Mutate:
Platformer where player goes from left to right encountering strange goop which causes them to mutate in some way whenever they touch it. There will be several ways the player can change and each affects how they interact with the environment. The player may have to touch different things in the right
 order in order to solve a puzzle and complete the level.

Mr Fixit:
This is my favourite I think. The player is a businessman who fixes problems using buzzwords. You will have to complete a bunch of minigames which will reward you with tokens. These tokens will make up a final puzzle which you solve to complete the game.

Mysterious stranger:
Again, basic platformer, but with a story to it. The mysterious stranger pops up in random places to give you information. At the beginning you are just told to do what he says as you're in danger, but over the course of the game you slowly unravel a terrible conspiracy!

Negotiator:
You are a spaceship captain, "The Negotiator". You "negotiate" dangerous obstacles to smuggle illegal goods from one place to another. You can also negotiate the amount of stuff you buy/sell at each checkpoint. Taking on more dangerous stuff means more  enemies after you. Each level there will be some mandatory stuff you have to take and the basic difficulty level will increase.

Critical hit:
RPG where everything you do destroys the enemy instantly. After a while everyone you interact with recognises you as the brutal murderer you are and avoids you. The player meets the families of the enemies they destroyed and is forced to think about what they have done. Then the player is arrested and goes to jail.

Don't you hate when life gets in the way of whatever you want to do? After cleaning my desk, plugging my piano into my computer, hanging my whiteboard on my wall and practicing how to draw fast, two ridiculous deadlines, a test and a new job have thrown me out of the competition, 4 hours before starting.

I guess by now everyone has enough ideas for the competition (I know I did!), but if any of you is still looking for something, this were my ideas for this edition. The descriptions are a bit long, mostly because I'm including the core gameplay ideas:

• More criticals: a movie director (a short, bald guy) and his main star (a big guy full of muscles) are drinking in a bar, after movie critics have torn their movie to pieces. The director wants to kill every critic he knows (and he knows many of them), but he lacks the strength, while the star wants to kill all critics with his bare hands, but he doesn't know who they are... and a team is born! You control both of them (one at the time, though), first identifying who the critics are in a crowd, and then the actor beats them up. Bonus: you can make one of them ride on the other one's back, depending on what are you trying to do.
• Mr. Fixit: You work in a production line, where you work along with some guys: Mr. Fax It, the one who arranges working orders (of course, they arrive by fax, hence the name); Mr. Fex It, the one who ships them (by using FEderal Xpress, hence the name); Mr. Fix It, the one who solves problems (that would be you), and the one who sells to clients, Mr. Fox It (who is smart as a fox, hence the name). Unfortunately, you have another coworker who tends to mess up things (hence his name, got it?), so your work is to keep things running, by fixing them fast enough. This idea is surprisingly similar to my previous entry, and since that didn't go so well, this one was my least favorite.
• Mutate!: You control a creature, and you have to mutate along the moving path - the farthest you make it, the greatest your score. You control three (or more) aspects of mutation: breathing system (lungs or gills), bone density (light, medium or heavy) and terrain (water, land or air). If your terrestrial creature falls into the water without switching to gills, it drowns (conversely, your fish dies on earth if you don't switch to lungs), your bird needs light bones, or it won't fly, and so on. Also, certain combinations are "crimes against nature", and if you hit them you lose immediately (such as a heavy bones fish - you may need more combinations to pull this through).
• Mysterious Stranger: You can pick one across many superheros, and you have to accomplish a trivial mission (talk to a guy, save a baby from being hit by a car, face the bad guy, and so on). You get a score depending on how many people you saved/killed, and what people thinks about you. For instance, if you choose HiperMan (not to be confused with Superman(c) ), you can easily crush the first guy's hands if you shake his hands too strong (defined by a moving target), losing "citizens injured" points (if you choose not to shake, you lose charisma points); you choose FastForwardMan (again, not related to Flash(c) )? Everything moves sloooooooooowwwwllllyyyyy. How about TorchMan? Good luck trying to save the baby and not burning him to ashes while trying! I think you get the idea. Bonus: if you choose to be the villain, you just burn everything, while laughing maniacally.
• Negotiator: You are a hard negotiator. With your main weapon, the Gun of Understanding, and your knife, the Blade of Compassion, you must reach the top of a building, "negotiating" with everyone you find in your path. As you may have guessed, I just wanted to make a brawler and this was the perfect excuse.

Anyway, those were my ideas. If anyone has any use for them, well, good luck. On a rather depressing note, I should have enough free time next week, so probably I'll give at least one of this ideas a try, if only to include them in the Pyggy Awards, if there is another instance.
Good luck, everyone!

I had a one-man planning session a couple minutes ago, 
and I've got a schedule I plan to follow (I can't speak for the rest of my team, though). 

