my drawing technique is ok now (~40fps)
but i have to make a game engine,
found some sounds and more graphics :)




it will be ok :) 

Progress video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfu0m36wpoI 

- Catching Circles
- Shooting
- Hitting same colour circle
- Hitting different colour circle
- Splitting circle

Various params needs some tweaking and some randomness. But basic moves and actions are all done and ready. Now I need to figure out how to extract "game" from this circles' mess.

Took some time to reorganize the code a bit.  It grew organically from the merger of the __name__ == '__main__' from three different modules and was super unwieldy. I cleaned up the game interface into a few simple objects and reduced the spaghetti code by 23%.

There's now a simple UI, too.  The banner across the top (five minutes in Inkscape) tracks you followers and distance to goal.  The button box on the right holds n buttons (n=4 for now) that will be used to invoke powers to knock back the advancing goo.  Right now you just click the good to shoot a hole in it (at the cost of one follower).  You can technically win (outrun the goo) and loose (run out of followers) but that's about it.

Next up: Add some obstacles and collision detection (with obstacles and goo).  Then maybe powerups and floating notifications.

I didn't get as much as I'd hoped today. I added some very simplistic movement for the antagonist for testing purposes, but it's hardly a challenge. I also started turning the level editor into something useful, although there's still a lot of work to be done there. I also hooked up won / lost and a basic intro screens. 

Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive, and I can get most of the gameplay into place.

Well, it could be worse... definitely. I'm starting to grasp how Cocos2d works, but it means that my trial/error process is resulting in the most awful code ever!

The good news is that the base game mechanics are almost working. Partially. Kind of. You can swap tiles, the invalid moves are detected and if you match 3 or more tiles horizontally and vertically... the gravity kicks in and the gaps are filled with new tiles.

Lots of things are missing, but I think its feasible I'll have a game by Saturday.

EDIT: ah, and there's at least ONE bug I need to triage.

to implement the movement with speed, angle and angle changing over time, had big disadvantages in terms of controllability and timing. I found a site with for me understandable tips about splines

http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dfg/AndysSplineTutorial/Quadratic.html

Due to the fact that my game looks a bit like a spider's web I decided to go with that as my setting. Instead of being up against a humanoid super-hero nemesis you are now up against an arachnid super-hero (or you will be once I draw them)

It was a tough day getting in the hero characters, combat, cooldowns and figuring out what everyone is supposed to do and when. The worst is yet to come tho when I have to put in some kind of enemy AI -ai! Maybe the most time consuming thing was finalizing what I actually want the gameplay to be -a long walk helped a lot in that regard.

You can now move your hero around, attack the enemy and plant nests which spawn minions. I really want to see this thing come to life -hope it works out

Well that flew by quickly. I didn't get to work on my game much (well, at all, really) this week due to uni, but I've started to make some progress. Since this is my first diary entry, I guess I'll explain what I'm doing.

My game is called "The Last Thing I Do" (I have terrible naming sense), and it's a beat-em-up/brawler where you control a hero storming your nemesis's castle. In my mind it would have gameplay similar to the old beat-em-ups like Double Dragon, or the more recent Castle Crashers. It's distinctly room-by-room, as in you walk into one room, kill everything, then continue to the next. For the nemesis theme, I want a nemsis character to randomly appear during rooms to mess with the situation by casting spells; sometimes he'll throw fireballs, summon more monsters, buff up existing monsters, etc. In addition to that, I originally wanted the nemesis to actually appear as a boss battle (that the player is expected to lose, but weaken the nemesis with each fight) every few rooms, but I'm almost certain I won't be able to do that with the time I have left.

For this entry, I decided that I really didn't want to code a physics engine myself, so I went off to learn how to use (py)Box2D. That ended up being more of a struggle than expected, so I don't know if this alternative was any better as learning it + coding it into my game ate a total of about two to four hours of my time.

So what I have now is the following:

It's probably impossible to interpret what the hell is going on, so let me explain.
The red boxes are the game's entities, one of them being linked to the player. WASD lets the player move around, and the boxes can collide with each other (currently they end up just pushing each other around).
That wierd gray bit is the map constructed by a simple tile engine, which the boxes cannot leave. The background is green because why not.

As that screenshot shows, the game is WAY far from finished. I still have uni tomorrow so I don't think I'll get much done then, but I have both Friday and Saturday free. I think PyWeek ends on 10am Sunday for me, so perhaps if I pull some all-nighters the end result will actually look like a game.

Most of the programming was going well, but I have been learning Panda3D and I've been trying to use it in this project and I've run into some major snags exporting my work from Blender 2.66 in a usable format. This along with pressing house renovations mean that I'm going to have to drop out of this competition. We're selling our house soon and I hope to be able to compete in one of the next two pyweek challenges.

I've really learned a lot this week and I'm glad I tried. Thanks for the opportunity