Ah, now I can remember why I NEVER finish a game project: I suck at graphics.

I already knew that, but anyway... I joined this competition and I'll do my best.



And yes... that's probably the best I can get (by now). I've tried to follow my plot. Can you see the cells? OK, kind of.

Some pygame code was written. Enough for a short first day!

For the game that im designing is a good idea the "stale-block" negation. A idea inspired from the Super Smash Bros stale-move negation. The player will be obligated to used different blocks. I hope that you will see the idea.

So far today I've drawn the player, a simple tileset (1 tile so far :P), written a bunch of code, and realized I have no idea how to write a cave generator! Fun all around!

You all simply amaze me, expecting to have a playable engine by tomorrow, I just have tons of text and empty classes, not to mention a rather complicated web of various objects, the essentials for creating the engine highlighted.  I managed to find a tutorial on making a ragdoll system, will use that and the gfxdraw library in pygame to do all of my animation frames for me, just need to define various positions and how to interpolate between them...  bug advantage of how I'm setting that section up is that I can allow characters to be dismembered when killed, making fighting very satisfying.  hordes of zombies + exploding fireball = zombie confetti!  I have a general Idea on how to do that, but I need to get my main loop complete and level loading and all that other stuff out of the way... *sigh*. taking a little break after committing, H:Reach firefight arcade? sounds like a stress reliever to me! (I'll be working plenty later on, but I spent all afternoon doing this)

Despite a somewhat late start, we settled on a game idea really quickly.

The idea is sheer elegance in it's simplicity. Start with the classic snakes game, and rejig it with a bunch of mutation which change the behaviour and abilities of the snake. Hopefully, we will be able to get a reasonably working engine fairly quickly, which will allow us to have adequate time to create levels while polishing the engine.

So far, 128 commits into the project, progress has been reasonably good.

• We can display levels, although we're a little short of actual levels
• We have a bunch of framework code in place for future features like sound
• We have several useful widgets for the gui
• We have a lot of funky logic for handling focus correctly with our widgets
• We have a good start on the art
• We are part way to having a level editor
• We sort of have a snake, although it currently moves in a very special way, and collisions are still outstanding.
• We've debugged our mercurial repo setup, and it now works as expected

The next couple of days don't look that promising, since we'll all be fairly busy with real life [1], but with luck, we'll have the basic game playable around by Wednesday [2].

[1] An annoying unavoidable distraction
[2] And, if we're really lucky, we'll still have the basic game playable by Friday

Day 1 recap:

We have an idea and made some progress towards a working game. Basic graphics exist and we'll probably reach a playable state tomorrow. We have our initial screenshot and will work on from here. Initial drama subsided. Some parts of the team work on deployment (already). I hear a lot of swearing about py2exe and py2app.....

Working on dfa.py

We're going to have a Markov Model be a descendent of a regular DFA with an overridden transition function (that essentially acts as a gate keeper)

Each Node in the DFA will keep track of:
  -Transition Functions
  -User Data

OK, let's say it now : I have little experience with python (and with programming in general), I have no experience in pygame, I have no free-time, and my daughter didn't sleep last night... I guess Zygotes doesn't a have a single chance to be playable in a week, but I'll definitely try as hard as possible...

I have lots of half-implemented features, all critical to the game. I am bouncing between them, which means that this thing is gonna go through a phase where it's coming together really freaking quickly because I'm finishing all of these different things.

Part of that is the artwork. I've got several hours' worth of player character art to make and probably another several hours' worth of terrain and backdrop art. When I get that completely finished, this thing is gonna fly together for a while. Until then, progress will definitely be slow. After that, it'll follow a more sane pace.

Here's how the game works. Every map has three regions: Hot, temperate, and cold. There are also three tiers of terrain: Underground with dirt that the creature can dig through, the ground with room for the creature to run, and the trees with branches for the creature to climb on.

His body varies in two ways: Fur length and leg strength. Heat makes his fur shorter, cold makes it longer. Digging makes his front legs strong and his back legs weak, jumping makes his back legs strong and his front legs weak. Moderate temperatures make his fur approach medium length and running makes his legs balanced. If his fur is long, he gets hot more easily and if his fur is short, he gets cold more easily. If his front legs are weak, he gets tired easily when digging and if his back legs are weak he does not jump very high and gets tired easily from jumping. When his front legs are strong, he runs awkwardly (kind of the way a bulldog runs) and if his back legs are strong he hops (like a rabbit); if his legs are balanced then he runs quickly.

Each of these mutations has two levels; the first level is somewhat specialized where the second is very powerful but gets in the way otherwise.

When the game is left alone for about thirty seconds with no input, the creature will wander around and behave however he wants according to an AI routine.

I'm hoping to have the base gameplay (platformer stuffs) done by Tuesday afternoon. That will involve the medium fur/balanced legs player art and the moderate temperature, above-ground terrain art.

Peace, love, and personal growth,

--- Akake

Yeahh, my favourite theme won!
Now I have worked for an hour and a half and here is the plan for my game:
It will be a platformer where you get the MutationGun(TM). With this gun you can mutate your enemies and yourself. Every time you use it you and your enemy swap your (positive and negative) mutations.

Good luck to everyone!