Right now you're just a small 30x30 square jumping around a grass tile level.
You can shoot though. I want upgrading your gun to be a big part of the gameplay, so I might have some sort of parts system, and you get more parts from defeating enemies, or just find them in hard-to-reach places, sort of like Robot Wants or KOLM. Another thing I've implemented is that higher-capacity magazines are all multiples of 9. You start out with a magazine that can hold 9 bullets. Once you upgrade your gun this number jumps to 18, then 27, and so on.

Here I am at the end of day 2. According to git log, here's what I've done today:

• 6:24pm: scrolling 2-layer background
• 8:23pm: ability to detatch leader and give control to the next guy
• 10:44pm: suicide bomb control works
• 11:57pm: +1 dude powerup
• 12:06am: +infinite dudes powerup
• 12:21am: land mines 
• 12:35am: spikes
• 9:20am: totally rewrite display engine and change level format.
  
• 9:38am: use pyglet resources rather than the skelington data.py module
  

Lines of code so far: 542. This is interesting because yesterdays LOC count was 612. After a full day's work and several new features, I ended up with less code. Three cheers for good design!

I'm now using Tiled for editing, which is way nicer than my own hacked up piece of crap level editor. I had fun deleting that.

Thanks to the display engine rewrite (I simply use glTranslatef instead of manually positioning every sprite), all my FPS worries are gone. I'm well above 60. However I have a new problem: weird line artifacts appearing on sprites. It seems almost as if the bottom row of pixels of every sprite is displaying on the top of the sprite instead. You can see it in the screenshot - there isn't supposed to be a flickering  line on the spikes.

Video
Screenshot

Next up on the TODO list: use the nifty level editor to create more tiles and a fun and legit Level 1. Then begin to do whatever game upgrades necessary to make Level 1 work. This may involve doing some (shudder) animations.

I should begin to think about music and sound effects too. I am considering making the background music myself. I have been known to make some music in FL Studio. I think it would be fun if some parts of the level pulsated to the beat of the music.

I'm really facepalming at the moment, not realising pyweek was this week, and last Saturday at ~9pm started a new project (why not start three hours later? -.-). Now I have to think up a new idea and fit it to this theme, and have a shorter deadline than you guys.

Can I do it? Place bets here.

Seeing how I already lost enough valuable time this days (I was 70 miles away from home this weekend, so I barely managed to write a few classes - I should have graphics up and running by tonight, or so I hope), I think I could do something useful for once and comment the ideas I had for every theme:

• For "A fry cook on Venus", I decided to approach it as "Admiral Fry Cook on Venus", and it would have been a shooter in which you must stay in the boundary between day and night - day would be too hot, and your ship would take damage, and night would be too cold, making you slow (or even stopping your ship, until the sun comes up and un-freezes you)
• For "Coughlin Brother's Mortuary", I finally decided to make a double game: on the top part, you'd have to convince people to deliver their dead relatives to you (adjusting prices and so on). Each coffin would increase your wood and meat (?!) amount, which you could use to create furniture and hamburgers (?!!) in the restaurant on the bottom part. Bonus idea: the soft drinks would have been called "Soylent Green"
• For "Warm and Soft", I wanted to make a factory - basically, you'd have to locate the operator in the right place of a production line, and press one of many buttons to assemble teddy bears - failing to do it on time or pressing the wrong button would result in broken and/or monstrous teddy bears
• For "Sausage King" I wanted to make a game in which you are a spy for a rival restaurant, and your work would be to sabotage the place, serving not enough clients to make a profit, but enough to remain employed. Tricky, I know.
• Finally, I hope I can show everyone the idea for "9 times" (let's keep a little surprise here), but I'll give you a hint: so far, it's going to be about a newspaper, located in the city of Nine (making it "The Nine Times", see?)

What I always like about Pyweek is how many possible interpretations come out of just three or four words. If you had an interesting (and now discarded) idea, fell free to share!
Edit: I missed a post an hour early about this very same topic. I'm keeping this entry for the whole journal thing, but don't miss the other thread.

day2 is down with the images and rects cleaned up a bit. Finally got some particles in which has made it slooowww.

I was quite stumped by the theme, to be honest. You'd think by now I'd be more prepared to deal with the themes I don't really gel with. Oh well :-)

So I'm writing a kinda interactive story... side-scrolling platformer. I think that can work... I've got the core of the plot worked out (the player has 9 points at which they can really affect the story, regardless of branching). I'll post the large PNG of the many-branching beast when things are more settled.

I'm fairly confident I can implement the platforming bit with one hand tied behind my back so I've started work on the core scene and actor management code. Oh how I wish I could "yield from" in Python 2.6...

Yesterday was a mess. We hadn't decided on themes and several team members were AWOL most of the weekend. By about 2pm it looked unlikely that we would be able to come to a decision, with three ideas to choose from, each with some merit but no clear leader.

At this point we are therefore developing two games - call them spikes, perhaps. I'll write a diary for the branch I'm working on until such time as we get our act together.

Anyway, after all that faffing not much progress has been made. There's a little bit of concept art that has yet to be turned into something useful, and a tiny amount of code to implement a basic mechanism. I would have liked to have way more done, but I was pretty burned out and had to turn in early.

Of all of the possible themes to be chosen 9 times was by far the most difficult for me to come up with a game concept because of which my game might not be the most original, but is more a mash together of a few different games that are currently out there.

Well anyway eventualy i came up with the idea for citySquare. In citySquare the user will be given 81 tiles and will have a certain amount of time to arrange them on a 9x9 Grid.

Each of the tile's edges can be either grass, road or city. The player has to place and arrange the tiles to gain as many points as possible.

Points will be awarded when time runs out for completed cities and roads but subtracted for any that are unfinished, with a bonus if all of the tiles are used to make a "perfect city"

The scoring system will reward players for bigger cities much more than for smaller ones, e.g. a city spanning 4 tiles would be given more points than 2 cities spanning 2 tiles.

If I have time I would like to add an additional game mode that just allows you to time how long it takes you to arrange your tiles to make a "perfect city"

All opinions or critiques are welcome

I had no ideas for this theme, and nothing good occured to me during day 1 :(

On the other hand, Nine Times makes me think of ritual repetition, so I'll just go for a simple game mechanics that would probably have fitted other themes better, but which I wouldn't mind playing right now.

http://code.google.com/p/pyglet/issues/detail?id=411

This is going to cost me a an hour or two of dev time to use sprite sheets instead of .gif's :-(

In other news, new screenshot:


Also, when I tried to upload my character art () to Facebook, I got this:



LOL!