Spamming another diary entry - it seems to help me keep focused.

Finished the first mesh- possibly an archer tower (writing this makes me realize that there would also need to be some sort of tower attack animation which I hadn't considered). I have only a foggy idea of how textures work and practically zero experience texturing meshes, so that will be postponed.

Next step is to get the mesh to display properly using pyglet.

Chance of a playable product: 0.4%

Oh boy... This will be fun.  I've got my plot lined up and basic class diagram set up.  Mercurial repository is initialized, gameplay mechanics are ready to be written out on the morrow, music is ready to be generated, fonts waiting to be found, graphics are forming in my mind, yup, sounds like many other pyweek first diaries I've read.  See my entry for basic idea.

Note: I will try to title each post with a line from my favorite game series: Halo! This is the name of the first level from H3: ODST.

Note 2: This is day 0.5 since UTC 00:00 is 8:00 P.M. here, and I don't really get a full day today (9/10/2011).  I put in 1.5 hours of work and .5 hours of reporting.  I will then add in .5 hours of preparing to go to bed and then sleep.

Keep coding!

Not my first choice of theme, but I can work with this. Right now, I'm shooting for an Angbandish type game, starring an ever-lovable mimic slime. Consume magic items and creatures to gain power.

Regarding the Mutate! theme, I'd like to do something that's original. In the discussions I've been seeing a lot of talk about viruses and mutating creatures, but what if this mutation was a person? Even better, what if this person has the powers to mutate? Introducing...the Mutation Man (read: hero)!

With a Kirby-esque superpower, Mutation Man can pick up powers by eating or touching (haven't decided which) objects or even people. For instance, he can swallow up people to regain health, swallow people when he's at full health to buff himself up, swallow garbage cans to do a stink ray attack, etc.

The Storyline: Mutation Man has a girlfriend, Jean. One day, Jean is kidnapped by a terrorist group when she was working on the top floor of a really high tower. Mutation Man realizes Jean is in trouble, and decides to go superman on the baddies! It'll be a platformer/action game, with levels being different floors.

Due to the limitations of PyWeek, though, I'm keeping my hopes low and thinking about 3 floors? 4? ...that's pretty low for a skyscraper... -___________________________-

I will keep you posted on whatever else my tired brain comes up with.

Yay, a crappy title screen has been added. Well, it's mostly an exact copy from the kytten example provided, but it's a start.

Kytten seems pretty cool except there doesn't seem to be any documentation outside of some docstrings. Absolutely love that google code (repo for kytten) provides nice search capabilities. 

Started switching to git from svn two days ago (seems to be the trendy thing, and who am I to oppose a trend). Seems pretty cool so far.

Also switched from vim to python tools for visual studio today. Have yet to figure out how to get intellisense working.

Onto coming up with some simple art for towers and monsters and monster towers and tower monsters.

Chance of completion: 0.3%

It looks like I'm doing my idea for "Mutate!" It was my least favorite, but I can learn to love it all the same.

Here's the premise: There is a little creature that mutates according to his environment. He can jump, run, and dig. Some places are hot, some are cold, and some have medium temperature.

In cold, his fur gets longer. In heat, his fur gets shorter. In medium temperatures, his fur goes toward medium length. If he is too hot, he gets exhausted. If he is too cold, he shivers and slows down.

When he digs, his front legs get stronger and his back legs get weaker. When he jumps, his back legs get stronger and his front legs get weaker. When he runs, his legs even out. If he digs when his front legs are weak, he digs slowly and gets tired easily. If he jumps when his back legs are weak, he does not jump high and he falls down easily.

This is meant to be a portrait, and if you leave the game alone the creature will wander and entertain himself without your guidance. It's kind of an interactive, moving painting.

This is meant to have a painting-like art style.

I'm hoping to place well, because I'm feeling competitive. ^_^

Decided on game genre - never tried making a tower defense game and mutate seems like it might make for an interesting twist to the genre. Well more "evolve/mutate" really.

The idea is that the player will be able to build different types of towers, (e.g. fire, ice, lightning, piercing, blunt) and the monsters who are blithely following their path will be faced with the existential crisis of either dying or evolving so they can deal better against the onslaught brought from the towers. In turn the player will be able to, err, mutate? his towers to deal with the mutating monsters. So sort of a game and cat type thing.

