A good start was made yesterday, and a fair continuation seems probable today.

But damn your eyes, Threads, get out of bed!  Those dinosaurs won't explode themselves you know!

Yesterday was a long day in which no coding was possible, after a long saturday night. Fortunately this was in my plan, nothing unexpected.

But there was time to think about what I'm building. So, this afternoon I will write the first lines and I hope the first pictures will be available :-)

Let's see. I'm looking forward to start coding...

Writing this a day late...Hope you don't mind!

Fingers crossed progress on other days will be more significant than today, although the Grand Prix and Paralympics definitely did nought but impede my progress today, so I guess they won't be an issue.



Todays Progress:

- Framework in place to be easily extended
- Knowing exactly what we'll make, although I was relatively clear before pyweek what kind of idea I wanted
- Character is able to explore the map
- Although the map looks very plain at the moment, it is very easy to extend it to include other aesthetic tiles, collision not get coded
- "Eyelid" shape generated in front of screen

- Some armour images drawn by my artist, he will be formally added to the team later today

So my idea is a sidescrolling fighter game, where you pilot your ship through the interior of an alien starship, trying to get to the center, where you will detonate a antimatter bomb housed in your ship to destroy the aliens and save the humans, and kill you.

Sounds one way to me.



A ship sprite for the game, I'm going to try a new pixel art style.

For this pyweek, i've decided to risk a low innovation score in hopes of completing the game and giving it extra polish.

the game is a metroidvania style sidescroller and i'll be reusing assets from my previous pyweek entry.  today i got some animations completed and tuned the game's physics for a low-gravity experience on mars.  i plan to spend another 2 days focusing on art and levels before i code.  because i'm reusing much of my previous entry, i will save time and hopefully get some new visuals and a nice story.

https://github.com/bitcraft/pyweek15/blob/master/walking.gif

i made a gif of the walking animation for the hero.  i'll get the running, stopping, and jjumping animations done tomorrow.

the repository can be found at

https://github.com/bitcraft/pyweek15

First an introduction: We are a two man team that use Python professionally. This is our first time to enter PyWeek.

We brainstormed last night and came up with an idea for a platform game with a commando on a suicide mission, a one way trip. Not so original but making a platformer should at least be fun.

We spent the day harvesting free sprites from the internet and writing some of the core engine code.

We planned ahead this time and came up with ideas for each theme last week. For One Way Trip it was "an artsy game about a dandelion seed". Apparently there is more than one possible implementation of that, and we spent today arguing the merits of two. One you will see later and I'll describe now the one you won't.



It would be a flight simulator for a dandelion seed. Wind would be very important and you could see the streams from the motion of fellow dandelion seeds. In a way you would be navigating this 3D maze in a tranquil valley. You would see "drops of sunshine" from afar and could collect them for points. They would each be located by a diorama and the narrator would say something wise when you reach them.

The grave above would be a diorama. Also these guys:

  

Flying up high would give a unique perspective too:



(You can see the grave in the top right.)

Day 1 kicked off with a brief brainstorming, as we hadn't come to any fixed conclusions about what game to make.

We've decided on a straightforward platformer set on a train:



Arnav has worked on physics (from retrogamelib) while I got stuck into the artwork. I have 29 frames of character animation, three train cars and the start of a steam locomotive.

I've also put together some OpenGL code to handle perspective on the tracks:



The sleepers look a bit flat, but it's harder to see that when they are whizzing past at speed.

"One Way Trip". Hmmm.... Tough theme. But I have a concept. As always I will try to experiment with game mechanics.





I think it asks some explanations. Let's start from beginning. After running half-marathon in VIlnius Maratonas 2012 my mind was it strange mode. Than I find out what this weeks theme is. And used it as an excuse to watch/listen few hours of Terence McKenna videos about psychedelic trips...