I guess I'll lock in my entries, also.
Mr. Fixit: A group of kids meet an eccentric old man named Mr. Fixit. The kids are interested when he offers to tell them his life story. Mr. Fixit is a great storyteller, and the kid's imaginations exaggerate the details of Mr. Fixit's stories.

Mutate! You're a bug that goes into its cocoon every night and comes out a new creature in the day, with new abilities and limitations.

More Criticals: You're a doctor in the emergency room at the local hospital. Every day, a patient in critical condition comes to your room. You have to figure out how to save them.

Negotiator: In the future, music is the universal language. You are a politician trying to become Supreme Dictator. To win, you must convince the other politicians to elect you by composing music that suites them.

Mysterious Stranger: Not quite sure about this one. I was thinking about using another idea and having Mr. Fixit be mysterious. Or something.

With both my post about "code paintings" and Cosmologicon's post about "locking in" his ideas, I'm going to "lock in" my ideas as well.

In the order they appear on the voting page...

More Criticals: You are taking care of a garden, but there are things that you must do which are critical to each plant's growth. For example, a certain flower may need pruning or it will wither, whereas a vegetable might need fertilizer. Some plants may start to require more specialized care as they grow. In its idle state, plants wither a bit but eventually return to a very small state. Also, when plants absolutely need watering, but the game is idle, it will start to rain. The "critical" comes from the fact that the plants require this care and it is "critical" that you give it or they will do badly. The "more" comes from the fact that the plants will require more of this specialized care as they grow.

Mr. Fixit: You are a member of a construction crew that builds houses. However, the other guys are awful at it and you need to go through and fix their mistakes. This means fixing faulty wiring, patching up bad pluming, and repairing bad floors and walls. When you have finished, you can move on to the next house. If you leave the game idle, your character will go off and take a lunch break until you start playing again. The game will use guided procedural generation to make each house.

Mutate: You are a little animal that mutates in various ways depending on what you encounter. If you are in cold places a lot, your fur gets fluffy. If you spend a lot of time climbing, your claws will grow to let you grip things. The game will use guided procedural generation to make each game world, and each game world will have a different climate and topology which lend themselves to different mutations.

Mysterious Stranger: You are a dog that is following a strange man in a long coat and a fedora. You must be sneaky because if he sees you he will stop and pet you, and you won't get to see where he is going. The game will use guided procedural generation to make a continuous world. The game will not let you go too far from the stranger, either. If you fall too far behind, he will stay idle and probably wander around a bit.

Negotiator: You are a man who is talking to a beautiful woman, trying to seduce her. You have a limited vocabulary (a set of symbols which she also uses) and have to think carefully. Neither of you are going anywhere, though her behavior toward you will change with her feelings. If you leave the game idle, she will gradually drift toward a neutral feeling, but if she is feeling intensely in either way the drift will be very slow.

I like these for the most part, but the one for "Mutate!" is my least favorite. My favorite is the idea for "negotiator" since it's fairly unconventional. (A dating sim without text or an ending is unusual, I think)

As I suggested in my last diary entry, I want to do something different. I've now got ideas for each theme candidate that I'm happy with. Some are more unorthodox than others, but all of them should challenge me in some way or other. I'm posting them now, in order to "lock myself in". (Once the theme is announced, I'm sure I'll be scared, and want to change to something in my comfort zone. By posting my game idea, I'm preventing myself from doing that.) So here goes, in order from least innovative to most innovative:

Mr. Fixit: Puzzle game where you have to fix machines by fitting the right pieces into the right places. It starts out normally enough, but as the game goes on, you have to be creative about where you pull the pieces from. By the end of the game, just like a real handyman willing to cannibalize anything around him for a quick fix, nothing is off limits.

Negotiator: A wide-open sandbox where all your attributes (such as health, attack ability) have to be purchased. You can either pay the (high) asking price, or find out what the seller wants and use it to convince them to bring the price down. The gameplay itself is not terribly innovative, but I want to use guided procedural generation to make a large game area to explore, and still make the challenge level and game duration right. While I'm at it, I'll try to make graphics (and if I'm feeling ambitious, audio) procedurally as well. Mechanics are very simple, possibly like Solar Winds: The Escape.

Mutate!: Inspired by Grow, in this resource-management game you control a quickly-mutating, cartoonish organism that interacts with its environment through a variety of appendages you cause to grow out of it, and appendages that grow out of those appendages. If possible, the game will be completely wordless.

Mysterious Stranger: Point-and-click adventure where you're the main character of a noir detective novel, involving pursuing a mysterious stranger. The clues you uncover are words that get integrated into your own narrative, changing the world around you. Like Today I Die, except that there's a timeline, and words you uncover late in the story can affect the earlier scenes. The story itself is very short, and you have to play it through several times and see several different endings to complete the game. If this works, I may also submit it to the Experimental Gameplay Project, whose theme this month is Story Games. (I may change the setting, since I have difficulty writing anything even remotely sexist, and it's hard to avoid that in straight-up noir, as much as I like the genre.)