This sounds ambitious enough to keep me procrastinating from the homework due Monday.

Chance of finishing: 0.2%

(Or I could go for a Grow type game with a mutating a tree or some creatures - but that sounds crazy difficult, a.k.a., requiring at least an ounce of artistic ability.)

As a manager at the CDC, it is your burden to ensure that you have hired the right people to the right positions around the country. You never know when the next outbreak may occur, and when it does, you want to know where it came from, where it is going, and how to stop it. Little do you know that the next disease is already here, and it's going to be the toughest fight yet.

Basic premise: You are the manager of the CDC, or a CDC like organization. You have a limited budget and staff. A viral infection is on the loose, claiming victims across the country. During the game you will hire various agents to posts around the country from a map like interface. Each agent exerts some influence over an area. Their work will find out causes of the disease, lobby local governments for actions to help stem the spread of it, and research and implement of cures. As the game progresses, and you think of solutions to the problem, the virus is also thinking. It will react to every action taken against it. Cures used will no longer work, it will change its attack vector to avoid detection, and it will spread in different ways to help it reach places that you aren't looking for it.

Can you stop it before the nation - nay, the world - is completely wiped out?

Phases:

• Exploration/planning - recruit and position your team, try and spot when the disease hits and from where
• Curb and slow transmission - use media campaigns and travel restrictions from keeping the disease from spreading, while also investing in keeping the infected alive as long as possible to allow proper study
• Develop and implement a cure - try and save as many people as possible and wipe out as much of the strain as possible
• Immunize the rest - if you are successful, you will have stemmed the spread before it mutated. If not, be prepared to restart the cycle with a variant of the disease :)

Actions:

• Hire/fire members of your team
• Assign workforce to the locations on the map
• Give members of the workforce a job focus
• Follow up on incoming information to be able to react
• Initiate specific special action plans

Disease modelling:

• Each location has an infectable population, divided into 1000s
• Each of those infectable population groups belongs to a demographic
• Population groups move around the map
• Disease starts with certain characteristics - spread vector and rate, time to symptom, symptoms, time to live, death rate, and resistances
• Disease will latch onto a population and be represented as a number of infected in that population
• Based on the activities of the population, and the spread vector and rate, the disease can be added to another population in the same space
• Local situations on a space, influenced by the agents there, will adjust these spread factors
• Cures or treatments can lower the infected amount in populations
• Diseases that are attacked (cures, immunization) but still alive, will tweak their characteristics

Style: 

• Not too realistic - have fun with it
• Interesting symptoms!
• icons and interface clear enough to have an idea of whats happening, without being too transparent (hidden information is an important part of the game mechanic)
• Pixel art for various things, but low on animation. A shot of someone in a hospital bed for instance. Only the bare minimum of art.
• Exciting interface to make up for lack of art, icons moving from place to place, color cycling, etc
• Creepy music stolen from ccMixter. Lots of it on a cycle.
• Nice interface sounds, clicks, pops, etc that feel good

Development plan:

• 1-2 days of design. Breadth and depth. Occasional programming, but only to check if an idea is worth pursuing or not. NAIL DOWN SCOPE - What is absolutely necessary? What isn't?
• 1-2 days engine work. Focus on the feel of the game. The icons and menus. Basic basic graphical elements - but not so programmer arty that they can't be used in final. Don't worry about being able to "win". The game may ultimately not be winnable anyway - the virus keeps evolving until it is unbeatable? Ensure all of the REQUIRED elements are in, even if not tweaked well.
• 3 days of tweaking and additions. Add elements that are not required. Make game fun. Must stress again. Make game fun. Identify potential problem areas early on and get them taken care of. First 10 minutes, not the third or fourth 10 minutes of gameplay. Engine should not have obvious bugs by this point.

So far in the 30 minutes we've had Fishbowl444 create an awesome logo for our team:


Me and Tekk have also gotten some boilerplate code done. Things are looking good.

First pyweek for me.

Decided to do the smart thing and use a lot of software I've never used before...

Planning on using (also learning) pyglet and possibly kytten.

Idea is to design a 3d game with 3d models made from blender and exported in the obj format (googling for simple formats yield this one).

First thing first. Learn more opengl...

Estimated chance of having a finished game: 0.1%