Not much visible progress today, but I've continued to add necessary features and the gameplay has therefore improved quite a bit.

You can now design quite weird and wonderful squid conveyance rigs, and the improved aerofoil physics makes tweaking the orientations of the parts relatively fun. However the gameplay really needs pitch control components to help players keep their squid straight and level in flight.



There was nearly a showstopper today with Pymunk. I wanted Pymunk to give me the coordinates of the insertion point for a component, as Box2D does. This is the point I draw the sprite and allows me to connect it in the right place in the hierarchy. But Pymunk only works on centres of gravity - you can't choose an arbitrary insertion point for a body. Therefore I'm constantly having to recompute the insertion point from the centre of gravity point and the body's rotation. It's an annoying omission that makes Pymunk just plain harder to use than Box2D. A few changes in my code could help relieve the omission but I don't think it's worth wasting the time on that during Pyweek.

... It renders some graphics and it has some interaction (via keyboard), so by definition it is a game. Very, very, very bad game, but game nonetheless...
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnnT01pHrjU
Repository: https://bitbucket.org/petraszd/pyweek-14

If a sypikslang slips on a muddy patch between some tree roots in the forest, does it curse PEP8?

Today saw numerous improvements including:

• centred buttons
• simple results and equipment screens
• auto save and load support
• propaganda (our game is good!)
• displaying of long descriptions for missions
• add a mission that allows the game to be completed
• new widgets
• text that fits on buttons
• your reputation now proceeds you
• better research tree visualization
• addition of new team member (me!)

I've done quite a bit in the past few days, and have totally failed to blog about it.

I realized part-way in that the format for the game (going from point A to point B, with mobs in the way, level to level) wasn't working out. It just wasn't fun. The story was good, and it worked, but it needed... something.

I've decided to go more with an exploration model. There's now one big overworld with different regions, where things need to be retrieved. It's not as in-depth as Zelda or anything, and will be easy enough, but there's only so much one can do in a week :)

This feels a lot better. Except for the performance problems. The game slowed down quite a bit after putting together my level. It's 150x160 tiles at 64x64 pixels a tile, and there were a few problems with that. I worked on it all last night, and finally went to bed. When I woke up, I knew exactly what needed to be done.

Fast-forward about 30 minutes and the game is super speedy! Excellent.

Planning to finish the level today, start adding some more enemies to the game, and hopefully begin work on the ending scene.

There's a couple screenshots on here, and also on my imgur gallery.

Spent a lot of time on making hair for my mad scientist. Out of many small cylinders. The hair as well as the arms and legs are also animated now.

And inspired by TheSheep's mockup, I just had to add a Companion Cube. Which means I had to figure out UV mapping in Blender - which is easy once you understand it, but not... while you didn't yet.

I also have keyboard controls now and can move other blocks (well, only one right now) around. So looks like tomorrow I might be able to finish the engine - only need jumping and stacking and pulling. And recursive pushing which I already dread due to my floating point use, but now that I'm prepared I might be able to avoid problems.

After the first work day, we able to complete part of the scenario and game items. The prototype is also well advanced. Let's try tomorrow make the animations and put the images in PyGame.

Got my main controls and mechanics done... Able to create tile maps and load them in to the game... unfortunately the "game" part of the game is still completely lacking.

Oh I've won an award already :-) Thanks.

Little bit of a break today due to tiredness. 1.5 more days at work then the final dash for this PyWeek. However I have got some smaller stuff done. Bad guys are now present and even move on screen (well wobble a bit), they are designed on paper, there's an exciting Please Wait screen, F11 now toggles FullScreen/Windowed and I reworked the Map so it scales and looks much better (see below).

Finally I tried running at full resolution on my laptop - delighted to see everything scale well. Time to sleep!

Our basic idea is set with a lot of base code going. Everything is looking good and we should be able to start polishing within a couple of days.