Today, I managed to generate something that reminded me of the LHC



I would however note, that the game doesn't have much to do with the LHC.

I did some work on the player's movement Good news is I got the body working and trailing the character. Unfortunately the code is an ungodly mess at this point, and it's not working right. And I'm not just prematurely optimizing, this is absolutely unmaintainable. I need to start over again. That leaves 4 days for enemies, levels, art and music. I'm getting that old sinking feeling...

Ok... Ok...

I was half-drunk of thought about me being such a genius last night. Idea about ninjas and Santa Clauses was epic - nobody can argue that. But today while I was trying to paint characters and I understood that I there is no way am not going to make it in time. So goodby my dear robotized dinosaurs...

Instead I am going to do a stupid game about protons and electrons. Player will need to construct atom with different count of protons and electrons. And shoot that atom into enemies (red rectangles). Direction of movement will be affected by negative and positive fields (Left '-' and right '+').

Art is almost ready (I don't like the color of electrons):

A good day today but with much of the code being done early on, I felt I should have got more done tonight. Have to remind myself I did get a good few hours in. There's now a viewable map, grit and a nice feeling of going somewhere when trees appear from the distance and get bigger as you approach.

Tomorrow I want to focus on game elements - namely finding the 5 lost components. Bad guys will be the day after that. Have to resist making visual tweaks. It is starting to feel like a little world to explore but has some distance to go. I asked my boys for suggestions and they came up with rocks - not sure how I am going to create those shapes!!

Tonight's screen-shots showing the fractal trees at different times of day:

I haven't had much time during the first two days, but I've managed to install an IDE, configure Git repository and upload the Skellington package there.

The repository's here - https://github.com/mmkay/mmk-pyweek14 - but right now it doesn't contain anything interesting.

The fact that I didn't have much time doesn't imply that I haven't done anything. I've discussed the theme with my girlfriend and an idea came up, involving three types of wizards casting spells that are actually physics laws, math symbols and computer architecture/programming concepts. I am a terrible graphics designer, though, so I'm thinking about top-down perspective to make things simple to draw (after all, some wizards wear hats with wide, oval brims, don't they? ;) ).

More to come, maybe. At least I'll try this time (during Pyweek #11 I didn't even start coding).

My motivation today got swiftly beaten down by bugs which are possibly simple to fix, but whose correction eluded me long enough to wear me down.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day. I'm hoping to get the basic game engine done quickly enough that I can focus on content creation. My idea is going to need some content.

I have overshot again, haven't I? =(

=(

One goal of this pyweek for me will be using github exclusively.  I'm also using my 2d sprite library, lib2d, with hopes of making it platform game friendly.  In fact, I spent just about an hour yesterday on the game and got the basics done.  I'm using impossible mission, out of this world, doom, and metal gear as inspiration on this spy game.

Yesterday, I finally finished the core mechanics of the game. A simple enough accomplishment, but it sure feels good. I was getting very frustrated for a while. I feel like my big breakthrough came when I stepped back from the grind, cleaned up/refactord the code, and started commenting what I had done. It seems to have made it so much easier to debug and add/change features without breaking something.

From now on I'll just be adding things like the start screen, adjusting the difficulty, cleaning up images that up till now had just been placeholders, etc...