Some progress exists, I have a somewhat solid game concept, the theme for this couldn't have been worse for me, since I am extremely horrible at drawing, so... I'll work around it, after all, its the game makers interpretation of the theme that is exciting!

Furthermore, as someone who writes mostly Assembly and C code, I have realized I do not really have a clue about good coding guidelines/styles for Python. :(

It's time to lower my minimum standards!

I've decided that I need the following at a bare minimum:

• Hot, moderate, and cold areas
• Platforming gameplay
• Fur length variation
• A dirt-simple procedural world

Anything beyond this would be great and I'll definitely pursue it. On the other hand, if I only make it this far, I'll be happy.

Peace, love, and relaxation,

--- Akake

Just completed the player sprites using Photoshop (bitmap)

The setting for the game is going to be the whole area of the UK (or maybe just England, depending on time constraints). I'm going to be using real locations to try and make The Web is Dead as immersive as possible.

I was surprised how difficult it was to find good figures on population; which towns belong in which counties etc.

Despite our Office of National Statistics making obscure data available as Excel spreadsheets or Access databases (!), in the end Wikipedia gave me what I needed. Lots of data entry to do, though, which is delaying my starting of the game code.

This map has been a massive help:
http://www.businesslistsuk.com/postcode_map.htm

I'm using altgraph to store the topology:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/altgraph/

This paper looks very promising as a way of modelling mutation:
files.innovative-science.com/1_innov_science2.pdf

Although I probably won't have time to use any of this:
http://wiki.deductivethinking.com/wiki/Python_Programs_for_Modelling_Infectious_Diseases_book

I'm trying something a bit different this time. Rather than a traditional game, this will be more of a sandbox for playing around with plant structures based on L-systems.

You will start off with one fairly simple species of plant. You have two ways of creating new species:

1. Induce a random mutation
2. Cross-breed two existing species

The DNA of a plant will consist of a set of chromosome pairs, where each chromosome is a production in an L-system. The pairing is irrelevant to the operation of the L-system, but it comes into play during cross-breeding, where a crossing-over procedure will be applied to each pair of chromosomes.

Mutations will consist of randomly adding or deleting symbols in the chromosomes, and maybe some other things such as duplicating entire branches or chromosomes to increase the overall complexity of the genome.

No predefined goal or fitness function is currently planned; it will be up to the player to set his own goal and work towards it, or just have fun playing around and seeing what comes out.

I'm also not currently intending to let the player directly see or edit the L-system, although I might add that later if I get time.

Day 1 Progress

Thought up the initial idea (after considering adapting my idea for More Criticals, which could have been stretched via the idea of radiation-induced mutation, but it wouldn't have fitted so well). Performed some initial research by reading the first few chapters of The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. Came up with a plan of attack for the main implementation problems.

Day 2 Progress

Put together a basic game skeleton and started implementing the core idea. Got the basic L-system substitution mechanism working, and the beginnings of a rendering system. Can generate and display simple plants consisting entirely of woody stems (example below).

Plan for tomorrow: Need to get more visual elements into the rendering -- leaves, flowers, etc. Will experiment with encoding of filled polygons and colour variations.

Name revealed: mutantris. Too original :p. Isn't a ordinary tetris.
Here testing the rendering engine. Is useful the pyglet batch for render the blocks. Also im using numpy for fast array manipulation.

Okay, so it's 3:17am here and the alarm for work goes off in 3 hours; awesome day it's gonna be! </sarcasm>
Anyhow, lots of housework this passed weekend so no real dev time until now (the joys of home ownership). I guess it's really not _real_ dev work either since all I've been doing is going through Pygame tutorials.**

I've managed to get my game surface up with some basic event handling, some basic animation (think Chimp Pygame example), but NO sound! Grr no sound is annoying! Maybe that Chimp Pygame example is outdated, but it doesn't work for me. All good, I'm gonna see if I can circle back to sound later since it really shouldn't affect game play. 

Anyhow, I may need to scale down what I thought was a "simple" game idea to something even more simpler. My main objective is to survive and see things to the finish. As the work week is starting, my "free" time will be dwindling down. Nooooo!

Here's a screenshot; it's animating and that's what it captured. A background, some text, a ball, and my dog! (just testing obviously)

 
Cheers all!

 
**Note: Like I said in my first diary entry, I'm just here to learn some game dev libraries and see how far I can make it! 

 

It was a long day of coding, yet I still did not seem to accomplish as much as I had hoped. Here is a screenshot of the game so far:


  
The graphics are just place holders. The ugly looking circles and rectangles are flowers which will hopefully be replaced with pixel art once the gameplay is hammered out. This is more of just a test of the flower DNA mutations.

The idea behind "Mutate!" is that the player can mutate the nucleotides in the DNA of flowers on a distant planet each generation (this game is by no means scientifically correct). The DNA is made up of the color elements RGB that change the flowers color, size and shape. The challenge will be in mutating the DNA of the flower to survive the changing environmental conditions on the planet. These conditions are also based on color so different color suns or rains will have different effects. There will be a seven day forecast of the conditions of the planet so that the player can strategize and prepare for the coming days. The end goal is to have a certain number of plants surviving or take up the majority of the land, but I will need to playtest to make sure this is actually fun.

I am calling it a night. I have to work in the morning.

 

Its my first Pyweek, and it has more fun than I expected :) After the first day's 10 hours of coding my core is almost done. So lets hope I can grab some paint and brush tomorrow. :)

This is the person behind it all. I'm the creator, 
I'm the programmer, the "sound guy" and the "graphics guy"
everything to some degree.

The target is to get finally started with something and to get
better in the fields I have started. Getting better with graphics,
no fancy pants "graphics designer" who sits there with his 
overprized macbook and draws with his bamboo wacom 
tablet some "things" he thinks is according to art or "good 
design".

Then the "sound guy" who runs in circles on his windows books,
if he manages to get stuff out of the speakers with his also 
expensive or downloaded software, man give me a break from
this bullshit.

Finally the programmer who is a bitch, if you have more in
your team. Maybe you have extra nerdy programmers, 
who snort out loud of any little shit like they can't 
control their laughing, which is then the case. 
Also when it comes to version control systems and
people are by accident windows users and want 
"good clients" which then goes to the conclusion,
that they want subversion. Which is a great facepalm
for a fucking team who is not sitting all the time in
an office and has maybe not always an internet 
connection. 
 
And then all the drama, which goes around or when 
creativity is thrown into a cage with "brainstorms" or
coding is thrown into a cage with "design patterns".
 
Fuck them, fuck them all.

And why I'm writing in the name of different people?
Why am I a little game studio as a whole? Because
to make fun of all those people, all those useless
people.
 
This pyweek entry... baby is trash and it is supposed 
to be like that. Because I'm at the bottom of 
what I was in my capabilities and now I try to get 
better again. After all those years, getting finally
to a state, where you want to be is finally again
the fucking time. 
  
HATE HATE HATRED GRML ARG ARG WAH WAH
( self referencial fun. I'm making fun of myself )