I'm having trouble with the projectiles, so I'm uploading the next demo.  I think I'll upload a demo each day until my final final.  that should help some with getting it playable.  In the meantime, I'll implement an idea I had to reduce memory, by having the tiles point to their image, instead of holding a copy.  this will require some major changes to low level objects, wish me luck!

Mac Note: Something goes wrong when loading levels on a Mac, not sure what it is, but the image that the level uses returns a -1 as a color value in the array2d, causing problems.  I don't have access to a mac, so I'll be working blind in trying to fix that.  

I slept on it, and I realized that the OOP-style of writing code in Python is still too unfamiliar for me, I would need to read up on several concepts that seem to differ from C++, I don't like to guess when I am coding.

So, it will be a rewrite today, I will focus on the logic first, then I move onto the graphics and I/O. If I do not have a working game draft 14 hours from now, I will use my first draft and build on that. I will be a major disappointment for me to do that, but I'd at least have something to show.

I have to give a big shout out to Eggfu, they mentioned that I need to interleave my position finding and collision checking, instead of doing one and then the other.  thank you so much!  I'll just get projectiles working, then do another, working, demo.

Okay, Here's my plan for the rest of the week:

day 4: 
get ragdolls working (no dismemberment ATM, will be added given time)
get projectiles working (not being created... I'm looking into it)
add animated entities
create bullets that don't have trajectories
add in various abilities

day 5:
Add in UI, both HUD and menu
add between-level movement
add death as a possibility for player
add AI enemies, with simple movement
add saving

day 6:
create levels and tiles 
create music and get sounds

day 7:
playtest
first final upload
add in easter eggs
playtest
next final upload (if possible)

That should work, but I have 1 more day to finish the core engine... not liking that thought, but sitting here typing isn't helping that, expect frequent updates

Plants can now have leaves. The leaf shapes can mutate

Realised that I wasn't going to gain anything from having the chromosomes paired, and got rid of that complication.

Totally rewrote the mutation code. It just seemed to need it.

The initial plant (hand-crafted) now looks like this:



And here are some mutations created from it:



As you can see, they tend to degenerate into a mess after a while. Not sure if that will turn out to be a bad thing or not. Hopefully when I get the cross-breeding part working it will be possible to breed better-looking specimens from what you have.

A busy day at work, followed by a number of family obligations in the evening, means I didn't get much time to work on my game on Day 3.

I did do some level design in GIMP.  The program will read in the image, taking specific colors as items in the game.  I figure GIMP is the easiest level editor I could find, and it's already written :-).  The game field is 576x480 pixels, and each sprite is 32x32 pixels.  This gives a field of 18x15 individual items.  It's a small playfield, but should be enough to create challenging levels.  Here is level 3:
 





 

 I also fleshed out the program design.  I might spend a few hours during the work-day day 4 since it's quiet and uninterrupted, to program in the game mechanics so I have something functional.  Then I'll hook it up to pygame with blocks day 5 and create some graphics.  Day 6 I'll add music/sound effects and create some more levels, then the last day I'll test and polish.  Ambitious, but I'll give it my best shot.  Regardless if I'm able to finish this week, I'll finish the game.  This is too much fun!  Onward!

Well, it's the fourth day. As of right now, I've got nothing. My code was such a tangled mess that I will start over. Ah well, learning experience, am I right?

For today... I hope to have an app that displays some terrain. Other than that, displaying a player character would be cool.

It's not much, but my game won't be much. I'm happy, though. :)

Peace, love, and best regards

--- Akake

Day 1

Was not ready for this theme. Thought of initial game concept: a giant monster attacking army troops. The monster will resemble a dragon with rectangles for parts (like head, legs, tail, etc.) with solid colors. As it is attacking (and being attacked) I will have the rectangles change colors and mutate to another form to attack people.

Day 2

Designing a model to animate body part movements (like legs walking, head bobbing) that will be easy to iterate and control. Also, a friend came into town, so I couldn't code that much.

Day 3

Was about to start building the game engine with PyGame, but after reading about Pyglet's Event Loop, I thought event handling would be the way to go. At this rate I will probably not produce a finished game, but this will still be fun.

Yay! After a lot of difficulties just getting started, I have gotten a bit further. This morning I implemented the map, which took a surprising amount of time. I pulled in some real life city positions from a data file (I didn't want to manually place everything), but then I realized I had no idea how to turn latitude and longitude into pixel positions that would match up with any of the maps I had. So I had to go out and find a map in which the latitude and longitude lines were straight, so that I could handle the conversion myself without a bunch of crazy polar coordinate business that I don't have time to figure out right now. A good map that could be used in the game was really hard to come by. I managed to find a world map, took the america portion, and blew it up in a semi ugly but semi interesting pixelated way.

Then I put a glowy green filter over everything. I want to simulate the kind of outdated computer terminals that I like to imagine in my fantasy world the government still uses in these kinds of positions.

But once that was out of the way, I attached the virus simulation to it, and it is pretty cool to watch. There is still nothing for the player to do, but it's cool to watch the green cities turn red over time. And sometimes it will jump across connections even though I don't have air travel implemented, just because of the way people like to walk around. The coolest run only saw a portion of the map go red. Everyone must have died before it managed to spread everywhere? It's pretty rare to not get a total wipeout though. And air travel will probably kill the chances of that.

Tomorrow I need some gameplay, but I have a lot of ideas for that, so it should be fun to see how to interact with the already interesting simulation.

Yesterday we started working on the story finally. We had a nice idea and are following the idea now. I hope the complexity doesn't kill us. This is a graphical display of the story so far: