I sort of thought it would come to this. I have 600 lines of boilerplate crap that I hardly even understand myself and no game assets ready. It's not going to happen. Maybe next year...

My game has completely changed. It is a simple game about breeding zombies to fight other zombies and the objective is simple: Use the scientific method to battle zombies. Or just throw random zombies at each other, or challenge a friend to a zombie duel.

We nothing work in second day... the staff spent the afternoon playing Pokemon. Today, the third day, we advanced in art, prototype and finished the game's soundtrack. Let's see if tomorrow we can finish... in the last day.

[belated diary entry for the second last day]

Spent most of today not working on the game, not by choice. Got the client talking to the server and completed the game model (spending way too much time farting around with sqlalchemy.)

I've really only got about half a day left that I can spend on the game (I also have to make sure the website rating form works) so I don't think it's going to be playable by the deadline. My co-conspirator is off at a wedding for the weekend - he promises he's taken a laptop and will do some game dev but I expect he'll be having other fun :-)

Oh, and so far there's no mention of the theme in the game whatsoever ;-)

One day to go. Another coding during the night session... Warm rain outside really helps to feel the melancholic vibe...

I need to add music, sound fx, menus, scores etc. In short: it needs polishing, but it looks that I will manage to make something of it. It feels that it may become half-decent small game.

I have added free subparticles (Electrons (-) and Protons (+)) - it somehow makes gameplay more chaotic (mad?) and more fun (at least for me).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tlixmHjz0Q

Yay, level 2! I made a brick floor and a tree. And an elephant. And my mad scientist wears a gown now (not animated, don't think right now is the time to figure out Blender's cloth animation). Also not sure why I started on this outdoors tileset instead of a proper lab tileset that would go with my story...

I also realized that I would have saved time doing the whole game in 3D instead of 2D. All the sorting and masking would then have been taken care of by the depth-buffer and I wouldn't need to pre-render anything o_O Also could let everything cast shadows then.

Gameplay-wise I implemented re-loading of levels. And ikanreed's comment in my last diary entry made me realize just how stupid my level format was and I changed it to a simple 10x10 ASCII grid now :P

So tomorrow it's level design day. My goal is 5-10 rooms with some (more or less obvious) puzzles.

I've taken the previous 5 days to make artwork, flesh out gameplay mechanics, and put my entry on GitHub. Now it's time to code...

I know, I know - coding, testing, and packaging on the last 2 days sounds risky - it probably is, to a certain extent. However, I'm alleviating most of the risk by packaging the game as flat source (no premade executables),and using as much pre-written code as possible (I won't be writing anything besides level-loading and level logic, hopefully).

Still there is obvious risk to this approach - I should be able to finish by the deadline, but disasters could happen...

Looking back over the diary, it is good to see progress in this game. Tonight the bad guys have eyes and we have the on-screen compass and health bar. Behind the scenes, Game states for Title screen and game over have been worked out, combat is in - you can hurt them and they can hurt you! A way to track the bad guys health would be good.

For the final day, the mission for collection components needs finished off. Some form of on screen progress too. After that scoring, game stats and sound. 

Any extra time will be spent on world tweaks such as sky, backdrops, palettes etc.

Goodnight and good luck to those still coding into the small hours :-)

We still have a lot of work to do, but it's starting to come together. Unfortunately, I get on an aeroplane tomorrow and spend most of the last 16 hours of pyweek (and the 20 after that) in the air, so I won't be around for the finish.

We gained a tech tree visualization script yesterday, and I spent part of the afternoon tweaking it to draw more useful pictures:

While this won't show up in the actual game, the script to generate it will be in the source package.

We also overhauled the mission infrastructure and added support for actually using equipment statistics. This means that your lightning guns are more powerful than the standard pistols you start with. (As long as they don't fail spectacularly and electrocute your entire squad of minions.)

The GUI saw some improvements, but still isn't anywhere close to what we'd like. The bulk of the heavy lifting has been done, and we have a solid set of widgets and such, but we need to add a big bucket of "pretty" to it.

We've also started getting the packaging sorted out, mostly because Nitwit's creativity failed him and he needed something tedious to reignite it. (I hope that happens soon, because we need him to crank out missions and equipment.)

Tonight, I conquer my packing. Tomorrow, the world!

The first version of my game is finished.  Tomorrow I will try to make it more FUN!