The theme wasn't one of my preferred options. Was initially a bit bummed about that, but then I had three reasonable ideas in the next couple of hours and spent the early afternoon choosing one (competition started at 10 a.m., Sunday morning for me). This is probably my second-favourite idea, but I'm kind of playing to the crowd a bit and I suspect it's more fun than my somewhat academically inspired favourite.

Onto the actual game that won the decision process...

Switch Racer

It's your basic racer style game. Except your vehicle keeps changing. You have a series of vehicles available at the start of the race, with different properties in terms of speed, agility, weapons(?) and defensive capabilities. You order them and then start the race in the first vehicle. Every so often — and I'm thinking at least once per lap — you have to change to the next vehicle in the sequence. This will happen "magically" and isntantaneously, since my mental image is based around a series of magic students having a race (unclear if the graphics will support that vision or not).

Tactics feature in terms of how the vehicles work with different portions of the track. Maybe there are shortcuts you can take in smaller vehicles and maybe the more powerful ones are better uphill. You can only use each vehicle once, so you need to find the right balance (and have a decent vehicle left for the end).

As a twist, in some races, you can force everybody's vehicle to change to the next one in their sequence. So you aren't entirely in control of when things change and have to be prepared to react. If you get a bad vehicle for the place in the race you are, maybe you throw it away by self-changing immediately, losing any advantage it might give you elsewhere.

Code and progress

I've decided to develop in the open. I'm pushing my code to a github repository as I go. After 4 or 5 hours on this today, i have a pretty solid idea of what I'm building and a plan of attack. Starting out with a simple 2D overhead version of the race, since the mechanics aren't completely tied to the visual presentation. Ultimately, I'd like to use a 3D view, but if that falls afoul of time constraints or enthusiasm, I can stick to the 2D graphics.

Had a bit of a wrestle, both mentally and at the keyboard, with technology choices. I know I want to use PyOpenGL for the graphics (pyglet is out of the question, since it has a long-standing bug that prevents it working without a patch on 64-bit Linux systems with Nvidia drivers, which is exactly my system). However, I still need something to manage the windows and draw text, etc. Using GLUT felt a little too low-level and I was concerned about support on Mac and Windows (freeglut isn't the default there). So it was pygame or wxPython. Both of these do not build cleanly in a virtualenv environment. WxPython  because they are "special" and don't build via setup.py. Pygame because it hasn't joined 2011 with respect to Linux systems yet and has a bug in the headers it's including (they also have some interesting problems with pip & easy_install picking the right version to download). Fortunately, the build problem is easily fixed with a local build and I've documented that in the README file to save people a couple of minutes. Still it feels very heavy to use all of pygame for one tiny corner of it, but I've made my choice and am not going to lose any more cycles on that one.

Tomorrow's goals

Get most of the 2D overhead version working on a simple oval or rectangular track. The graphical side is the straightforward piece here. Possibly the most fiddly in some respects, but not particularly brain-stretching. Modelling the game entities is going to be more interesting, but more details on that tech tomorrow.

-Download and extract skellington1.9.
-Rename the directory to game name.
-Init git repository. I can use mercurial, but i will give a try to git.
-Listening music for inspiration ;p.
-Start game design.

I decided to change the name from immunity (kind of boring) to mutagion (mashup of hot new movie contagion and the theme).

Today I did hardly anything. I waited most of the day for theme announcement, then after a short brainstorm session, I left it to simmer. Then right before bed, I picked up my notebook and started planning this stuff out.

First, rather than having faceless population groups on the map, I decided I should add some character. Each population group will be represented by a single character. For instance, a child group in an area will be abstracted away as Sally, the 6 year old rich girl who has all of the standard immunizations. Don't hurt me if some of these are racially or gender stereotypical :( I will try not to but it's hard. Ultimately all of the characters at the start of the game will probably be randomly generated though, so that might help.

I haven't decided yet whether you will be able to monitor the status of all people (clicking on a city, you see a list of all of the representative characters), or only see the ones who have reported they are sick. But you will in some fashion be able to read about the characters and try and spot the ones who have more than just the common cold before they die. Of course you will get reports of deaths as well.

I'm also throwing out the mechanic of hiring disease center agents and placing them on the map. I'm not sure what I'll be replacing it with, but it felt too indirect. And like a different game. I know there will be some types of actions you can take, ranging from things like collecting a blood sample from a person (which will give you a piece of info about the virus, if they have it); to more drastic actions like implementing a campaign for safe sex to curb spread of std (if the disease happens to be transmitted via sex).

The former will be far less costly to you as a player than the latter, and these resources will be one of the main mechanics. One of the ways to gain influence is to simply wait for the disease to be more of a threat. I'm not sure of other ways, but perhaps spending cash or healing famous people lol.

