After losing half a day of productivity yesterday with my laptop cpu fan died, I have most of the display/interface stuff I am going to use down. I am using PGU, which has simplified everything. I was having trouble figuring out PGU Menus, but I decided I can do everything I need to do with dialogs. The code is a horrible hacked together nightmare. But it works and I think it will be resilient enough to last the week.

I have a rudimentary relationship simulator working, but it only takes into account similarity of attributes (in my system attributes could refer to things people normally fight over like, good-evil, law-chaos, republican-democrat). Tomorrow I hope to add mutual friends, mutual enemies, introductions and people being influenced by their friends. And then hopefully I can add ways for the player to manipulate the network, and start searching for funness.

 

Hi fellow PyWeek-ers !

Hope you're all right.
 
So yesterday I said I will talk about the enemies ... well I lied :) I prefer talking about the powers and the levels' rooms.
 



So basically, this is 1 room. The first room of the first level to be exact. You already know Stan.

You can see 2 apple cores. Stan is here to find food remember ? So on his way to the dreamed meal, he will find apple cores not to starve to death. (we thought about the classic coins but he didn't want to eat them)

The orange gem on the platform next to him is the Fire gem. No surprise here : it gives Stan the ability to launch fire balls. And this in two purposes:

• kill the enemies 
• burn the obstacles preventing him from reaching his meal

I think you already know what he will burn in this first room ;)
But enougth about FEAW for today, we still have 4 entries to learn more about it :)

 
So what did we do during this 3rd day ?

Well cha keeped creating assets and doing some level design. We now have 3 levels waiting to be implemented in the game. We might be able to have all the levels we wanted by the end of the week.

elghinn finally find a convenient solution to handle the levels as he wanted to. I won't say more about this today as he will stop his diary-lazyness for 1 day tomorrow and will talk about his system ;)

And me? Well I'm glad you ask!
I took care of the Stan/ground collision system. I've been wanting to do such a system for a platformer for a long time but I never had (took?) the occasion to do it. But now I can check that on my list :D
The simplest thing would have been to have a flat ground, but it would have been too easy ... plus cha wanted uneven grounds so I accepted to let her express her art with uneven grounds (and then my stress got bigger! Damn graphic artists! :p)

I was a little worried about this part of the dev as I had one idea but had some concerns about the performances.
My idea was quite classic though: have a black and white image for each background and check the box of the player on these images loaded in memory. I also considered partitionning the ground into lots of simple geometries but I finally prefered my first solution. 
I already tried this solution in a personal space game though (a PixelJunkShooter-like) and I wasn't pleased with the result of the collisions: how to know if a collision comes from the top or the left?
After some google-time I found a solution: create 4 boxes! 1 for the top,1 for the bottom, 1 for the left and 1 for the right.
Like that, depending on the player input, I can check to collision with the boxe(s) I want and act accordingly. So I did it and was quite pleased with the result.
I just had to spend a few minutes tuning the boxes in order and the result to collisions and Stan was able to run on uneven grounds \o/

And that's it for today.
Good luck and be brave: we almost reached the half-week milestone \o/

A few things came together today. After I added the ability to connect additional parts to your mutant I soon added rescaling of parts. This allows body parts to grow into place, and it also allows lungs to breathe and hearts to beat.

The first grotesequely pulsating monster was this armoured slug thing:



Then I implemented some of the other body parts on the drawing board:



The framerate is lower than I would have expected. Possibly Box2D doesn't like me scaling dozens of shapes every frame, but I haven't investigated further.

Finally I wasted a good hour trying to make the mutant stand more gracefully. In fairness, Honda spent years making ASIMO walk, so I should have expected to fail in an evening. Making the creature walk is going to be an exercise in physics hacks.

Although progress is still slow (nobody has much time this week), we managed quite a bit more today than yesterday.

• The snake now has had plastic surgery getting a nice segmented body with a head and tail. It still has endearing quirks to it's movement: After a good hour's head-scratching crawling lessons, it can move smoothly in some directions. Earlier this evening, it loved climbing the screen a little too much. Then, decapitated itself if you went down-screen. But while I was writing this entry, it appears to have been tamed.
• We have "locked" level button widgets for a "levels" screen
• And we spent way too much (> 0) time fighting and debugging the pyflakes + pep8 commit hooks.
• The start and end points are pretty arrows, rather than confusing stars
• We have rats (or are they mice?), and frogs.
• The level editor is coming together, and can now paint pretty levels. I predict the arrivals of new levels tomorrow.

Two days in and I'm quite pleased so far. Spent quite a lot of time tuning the simulation so that it gives the player a chance of winning. Tomorrow is going to be about the web stuff which is a key aspect of the game.

Web Game doesn't grab people as much as, say, beautifully transparent procedurally generated manga babes, but here's the back story to try and get you in the mood:

Joining the Volunteer Reserve was just a way of earning a few
extra quid every month. You never thought you'd actually hear
the attack siren. Have to find your OP key. Drive to the hill
above the town.

Seal yourself inside.

Log on to the Dispatch Net.

You are hung over and have never read the operating manual. But
there are some people who need you to do something. Quickly.

They are waiting on your order to distribute Retro-mutagen 54A-6.
It needs to be deployed into the drinking water, but supplies
are limited so you need to time each delivery according to local
conditions.

Things wouldn't be so bad if you had a proper phone. But this old
RAF comms net only delivers messages by fax. And some bright spark
thought it would be a good idea to keep those fax numbers...

In The Cloud.

The piece of wet string which is your WAN connection also delivers
operational information via a beautifully designed Web API. The
trouble is, as each of England's counties is lost to hordes of
unspeakably modified but highly aggressive taxpayers (and others),
your ability to access these resources is progressively reduced.

Can you stay online long enough to make a difference? Or should
you just wait until the worst is over and come out with your hands
up?

Actually, you don't have that choice. In this game you're most likely
to throw your mouse at the wall and then die.

Ok. I am learning Blender Game Engine and my progress is so slow. But finnaly I have something that works.

So you are Paco, Pablo, Juan... none of them? Didn't decide yet.
But you like the gorgeous chica living a couple of blocks from you.
And no, I'm not going to tell you her name.

She is H-O-T. Isn't she?
You can't live any more without her, you have to win her heart by any means.
Think, think, think! What you can do?
(...)
GOT IT!
What about clicking here and there, wandering around the city, looking for some nice valuable stuff and, why not, doing something illegal? Let's stock up on camouflages.
Whatever your name, you are a genius!

-------------
Very productive day... teammates are drawing like crazy generating tons of arts for the game, and I managed to make a rough gameplay that is working, ugh, pretty fine...
Tomorrow issues: screen scrolling and character's pathway. And collisions, of course!
Good nigth.

Day #3 and we have:

• Some buttons on the right (non-functional)
• Ability to place down "towers"
• Creeps that spawn and slowly scroll up the screen

Hopefully by night #4:

• Creeps will spawn randomly (and in bounds)
• Towers will shoot at the creeps
• Creeps will start being generated using a genetic algorithm

Wish us luck!

I managed to make a track. Hopefully I'll have enough time to do more.

http://soundcloud.com/cav-3/pyweek13