Well, I knew I wouldn't have much time to devote to this.  So it's a good idea I chose an educational game that will hopefully also be useful to my 8 year old daughter.  The basic idea is that a math problem will be presented (the one for the challenge will use only the 9s multiplication table).  The player then shoots a cork gun at the correct answer, which is written on a yellow rubber ducky floating by.

Inspiration is from Polaris, the Atari 2600 game.  :-)   And some little Flash thingy that I saw a long time ago -- as I recall the player simply clicked on the correct answer, but the answer was a little target that fell down.  Or something.  It was a long time ago.  :-)

I'll try and scan in the design drawing tomorrow.  I started drawing out classes today.  There are too many to finish.  :-)   But I'll make a go of it.

and a rewrite.

At lunchtime I sketched a few graphics for Team Wasabi Group 1, then stopping work earlyish I continued hacking on the Group 2 project for the rest of the day.

In today's screenshot you can see the basic mechanics are pretty much complete (though there will be a couple more layers of gameplay on top of that). It looks a bit soulless but that's because the player characters are still on the drawing board:



Hacking music this evening has been Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds. Fantastic stuff.

Day two flew by, mainly because of that pesky job thing they keep making me go to.

Anyway... long story short (because I have to get up for said job thing in around 5 and a bit hours) I have added a starfield, some chunky enemy sprites, some very chunky player bullets that work and everything, and am overall happy with the progress.

I have added yet another '9' element to the game: because I want the GFX to be chunky pixel type affairs I am limiting my palette for the whole game to 9 colours. I'm sure there are more ways to shoehorn '9' in somewhere.

I'm never going to win awards for my graphic design skills, but I'm confident it will be fun to play :)

5 days and 30 minutes to go. Eeek.

Despite seriously considering changing the team name to Maandagsteker, decidedly non-zero progress was made today including:

• Detailed outline for the first half of the story
• Arrival of the player fox complete with controls and animations
• Far too much bouncing
• Shiny new collision detection (now more flexible and with completely different bugs to the previous implementation! Includes ramming, Mr Sulu!)
• Script for generating tile images from textures
• New images including an oni, a monk and attacking kitsune!
• Ninja scrolling level window
• A FPS display (useful for making sure we're not introducing performance issues)
• Start of global game and story state tracking.
• Embellished tiles (late addition, not shown in screenshot -- you'll have to wait for tomorrow's pillow book entry)

Courtesy of the now-fixed screenshot uploading, here is your daily snapshot:

Last night Mum found out that I was making my youngest brother write about snakes (coding in Python) and he missed dance practice. Now she said that we can only have half an hour on the good computer each per night and it has to be for study. 

Game development progress is inching forward. I spent 1 hour last night trying to get pyglet to run on my computer. I found that Pyglet was checking the MacOSX version using platform.release which gives 10.5.0. Apparently it quits complaining about 64bit Python and a version of mac less than 10.6.0. And when I checked using this method I found I have 10.6.5 or something. Re-running a python interpreter i found platform.mac_ver I get the correct result. So now I monkey patch my pyglet installation:

import platform
platform.release = lambda:'10.6.5'
import pyglet

I wonder if this bug is specific to my computer, I haven't done much to it other than take it out of the box. I should note that I am running Python in a virtualenv too, I read that it can cause issues. At any rate, I'll look into this a bit further when I have time and maybe file a bug report. Is it a bug or is it my problem?  

Completed the menus and have finished a lot of the movement system. Will post some screenshots soon. I have a friend who is working on the art - will try to get him to create an account so he can post his progress seperately.
The game is a sidescroller beat-em-up, where, when your meter fills up you can grow to Nine Times the size for nine seconds.
Going to start work on attacks soon. Its gonna be pretty awesome.....
I hope...

We had a brainstorming session yesterday to figure out what kind of game we should make. We had all kind of crazy ideas. But in the end we realized this: We don't want to make some random funny game. We want to create something that takes notice of current events in the real world. We want to tackle difficult topics. We want to make a game about something substantial.

So we decided to make a game about the Fukushima accident.

We are trying to make a serious game. About consequences - in a situation where you can't win - only loose less.

You are in charge of a nuclear power plant, which has been severely damaged in an earthquake. Now you have to do your best to minimize the damage. But you can only try nine things to bring the situation under control again. Nine times you have to make hard decisions - will they be the right ones?

We are aware that we might not win in the fun category this time. But we will try our best to create something that is worth experiencing and also shows the appropriate respect to the current situation in Japan.

I present to you the plot flowchart. You'll see that PyWeek now becomes a simple programming exercise implementing this simple flow.



Hmm.

Really small progress was made today. Should I quit my job or should I quit sleeping...
I have make repository for this challenge.

https://bitbucket.org/petraszd/pyweek-12