One of the things I want is multiple "solutions" to the game. For example, I thought of a strategy where you basically pick a city, and build up enough influence to implement the most drastic actions there. You halt air traffic in or out, block the roads, and make breathing masks, water filtration, and abstinence mandatory by law. Then you wait as the rest of the world is taken over by the disease :) Not that this is necessarily a good ending, or that I plan to actually implement this strategy or make it viable, but I want the possibility space of the game to be big enough that people can come up with crazy ideas like this and see what happens.

Scope still too big. Plan for tomorrow: simplify more, and begin coding diseases, spread, and how to influence them.

So, genetic algorithms. Bits describe connection weights for AI MM. 100 States seems adequate.

The player moves around a maze hunting blobs. The blobs will do something. If they collide with the player, they will harm him. Blobs come in waves? Or do they spawn directly off of 'successful' blobs?

So it's begun! I haven't done anything yet, since I just must to have a decent sleep. So I made some personal rules for my self to make most fun out of this:

1. Each day I will take few photos in the morning and in the evening that I could do  my personal morphing to zombie.
2. I will stay sober.
3. I will not delete my comments, todo's and fixme's (I just gonna mark them obsolete). This will sort of draw my mind map true out of competition so reading the code after a month or so should be fun.
4. No spell fix or censorship of previous day's comments, posts.
5. At least single diary entry per day.
6. Have fun.

I'm planing to make tower defense game. I'm going to use pygame. Since I barely touched it - I hope to finish. My code inspiration will be this game - http://www.pygame.org/project-Python+PyGame+Tower+Defence-1296-2281.html No it won't be copy/paste, just it has some interesting ideas. My initial plan of actions is: 

1. Make a map;
2. Make predetermined waves of mobs
3. Make tower
4. Make basic tower upgrade system based on full binary tree
5. Make advanced actions to upgraded towers (splash, spreadshot or something else)
6. Make random waves that are based on what you're vulnerable to (If you have a lot of slow, but powerful towers - launch fast mobs)
7. Make random map

I hope to make up at-least up to #4 on a worst-case scenario... The game accordingly to my idea will be infinite (or up to a point where you will lose). Morphing will be felt in tower upgrade system (all towers will derive from one) and "smart" waves. Yet I just don't know why the hell I would need a menu, there will be no options, and no save/load system, so it leaves two buttons - play and quit, so probably I wont make one. What do you think? 

People still like hexes, right? I also have a fancy darkness effect I had to look up the logistic function for. That's all I got so far.

Using Pygame, Humerus, and Albow I was able to quickly (~3hrs) get some of the ground work for the mutation game mechanic coded. There is not much on the screen except some debug text and buttons, but I hope to have a screenshot of a ruff version of Mutate! up tomorrow. 

 So far I am having a blast with pyweek!

  

Every time I start an opengl project, I consider it a milestone of sorts when I get the screen to display something other than black.

Stole (well, I did give credit) pygame's wavefront object loader. Figured time could be better spent elsewhere.

The tower mesh I made earlier displays properly. Now I need to figure out how to implement lighting. Spent a few hours reading the red book last week in preparation for this, and it seems doable considering the 3D normals get calculated from blender (i.e. won't have to figure out how to find normals).

Rather than keep working through the night, I'll take the prudent choice of an easy homework (watching Broken Blossoms for film class) followed by sleep.

Chance of game completion: 0.5%

Okay, so let me first say that this is my first PyWeek. I saw this challenge either in Hacker News or Slashdot and thought it would be a good idea to challenge myself. I know python, but I don't know pyGame or any other of the aforementioned game libraries. I figured a week is a fair amount of time to learn! I'm really just curious how much I can accomplish. Wish me luck!

Great, now that I have that out of the way...

Mutate Game (or atleast attempt to)
Name: as of now, null, but Dr. Laughing's Adventures is slowly growing on me
Plot: Dr. Laughing is a scientist that has created this serum that "mutates" things. The mutation can be good or bad. Dr. Laughing needs to use this serum to navigate through the world.
Objective: Dr. Laughing's objective is to clear each screen. There will be obstacles along the way, but "mutating" them can either help or hurt you. 
 
Yea, I'm trying to keep things simple, but "simple" is turning out to be more difficult at every new idea I have... I have more ideas still flowing... I'll edit this as they come I suppose. 

Cheers all! 

Alright, in order to keep things on track, my plan is:
Sunday night: have the map generation and display done.
Tuesday night: be able to move around the map.
Wednesday night: have enemies and a generic game experience
Thursday night: have menus, save/load, an ending, and all those other fine things.
I'll see how well this ends up matching reality.