1. Create the basic structure of the game engine
   
   •  Event Managing (class-based) -- 30 min. ~ 2 hrs.
   •  Object Handling (Worlds and GameObjects) -- 2 ~ 4 hrs.
   •  Animation and image handling (Sprites) -- 30 min. (Only if necessary)
   •  Patch Management -- 2 ~ 3 hrs. (Only if strictly necessary [like, say, a large project])
   
   
2. Start working on hte rest of it (I'll figure it out when i get there)

Ok, so the compo starts in six hours, but I'm in the UK so I probably won't start coding until tomorrow morning.

Don't want to cheat by collecting game assets, so the only thing for me to do this evening is try to clarify my architecture.

My aim is to incorporate a RESTful web service for semantic game content, and to present multimedia locally. So, I plan to have a client in Ren'Py which plays, eg: atmospheric effects according to what it perceives as local conditions. I'm hoping to use bottle.py as a web server, keeping game state there and serving human readable content as XHTML and data for client consumption as JSON.

Of course, there are grey areas. For example; how will time be communicated/synchronised between client and game world? How much does the game server need knowledge of client state, etc.

I know others have been thinking of a web-oriented approach. Has anyone got any advice to offer, or any strong opinions about architecture?

I haven't given much thought about ideas, but I'm thinking of trying something horror-based, whichever theme comes out. Horror is not something we see often in Pyweek and I feel inspired since I've played Amnesia not too long ago. I have a feeling this won't be easy, though.

But I decided to create a game right before pyweek, I should probably be sleeping... nevertheless, coding sleeps for no one!  It's a simple run and gun, and use a multicolored ink gun to defeat monochrome enemies, releasing the land from it's monochomatic bondage.  stupid? most likely. simple? yes. easy to make? I have the engine skeleton in half an hour. fun? that's sort of the point... I'll continue my insanity on the morrow.

I've decided that I want to spell out my goals for this coming PyWeek. It'll help me have a direction to take my ideas in, rather than just haphazardly making them. (the ideas in this post I made are still in effect unless... well, unless I change my mind, to be honest)

Here are my goals, briefly:

• Learn to make good pixel art
• • Painterly style rather than stereotypical game style
  • Good animation
  • Nice terrain tilemaps (I struggle with this one)
• Prove the concept of the "code painting"
• • Demonstrate the "single game state" concept effectively
  • Show a feasible way of handling menus
• Create an unconventional idea
• • The idea should not be stereotypical of games
  • Avoid violence, prefer peaceful activity
  • Use gameplay rather than story to communicate
• Communicate a feeling or idea
• • Related to above, use gameplay to communicate
  • Use feelings not often found in games, EG:
  • • Romance
    • Nurturing
    • Industry
    • Peace
  • Do not preach, but show instead

These are hopefully going to be goals that I can carry through. Well, hopefully.

Peace, love, and project planning,

--- Akake

Murphy has been vanquished!  A brief search on ubuntuforums.org provides me with the solution!  all systems are go for launch!

It appears that my normal tower computer has some serious bugs, the window manager (I use xfce on ubuntu) will not run, I'm searching for an answer since this has happened before.  but only 2 days before pyweek? really? ah well, good things come to those who work...

Like some of you, I have been working on coming up with workable plans for each of the 5 themes under contention. I also did some brainstorming in the weeks before, to kind of pick a direction I wanted to head. All of my plans are meant to be manifestations of the same idea, but colored and shaped by the theme. There are a few concepts I am aiming for to explore with my design this week:

• Clear and meaningful player choice
• Be inspired from abstract concept rather than other games
• Flexible game system
• Emergent simulation
• Light on time consuming elements such as graphics

And here are some very brief statements about the more concrete plans I have for the themes.

• More criticals - change a populations viewpoint on a topic (critical mass to sustain the viewpoint) through social networking. Primary inspiration: political campaigns.
• Mr Fixit - take jobs to fix clients broken devices, but parts can be hard to come by, and when the devices get strange, you may wonder if you should accept the jobs at all. Primary inspiration: Brazil
• Mutate - fight the spread of infectious disease without causing it to mutate and invalidate all of your work. Primary inspiration: pandemic. Ok, so it IS a game, but at least it's not a video game :)
• Mysterious stranger -You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now are caught between rival factions and their turf war. With no fighting skill or any skills of note for that matter, survival lies in turning enemies into friends. Primary inspiration: Enemy Mine
• Negotiator - You are used to receiving some pretty strange and difficult calls working for the local counseling and crisis hotline. But through negotiation with a few callers you become aware of a dangerous situation that seems to be brewing in town. Trapped in the crisis center and armed only with a phone, can you make a difference? Primary inspiration: natural disasters

So far, I only have real gameplay planned for criticals, fixit, and negotiator. For those games I can visualize what the interface looks like, and how the game proceeds. Mutate has not yet taken complete shape in my mind, but I have an inkling of what it may be like. Mysterious stranger is the theme I have had the hardest time with, and it was the last one I came up with an idea for. I have no actual gameplay idea for it at all at this point.

Also, each idea I came up with I thought was better than the last, until I got to mutate and negotiator, which I feel are weaker. So please, vote for more criticals, negotiator, or mr fixit :)