Had my second development day yesterday. Still a long way to go, but I should have actual gameplay today. gogogo

Meanwhile, I'll be putting my development timelapse and commentary videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/shundread#grid/user/EF40A4B5A4F28974

Now that i have a player up and moving i am running into the hurdle of might lighting routine is not fast enough to have a light following the player without a noticeable drop in frame rate, as part of the process of optimizing my algorithm i have found an a really great tool to help visually represent where time is being spent.

To show the kind of output it can give
View it Here


So hopefully i can get that sped up soonish.

If anybody is interested in using the tool have a look HERE

Ok, today I didn't have any major collision detection issues (I've managed to discover one issue but that's pretty rare anyway). This allowed me to pretty much focus the whole of today on content, and I now have about four rooms totally finished. A bit of balancing needs to be done on certain aspects (eg the spikes), but again, that's balancing not bugs.

One major bug that needs fixing is that returning to a checkpoint on death crashes the game if it's in a different room. This is kinda unfortunate as one or two of the game mechanics rely on that working.

Todo for tomorrow:

* Saving
* Fix a collsion bug
* Change flyer movement
* Add badguys

For the rest of this week is also looks kinda like this:

* Add sounds
* Add music
* Add loads of music

Yesterday was a short one. I just made a background and adjust some graphic detail. Todays tasks are fix some minor problem, tunne gameplay, and maybe add some sound too.

Today was a good day for the design of the game. The first few days the design was kinda of nebulous. I had a ruff idea of elements I wanted to include, but the game as a cohesive whole was not yet formed in my mind. That all changed today with hopefully enough time to code it all by the end of the pyweek. 

 I solidified a gameplay loop with an actual ending condition and a goal. Here is what I came up with (It probably won't make a lot of sense to anyone else, but oh well): 
Pseudo Code

GAMEPLAY:
  Player starts with one plant
  Computer rival also starts with one plant

  While not END_CONDITION:
    Change DNA (Gene 1: Bloom color, 
Gene 2: Color Sun Bonus, 
Gene 3: Color Rain Bonus, 
Gene 4: Reproduction Bonus if pollinated)
    ACTION: Rotate DNA Left, Rotate DNA Right, Cross DNA, Random Mutate DNA
    One new plant is spawned for each player
    Random Color Bug pollinates (seeks biggest bloom of same color) + Bonus from DNA
    Day Changes
    Weather effect happens ( Sun +/- bloom + Bonus, Rain +/- plant Size + Bonus)
    if bloom or size too small 
    then plant dies

END CONDTION:
    All slots filled on the land

WINNER:     
  Most plants wins! 

We finished the game design, and we finally started making "artwork" and coding a bit :-) Still, there is a major problem with the game play, so it's back to the drawing board...

I'm starting over. Almost from scratch. Usually I plan quite a bit during the theme-choosing week and then take the coding week off from work completely with saved-up vacation. Unfortunately last week was my first week of work at my new job and taking week 2 off would have been pretty unacceptable. So I planned light in comparison to my previous PyWeeks. But apparently not light enough to be able to polish it to the degree that I wanted. So I'm switching to something entirely different than a 2-person co-op alien shooter: a simple puzzle-style game with an incredibly small number of rules. Hopefully this isn't a mistake. 

Today, there have been several decisions regarding game design and in addition the graphics also leaped forward quite a bit. There is an editor now too, allowing us to puzzle together levels very fast.

Since we do not intend to be too politically correct, there are our 3 different types of buildings the player can choose from

-FastFood Restaurant spawning „Fatsos“, tanklike

-Beergarden spawning drunk people, attracting aggro from towers

-Orphanage spawning Orphans, they are weak but many

Main menu also works pretty fine now, stay tuned!

screenshot day 3

After spending the majority of today fiddling about with the collision detection and one very annoying bug, I just realized that I coud solve my problem by not allowing the circumstances of the bug to happen, namely, don't use any platforms.  This will make it seem more like an RPG and I am fine with that.  It allows me to include more time for fixing projectiles (the other thing I worked on), frame animated entities, and ragdolls.  This is all going to be attempted tomorrow.  The next day will be UI and game mechanics (like respawning, moving between levels, actually mutating, etc), and the final full day will be creating all my assets that I have not done yet.  Saturday will be playtesting and tweaking, (I get to play a game for 12 hours straight and not get yelled at, sweet!)  I'm going to get some rest, because tomorrow is going to be a very busy day. (oh yeah, two quotes! I might explain all of them in a postmortem entry... than again, I might not)  

Side note: unless I can figure out a way to make bullets work, MC will not be making a cameo in my game, I myself might try to add in a cool god-mode easter egg, actually, that sounds perfect!  Then again, I just figured out how to do bullets in my head as I'm writing this.  How to portray him as a stick figure...

So, I currently have 2 version of my game:

Version 1:

Written like I would've written a C program, this version I mostly worked on yesterday, this version actually works fine, of course there is several things that would need fixes and adjustments, as well as more features

Version 2:

This version is written some sort of OOP fashion, sorta like how I expect a Python program to be written if it was written OOP-style (+ my own touch of failure in terms of my lacking Python knowledge). This version has major issues, mainly because, since I already had a working version from the days before, I pasted a lot of code from my previous version, and that has led to several major bugs, and design flaws.

When I rewrite code, its not as fun to write it the second time, and I get stuck in the mindset that I used when writing my first version, which is bad, and its only 3 days left of the challenge, I will have to start to really work my way through this, it is moderately stressful. So I decided I really do not have a choice, I will have to rewrite my game one more time.

I will be throwing away thousands of lines of code. And start over. Luckily my story and my artwork is there, no change in concept is present.

:(