So a lot has happened to the project over the last few days, but progress is still being made.

The original concept was to have a small squirrel, running through the forest jumping from platform to platform. The design was a kind of platforming "runner", where the character would constantly run right, and the only control you have over the character is making it jump (this is what is used to meet the "One Way Trip" theme requirement).

The system is still pretty much the same, but I had to scrap the whole squirrel in forest thing. I'm by no means an artist, and coming up with a forest background proved to be beyond my skill. I am instead doing a city landscape, which meant changing the main character from a squirrel to something else. For the moment, I'm going with a ninja - because who doesn't love ninjas :)

I'm considering adding other actions (throwing stars), but will wait until the primary systems are in place, and working as I would like them to. 
Here's a screen of my current progress. It's depicting the level running, with the platforms moving from right to left. The platforms are created procedurally, at a random width (specified in a range), at a random y-location (specified in a range).

There's some dirty collision in place, but it's definitely not what I want in the final product. I will do some fine tuning so that the character needs to hit the platform on the top to be safe, and not just intersect it at any location. 

I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but I still feel like I'm on track to finish by the end of the competition. 

The cold I mentioned in the last post gave me the day off work, so I have some extra time to boot :)

I've written a level editor so far and defined most of the classes.  Only need to put everything together and draw a few dozen images.

It seems that the excellent establishment of Github & Sons is temporarily closed due to unforeseen circumstances. Work on our project can only proceed haphazardly, deferring the reconstitution of our disparate repository branches and the resolution of conflicts therein at some future time unknown.

Exciting times indeed.

Mr. P Scavenger, Chief Engineer.

Well so far I have come to a dead end, with the complexity of different bits adding up to more than I have time for.

Currently I have got it to a point where it will show the paths of planets through time and you can zoom and move around nicely. However getting my simulating my rocket is just not working and I don't have the time or patience to fix it.

I am now going to start from scratch and go for a much much simpler arcade style game.

Screenshot of where I got to with graphics

Today I made much better progress than yesterday, but in the grand scheme of things then nothing stupidly exciting happened - just simply getting collision detection done.



In this screenshot, you can't really see the collision detection at all, but just let me assure you quite how much of a nightmare I found it - post pyweek it is definitely something I will want to look into because I find it hard to believe that it can be so messy as whenever I do it.

You can also see here that there are more than one kinds of tiles, and that there is small variance between tiles - thanks Rod!

The other big difference is now there is a HUD thing at the bottom where you can see all your levels and xp, as of right now they don't do anything, but expect that to change as I get further into the week.

From my artist the black ring is no longer generated by code and we have much more variation in the dirt art.

My maps are done, the ideas ready to be coded. Tomorrow I will start working more on the game code, as right now I have just a basic frame of some usual functions I find useful.

And a question: Is it better to load one huge image, larger than the screen, or to load a few tiny ones? Or what should I do?

(Basically I have a huge map image, and it needs to scroll, so what would be the least laggy way to do it?)

I had a ton of work related things to take care of, so I only had a couple hours today.  I managed to work out some rendering issues and to smooth out the controls.

I added parallax scrolling as an afterthought today after I watched some videos of Super Metroid for art inspiration.

I've decided that if things go well tomorrow, I may try to push the level design into an action platformer.  I worry though, that I will not have enough time to make the animations to really make it shine.  We'll see tomorrow, I guess.

We added a few more sprites and have a character that can walk and jump on a basic level. A collision layer is working to prevent the character from walking through walls. A screenshot has been uploaded showing the character on the ground. Our repository is located at https://bitbucket.org/DavidEdwards/pyweek15.