So it looks like our team is down on even more coding capacity than last time, which was already a drop from previous PyWeeks. In the process of reminding myself what's possible in a fairly minimal amount of time, though, I set myself a new high score of 40,103,490 on Caterpillar Fever Dream!!:

http://www.supereffective.org/post/2009/03/01/CATERPILLAR-FEVER-DREAM%21%21

This is what we've got so far.



Off to bed now, we'll be back tomorrow for more surprises :)

(Due to time zones, my "Day 1" is Saturday and my "Day 8" will be the next Saturday. Even though I might sometimes go past midnight, I'll still consider it the same day until I go to bed.)

DAY 1

8 PM - The competition has started. The theme is Nine Times, which is the theme I was really hoping for. The game will be called "Tic-Tac-Toe Squared" and that is all I will say about it for now. The first thing I'm doing is designing the main board for the game. I don't know if people usually start with the graphics before the programming, but I guess that's just my style o_o.

8:30 PM - The graphics of the main board is done. Now I will start with the basic pygame programming.

9:15 PM - I have defined the classes for SmallBoard and BigBoard. A SmallBoard is a single Tic-Tac-Toe board and BigBoard is made up of 9 SmallBoards with some extra functionality. They are not finished, but a lot of the functionality is implemented. Now I will make the graphics for X and O.

10:10 PM - Graphics for X and O are made. The game now allows players to click on tiles on the board and have that tile be filled in with an X or an O. Winning has not been implemented yet. Off to make more graphics.

11:10 PM - The game now shows restrictions where players cannot use, although it looks slightly confusing now. These restrictions will be explained in the game.

11:50 PM - Updated some more graphics. As far as regular gameplay goes, the game does pretty much what I want it do except what it does when someone wins the whole game. Taking a break now.

12:55 AM - After a good break, I went back and quickly implemented the logic for when a player wins. I'm probably going to stop for the night. I've already gotten the main interface of the game in place, although with less than 5 hours of work, it doesn't look fantastic, but I am glad to have gotten this much work done in one night. Stuff I need to add later includes a menu, better graphics, sounds, and possibly animations. I was going to upload a screenshot of my game so far, but that part of the website seems to be broken.

=Math

The theme Nine Times seems like an obscure concept at best. However, I've come up with how the theme is going to be incorporated, namely, there is a valuable resource, and you only have nine units of it. I suspect that this is going to be manifested in other's games, but what works, works.
Now all that remains is to think of a fun gameplay mechanic that uses this concept, and the *easy* part, making a game about it. :)

So, `Nine Times' it is.

I was quite surprised Sausage King scored so high. It was the only theme I had no idea whatsoever of what to do, that wouldn't look downright obvious or silly. But oh, well.

My idea for the game is a Lego-like logic puzzle, where you must arrange different blocks to get through each level.

Each level is a 3d matrix in a 2d plane, with obstacles and a start/goal mark. The objective of the game is to transport your little character from the start mark to the goal mark. For such, you can combine Lego-like blocks in different ways to make weird kind of vehicles.

Blocks may be placed anywhere adjacent the character, or below the character itself, which basically gives you a Noughts and Crosses board. The way you win in Tic-Tac-Toe is also the way blocks are combined.

A block may be a Sensor, which measures an arbitrary condition of the nearest wall block, like distance, heat, energy. A Function, which takes the value of this sensor and maps it to another value. Or an Action, which takes the value of the row/diagonal/column and do something with it, like moving around, pushing blocks, etc.

Oh, well, that's basically what I have for now. I still need to figure out quite some stuff.

Now, to figure out how to fix this silly hg-git problem which is getting on my way. Seems like merging two different repositories by using `hg pull -f x && hg merge -rotherheadtip' is not a good idea when you're using hg-git...

Only a few hours left to go. I've been able to think of ideas for all the themes except one. So if that one becomes the official theme, I will be really upset and probably end up not doing the competition altogether (unless I think of something in the next few hours).

I'm a student at Georgia Tech, so finding time to work on this project will be tricky. However, I have done a lot of work with PyGame in the last few months, so hopefully I won't have many major programming issues. I can create graphics using the GIMP, but not anything fantastic. As for sounds and music, I'm not sure what I'll do.

I do think that at the very least, I will be able to complete making the game within the week.

=Math

Our team has been working on a practice game over the past few weeks. We didn't get to add everything that we wanted, including:

• Animations to show the character swinging/firing a weapon (we trace out the area of effect, so use your imagination)
• Separate sprites for the monsters (right now they're just palette-swapped versions of the main character)
• Line of sight (you can shoot through walls and monsters can see through walls)
• Health packs and ammo pickups (instead you refill at the end of every level)
• Bosses
• A sprite for the NPC
• A new tileset (we reused an old one)
• More sound effects
• Cutscenes

But it's still totally playable, and has a couple fun features. Enjoy!
Download Fort Izembo

Can't wait for the challenge! Right now it's at 23 hrs. 57 mins.
I'm super excited.

Oh yes, this is my first diary entry. Can you tell? :P

And I have 23 hours of homework to do in order to clear the Week of Py for development.

I've plotted out THIS week in Google Calendar (the week before PyWeek) - an entry for homework time, break time, and even sleep time. I'm following a strict schedule for optimum time management during PyWeek. The start date is 5pm on Saturday for me, so I have rotated my sleep schedule so that I will go to sleep at 9am on Saturday in order to wake up just as PyWeek starts.

I'm getting pumped up. I can't wait to start!

Well, we are about three days away from the beginning of the challenge, and I think it's fair to say one thing: please, please, please, PLEASE don't let "Coughlin Brothers Mortuary" be the chosen theme!

I guess everyone is doing the same thing I do - that is, think about 5 possible game ideas (or, let's be honest, think about two game ideas and bend the artwork to fit in more than one theme...) and pray for they favorite one to be the chosen one. When it comes to C.B.M., however, every single idea I have involves caskets exploding, flying corpses, rolling heads and stuff like that, and while a little black comedy is not too bad, a whole game is... well, a little too much :P

Well, back to the drawing board. I still have to think something for "A Fry Cook on Venus", or at least something not too obvious. I thought I could play a little with gravity, but it turns out the gravity on Venus is almost the same as on Earth... Why couldn't you choose "A Fry Cook on Jupiter", Pyweek?