After some brainstorming, and a reading session about the mars, i have some game ideas, although they are not really exciting.

One game idea is based on a one way mission to mars. It will be an exploration and survival game. Apparently i am not the only one who had the idea with mars :)

The other likely idea is based on these pokemon riddles similar to the ice levels. You have to go through one way passages, wich send you through the maze, which you have to try to escape.

Also i did some graphics for the main character. It is very tiny pixelart (8*8). The smaller the graphics, the less i could do wrong ;)
I'm quite satisfied with it's appearance. Even though i don't like the walking animation i stick with it for the moment.



(It's an astronaut)

My preconceived ideas for this PyWeek were a platform game of some sort or a sprite related experience. Couldn't fit anything along those lines into the theme so a clean slate - more in the spirit of PyWeek I suppose :-) 

A few Googles on the theme led to Mars which seems a common destination for this PyWeek. I put together a skeleton app then started work on a landscape generator just to get busy - midpoint displacement etc etc. I had hoped an idea would have popped into my head. Nothing. So kept busy with some graphical bits and bobs. Combining the sky effect with a pseudo 3d drawing of the landscape seemed to work so I tried having a character in there and added a few movement keys. It worked and the green block can walk on Mars though not quite as bouncy as John Carter.

So day one over and I don't know where this game is going but actually feels much more immersive and interactive than my last effort. Marscraft? :-)

Hello.

So ended the first day of competition, and I want to tell all that I have done for the day. But first I'll tell a few words about myself.I live in Ukraine, I'm 22 years old, I have long been fond of game development in python, this is my hobby, I work ActionScript developer. I was not the first time participate in pyweek, before that I was involved in pyweek 13, but I failed, failed to bring the project to the end, I hope this time it's my turn. This time I am involved to find new friends who are also addicted to game development in python, I hope the fact that I got it.

Now a few words about my project. I decided to make a sequel to the well-known fairy tales of our country, "Frog-traveler." In the original tale she died, but in my continued she survived, and now she had to go home. The essence of the game is that the frog needs help to return home. As for the mechanics of the game, this morning I came across a very funny picture, here it is.

Overall, this picture describes the whole mechanics of the game. We will have to find a vector for the frog jump, and the platform for the platform, we will have to return the frog home. Today I managed to do something, all see in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNB7F7PECNY&feature=player_embedded 

Now it is very easy, but I hope in the next 6 days, the game will take a great view. I will have a very simple project, just jump from platform to platform, collect different bonuses (mosquitoes and flies), trying not to fall into the trap. My main goal in this competition, to find new friends.

That's all I can tell you today. I hope you like. All the participants good luck. Yet.

PS

Unfortunately I do not know much English. If all of a sudden I made a mistake, I apologize for my bad English. Translated by google translate.

I was thinking about alternative interpretations of the "one way" part of the theme. Perhaps the trip is a pilgrimage in which you learn "the way"

Which naturally led to this:


Too meta?

Note from the quality assurance office

An adjustment was required to the Skellington apparatus, its handling of the apostrophe being less than satisfactory.

This small modification is being announced in the public interest, that others not discover this problem upon first exercising setup.py in an emergency situation.

https://github.com/scavpy/Scav-Threads-PyWeek-Sep-2012/commit/36d58d25600f811f792a0aab8bd7b0e08f60ff49

So I don't really have any ideas yet...

One way makes me think of

• mars rovers
• river with a strong current
• a very unfriendly escalator system (maybe designing one)
• mazes
• terrorists bombing a train/plane
• falling off a tall building
• XKCD comic about the guy that falls sideways

This day at 1 a.m. a meeting was satisfactorily concluded, in which it was resolved that

i) the entertainment be set in a land of exploding dinosaurs, from which no man has returned alive,
ii) the aesthetic and stylistic elements of the entertainment be consistent throughout the body of work, vis. all written material including the textual feedstock of the analytical engine itself,
iii) the first part of this day be spent primarily in contemplation and preparation for the great work to begin this evening.

Mr P. Scavenger, Chief Analytical Engineer

Very poor mockup of the main game view. That clip art is wonderful isn't it? Really puts to shame my actual artistic ability. Note to self, use more clip art and less self.

What I want for my game is to be a strategy simulation type, where you manage a mars mission. It obviously fits the theme, because these scientists on the mission do not get a return trip. We are colonizing mars! The catch of course, is the only way to fund such a mission is to turn it into a reality tv series. You will have to balance personalities and various psychoses in the crew, the ratings and revenue the program generates, and the actual health of the crew members and the mission. Low ratings? Encourage a love triangle or put someone in danger. Is someone's ego really becoming a problem which might jeapordize the mission? Put them out the airlock!

I like the idea, but as usual I have no idea how it will actually be a game. I'm going to spend most of tomorrow writing a design document, in as much detail as I can. I tend to do very little solid planning for my games, while tackling somewhat experimental ideas. I'm going to try to devote the planning this needs to come up with something that's actually playable. I'm also open to suggestions if anyone has some concrete elements to add.

Sidenote: why am I so obsessed with games where little people are involved? My early exposure to House on a Disk, otherwise known as little computer people, may have something to do with it.

It looks like this pyweek between work, uni, study and a maths exam next weekend, I am going to have a severely limited amount of time to spend on building my game.

As for a game idea I am very happy that "One way trip" was the chosen theme, as i didn't really have anything good for the other teams.

Especially because of the super cool Mars rover mission that has started recently (well got to Mars recently) I really wanted to do some space based game. As such the game I hope to make, time permitting will be Super Science Space Explorer where you will have to send forth a collection of ships and probes to gather information about the solar system and earn science points and capture the public's attention to gain funding for future missions.

If I happen to get way ahead of schedual somehow it would also be really awesome to build in some online highscores or something.

Good luck to everyone and I hope your games progress well.

Came up with a gameplay mechanic that employs the player's browser and a local web server that is kind of a joke, but kind of not, and may actually be weird enough to be fun and challenging in a non superficial way (maybe... or maybe it won't.

Just have to see if I can focus/shortcut/and find the time to implement..