I spent almost 5 hours to think about the concept blankly. Finally, an idea came into my mind, so I sketched out the whole game design! I will start coding tomorrow.

Mad Science

Not my favorite on paper theme, at all. As someone who has tumbled their way through multiple science degrees I guess I've a bit snide at the subject matter. Nonetheless I decided to riff on it a bit.

I thought about inventors I like, and thought about basing the game around a really novel piece of technology. It would tie the theme in, by either having the protagonist as the scientist or having the tech given to the main character by a scientist.

But I really like to be less direct with themes. Thinking a bit deeper.

My most positive association with the theme comes from remembering the Mad Scientist labkits which used to be advertised during cartoons. I never had one, but they were always so neat.

Think 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyQUvMT7tAw 

Or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW5u3ztcLKw 

!

There's many more out there, and the ads are mostly priceless.

This led me down a road of 80s and 90s toys commercials. Including,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajlIVx0pE9k&feature=related 

And

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woL9mHC4WHY&feature=related 

The Z-bots blew my mind, I had heard that term before and owned like 10 of those as a kid and they were some of my favorite little toys. But I had just received them as a gift or something and never knew the name, so awesome to find that out.

The way these toys were exposed used to be so neat. 

So many of the narratives were about pulling you into the storyline as some sort of monster creator, robot maker, demon summoner, or whatever. These things gave a generation such great feelings of wonder, and excitement. The urge to collect! I just don't see it out there in the offerings today as much.

I had seen Skylanders a few days ago and thought that was about as close as there's been in ages. 

I will set out to make a game informed by the sheer awesome that were these old toys. 

So, I saw a posting on Twitter about the contest, got excited about the theme and joined at the spur of the moment. Not sure if I'll be able to spend the full 168 hours on the contest but hopefully I'll have time to do something interesting.

I'm going to be building a roguelike game based on the theme. I don't want to give away too much more until I have some stuff working, and we're a bit further along. Hopefully it will be interesting and fun... I am one of the Angband maintainers (http://rephial.org) so it will be nice to build a roguelike from scratch in Python (instead of C).

I do most of my editing in Pmacs (https://bitbucket.org/d_m/pmacs) and will create images in gimp. I'll either record some acoustic music or whip something up in garageband.

I'm hoping to be able to use some of my previous game jam pygame code as a reference (since the contest rules require it to be public domain code). The last entry I did was a game called Red Rover (https://github.com/non/redrover). So far I've held off on looking at any of it but I feel like it's within the rules (it's been freely available for many months), so I'd love some guidance from other participants/organizers on it.

See you in a week! :)

Alrighty! We've got our game designed, and the other team members have left for home to develop some content. I've got the beginnings of a simple platformer working:
 

So after a long wait from last pyweek, im super keen to get started, desk has been cleared off so I can get my laptop on it, the writing all over my mirror from last pyweek has been cleaned off, ready for new scribbling and jotting down of ideas and problems.

My goals for this pyweek are to make some kind of multiplayer game so we will see how that turns out.

I am pretty happy with the theme but was kind of hoping for "everything goes to hell" so I could roll in a bunch of quotes from Pink Floyd's "Wish you were here" into whatever I ended up making.

I think what I would like to make is a game a bit like battleships, but more complicated with a range of buildings that provide different effects such as, attacks, shields etc. All in the theme of mad science, so bring on the robots, chemicals and lasers.

Also to satisfy my inner need for numbers and graphs I have made up some, little scripts to log all mouse an keyboard data from during pyweek so I can make up some graphs after pyweek is over.

As a team, we've discussed a few ideas. One note, especially due to the short time and inexperience, we've decided to do a 2D game, likely in pygame.

Possible theme ideas: 
Al Gore is really a mad scientist who has financially invested in heaters. By promoting environmental awareness, he is really trying to cause a global cooling effect, so demand for his heaters will skyrocket. It's up to us to stop him any way we can, or be a minion in his army of anti-warmth.


 Possible game ideas: 

• You run a factory, and have to shoot holes in the ozone layer faster than Gore and company can repair them. Similar games would be Space Invaders or Red.  
• You delve into his eco-dome of horror, fighting off his servants, until you can destroy Gore himself. Similar games: Dungeons of Dredmor, Nethack, possibly The Binding of Isaac
• You are Al Gore himself, setting up turrets to destroy greenhouse emissions, with your score determined by how much you can sell. 
• You are an alchemist who is working on several recipes, and only by combining things in just the right way can you succeed. (Mastermind, or possibly a bejeweled kind of thing) 
• You are a tiny scientist, who has dreams of growing immense. One day, you discover a formula that lets you absorb other forms. Kind of like a 2D Katamari 

Today we had our first meeting with all our team members. Was very successful. Discussed Fapping.

I will make an virus-simulator. You are a virus that wants to dominate the world. As a player you affect the mutations and perhaps infect some people to seed the virus. It will be played on a world map. There are different parameters for each place such as population, infection rate, immunity, wealth, …  In the end it's just a complex cellular automata. It will be difficult for me to balance the parameters and make the game fun, but i think this idea is worth a try.

The theme is "mad science" and i have no idea. :-⊂
So firstly i made a logo for my entry. But unfortunately i get an server-error if i try to upload it. :-(
However i've got half of a pizza and an africola left so everything is just fine. : ⊃

My idea is somewhat vauge, as mad science wasn't my top choice.

32 years ago, in 8th grade, our hero is walking home from school when he crashes into a pole. Most people would just forget about it, but this kid doesn't. He whacks it with a baseball bat, but it stays up. This kid grows up, and becomes a mad scientist in a secret lab under the ocean in the south pacific. But has he forgotten that pole? NO! And he will launch every rocket he can to destroy that pole.

Build a rocket, kill the pole, deal tons of damage to destroy it. And maybe the earth surrounding it. And maybe all of the town surrounding it. IT DOESN'T MATTER, THAT POLE NEEDS TO DIE!

Time to get to work on that code.