More Criticals: Definitely the scariest for me. The idea behind this game is to learn to give and receive constructive criticism. Players will upload text, drawings, or recordings of them performing feats, like telling a joke or composing music. Other players will give criticism of the feats. The criticism itself is then scored. In order to decide the mechanics, I'll investigate what are the psychological barriers to giving and internalizing feedback, and find a way to gamify the confrontation of these barriers.

I will join PyWeek this time, it will be my début. Oh before PyWeek I will post some tutorials about mostly used library - pygame. So it's bound to be more!

More on http://jackleo.info/post/2/intro-pyweek-challenge/

There's the very real possibility everything could go kablooey. Guess I'll have to curl up with the Pygame API documentation

Like most game developers, I always have a slew of game ideas and mechanics just waiting to come to fruition. Pyweek brings the best ones forward. This Pyweek I'm hoping I can make art and music very central to gameplay. One of my biggest mistakes last Pyweek was focusing only on gameplay; as a result, I ended up having mediocre art and music that someone else composed. This Pyweek I really want any music and art I make to be very important to the game.
Therefore, I'm going become a minimalistic game developer.
A few songs, hand-drawn art, and a small, polished game is what I'm going for.

I've recently begun thinking about how to structure a game. I've stumbled on an idea that I like and that lends itself well to very simple games.

I took the name of this idea from my philosophical blog. I call this a "code painting."

The basic structure is simple:

• Game exists only in the play state
• • No menu states
  • Play state usually becomes idle when not playing, but some concepts may benefit from the game constantly running
• Menus are drop-down and triggered by the F* keys
• • F1 is for the "help" menu
  • F2 is for the "configuration" menu
• Game concept is very simple
• • Keyboard input should be arrows plus no more than four other keys (ideally only one or two)
  • Mouse input should only use left and right buttons
  • Joystick input should only use the d-pad (aka "hat stick") and no more than four buttons (like for keys, ideally only one or two)
  • Content is either very simple or procedurally generated (or a mixture of the two)

This lends itself, again, to very simple games that may not benefit from a menu state. Also, because the play state becomes idle when the game is not being played (unless the game works better running constantly, such as some "indirect interaction" games), the game can be picked up and played, then put down for a while.

In developing these, I will try to focus on less violent concepts and more on concepts that have some kind of artistic quality. I'm not going to be pretentious about it (I hate pretentious art), but I will try to do something that could be considered art.

At the moment, I am working on a C++ library for these, but I am also planning to make a Pygame port. If I decide to enter the Pyggy Awards, I will use that to work on the Pygame port of this library. The PyWeek version of my game will not use that library, though.

I'm also working on a specification for this library, which I will post when it is reasonably complete. However, I am writing the specification as I implement the library rather than writing it up-front. I will use it to keep my ports of this library (I may also port to Flash and possibly Java) consistent.

Peace, love, and ambition,

--- Akake

So now that the themes are announced I can start to figure out how they fit into my master plan. I have been thinking a bit about what kind of goal I want to accomplish this coming week for some time. I do have a general esoteric idea that's in the dustbin of my brain that I was planning to pull out. Before the age of 15 I had a spurt of great ideas, most of which have yet to be attempted. But an idea is such a simple, weak thing. It is formless and without structure. It's like a packet of seeds, with no picture on the packet of what will grow when planted, or what proper care should be taken for it to grow. Or perhaps, it is the perfect garden environment for a specific kind of plant, but lacking the seed that will thrive there.

The themes announced are the perfect food for the strange vegetation that lies somewhere to the left of my vision, just in the corner there - waiting to grow. Each theme will emphasize a different feature of the plant. One may make it grow a bit taller, another could contribute a specific and pleasant smell. How to choose one theme over the others? It remains to be seen what this thing is going to look like when exposed to the light. For all I know, it could be a noxious weed that eats up all potential loveliness that could inhabit the garden otherwise. How to choose the proper conditions for a plant to grow when I don't know if it is tropical or temperate. Spring or Fall vegetation. Blooming during the day or in darkness. Whether it should be occasionally pruned - and how much.

The only thing for me to do is stick the seed in the ground, pour whatever theme pops to the top of the pile onto it as fertilizer, then spend a week watering, grooming, perhaps singing to it, and ensuring it gets some sunlight. All I can do is care for it the best I know how, and hope that it blooms into a beauty rather than an eyesore. For the most part, I am at the whim of nature. And if it doesn't grow, there is always the next seed.

I am impressed. Pyglet is working for me ;)

I've come up with game ideas for all of the themes except Mysterious Stranger.
Vote for Mr. Fixit or Mutate!