Yesterday I couldn't do anything and it looks like I'm going to lose Saturday too.

It's been nice. I'll try to reuse what I've done/learnt these 4 days for something good (hopefully!).

i have monsters being randomly generated along with a format that is loosely based off of biological DNA.  a creatures "DNA" is represented by a series of bytes.  even bytes are always a "gene", or marker of a particular quality in the creature.  the top nybble of odd bytes defines the "power" of the gene, while the bottom nybble is a mask.

mutations can be make by flipping bits in the DNA, and also by pairing sequences and doing bitwise operations on them.  

i've got some stuff worked out that will render what a creature would look like based on the dna.  there are 41 parameters, each with 7 levels of "power", but i've only got a few that are actually drawn.  so far it seems to work, but as you can see from the screen shot of the battle sequence, the creatures are really ugly!

Level 1 is about to be completed. Background graphics needs to be updated. The game is now playable.

It took a day or so, but I am finally getting cocos2d. Or it feels like that anyway.

The key to image based animations in cocos2d seems to be pyglet. Understanding both was key to much happiness. But doing so was like making origami without instructions. It is surprising that there are so few - easily found - examples of image animation management in cocos.

Creating the animations is very simple. pyglet.image.Animation is all that is needed. I use spritesheets so from_image_sequence is my new best friend. The key bit of information is that a cocos sprite inherits two important things from pyglet.sprite.Sprite: the property image, and the event on_animation_end. So I use image to assign the next to play animation to an existing sprite, and on_animation_end to know when it ..ends.

I'm on an 8 day schedule here, since I'm counting both last Saturday, when I worked at night, and next Saturday, when I'll work during the day. So today is Day 5.

I spent all day yesterday refactoring my graphics engine. Normally I would advise against fixing what isn't broken during Pyweek, but it turned out to be worth it. I found several speed improvements, and went from 11fps to 30fps, and my machine is pretty slow. If I can keep it in the 20s I'll be happy; it should run faster for most people.

I've spent some time today getting the UI working. I still have a long way to go. After that I have a lot of work to do implementing the various gameplay components (organs) and balancing. Oh, and figuring out some sort of goal. Days 6 through 8 are going to be action packed.

Anyway, people seem to like the graphics so here's the latest. Just please keep in mind that good graphics don't necessarily make a good game! :)

Incredible News today: Functionally, our game is mostly complete. That means, the editor is fully operational now and the game mechanics are ready to be taken to the next stage, designing the levels.

Also, the graphics are mostly complete, leaving us in the comfortable position of creating the levels now as well as polishing the graphics and adding sound assets!

Stay tuned!

screenshot day 4:

So today it's my turn to talk. Lazy Gruik!



I'll talk to you about the level management. Since the begining I have planed to handle the levels like Castlevania: divide the level into tiles like if the whole level could fit in a sheet of LibreOffice calc. It allows to have a simple representation of a level in a plain text file. From this file, we can know the geographic position of a tile in the level and we can load its background image and its informations (like enemies, fruits, etc.).

But we are not in a perfect world: graphists do exist! cha, our graphist, is not very nice with us. So I had to find another idea. After a day of thinking, I finally came with a great one. I realized I did not really need to know the position of the tiles from each other. I just need to know which tiles are linked to each other. I have now a xml file with the tile list and I will have the item list, the plateform list, the enemie list for each of them, with their position. There will be too the list of existing links. With this informations, I will be able to create a graph that represents a level and allows me to know where the player is going when he is changing room.

We do not save any information about the images of tiles and items in the xml file because we can retrieve their names from other informations in this file. For example, with the apple, we only need to know it is a fruit and it is an apple.

When we are playing, we are only displaying the room where is the player. But a tile being small (1200x600px), we allowed cha to use more than a tile at a time to make a room. She was very excited.

And the others guys? They procrastinate! No, I'm kidding (or not).

cha keeped creating assets and doing some level design. We have new fruits, a new level, new animations (for the powers).

Thanks to Gruik, Stan can now use his powers. \o/
He can also fly around like a(n angry) bird. Gruik also upgrade his collision algo to handle more accurately the collisions with platforms.

I hope you will really love this article. Because it's from me and it will be the only one from me during PyWeek #13 (Gruik, if you read me ;).

Well.. having a full-time job kind of gets in the way of making games. Damn.

cpt_danger is joining me. He's making graphics, music, and helping with design.

We're working on getting the map up and running. For this challenge we're just going to implement North America... and maybe just a handful of cities to start. We found some open licensed map graphics to use and cpt_danger is throwing together the basic elements like pawns for the agents, agent portraits, buttons, and the like. I've got some basic mapping code going. Graphs are pretty easy and fun to work with.

So we're hacking away in my tiny little home office, jamming to sweet tunes, and trying not to stress about making a 'good' game. Just a 'done' game (for some value of 'done').

Today saw the game becoming playable, which had a delightfully predictable impact on productivity while we all played it instead of writing it.

My morning started with a pull of the repo revealing hodgestar's delightful commit 177: "Snake that moves (my god that was an epic struggle)." That paved the way for slacking off at work and adding support for the snake and its environment to affect each other. By mid-afternoon, we could be painted in an exciting variety of colours and eat frogs to learn how to breathe underwater.

Knocking-off time arrived then, and we mostly congregated at our Designated Wednesday Work Area to get in some quality yelling and gesticulating about whether we needed a more complex level format. drnlm couldn't make it (some weak excuse about a broken car or something), but he alternated between working on the level editor and posting snide comments in IRC. (We won't mention the time he spent adding various team members on Google+ instead of coding.)

Just as our enthusiasm was starting to flag in the face of adversity and starvation, the nice delivery person brought us Asian food. (One day we'll write a game about eating insufficiently sticky rice with chopsticks.) We spent supper time discussing more mutators and things to add, and dumped a huge load of fresh art generation work on confluence, who has been keeping up admirably.

By this time, tumbleweed had finished faffing about with widget focus and the like and dove into making some animations animate. (I celebrated this by almost immediately breaking the code that closed the snake's mouth after eating, but that was fixed before the jaw became permanently dislocated.

While we were all engaged with the above, Resprove (our newest team member) quietly built a sadistic level using all the mutators available to him so far:
 


(His level was a bit different from this and was rather harder to complete. On the other hand, it was a decent demonstration of how fun the game is to play. I think we have a winner here.)

There was some more stuff that happened after this, but that shall have to remain mysterious for now. If I don't wrap up this diary entry now, my laptop shall fall on my face and damage something important and nobody wants that.

Edit: Whoops, I forgot teleporters. Teleporters are made out of win, pixels and really subtle bugs.They'll add an interesting perspective to future levels.

Okay this is the beginnings of a game.  Have a go if you like, all criticism welcome.



We have:
- a randomly generated maze
- pacman-like movement
- a key/lock to win (more to come I guess)
- a mysterious fog that will randomly mutate the maze (i'll add in more of a warning.)
- a title and win screen!

stuff I might take out:
- the giant who runs across the maze. its hard to figure out how he doesn't destroy other people who you might want to save
- the ability to mutate the maze, maybe just rely on the fog

stuff to add:
- enemies
- score
- people to collect/save
- more with the mutating fog mechanic.

Controls:
up,down,left,right - controls
mouse left click - mutate selected portion of the maze.
esc - exit

Download link: Godspeed You! Mutated Maze v0.1