Is it a train? NO!
Is it a submarine? NO!!

It's PyWeekMan!!!


I'm proud to announce the title of my pyweek game: "PyWeekMan vs. Dr. PyEvil"

You play PyWeekMan and have to defeat your arch enemy Dr. PyEvil nine times in a row. The battles happen in nine big cities all over the world.

By the way: There will be massive destruction :-)

I'm trying some new things.  I'm trying to get out of my object-oriented comfort zone.  I'm trying to implement a kind of proto-language whose elements are all first-order functions.  Learning new things is good.

I'm trying to constrain everything in nines: nine nanites, nine instructions per function, 9 * 4 instructions (9 function calls, 9 actions, 9 control structures, 9 sensor inputs).  The game has three nine by nine grids, each kinda broken into nine three by three grids.  The goal is to take over all nine nanites, at which point all your code will be running nine times.  So I think I meet the theme.  That's good.

I think that this can be fun with really simple graphics, which will save a lot of time, which is good.

I'm paying a lot of attention to the idea of "emergent complexity".  36 commands is a lot, but really all you can do is drag an instruction onto a square.  If there are multiple nanites following the instructions, that's a lot of multiplication.  So that's good.

I got a lot of the framework done pretty fast today, and have a pretty good idea of how to do everything, so it's feasible, and that's good.

I'm not sure how long the control side of the model-view-controller setup will take.  In the past I've struggled slowly with building drag-and-drop interfaces, so I could fall behind there and not finish.  That'd be bad.

I'm not really sure that nine nine-instruction functions will be enough to do anything interesting.  If not, that's a clear way this game could suck.

-Shanti Pothapragada

I've spent most of the past few days implementing a sniper enemy. You can also sometimes jump on top of enemies to kill them if you're out of bullets, and you die if your HP is zero.