Playing area, inventory and status display are implemented. Can purchase random pipes, and place, rotate and remove pipes in the playing area. Pipe circuit detection is working.

Was definitely off to a slow start after being stumped with the winning theme, and being a bit put off that I wouldn't get to use my awesome idea for kryptonite.

Eventually (Tuesday Night) a game was decided on aiming to be somewhere in between FTL and Geometry wars. The user start with an initial ship made out of various "modules" and will face off against varying randomly generated enemy ships.

Each module can be assigned a key or keys that will activate the module and carry out whatever that module happens to do, i.e.. power engines, fire laser etc

So far coding has been slow, but I have a ship editor screen almost complete.



In the screen shot is engine modules, laser modules, shield modules, missile modules, the command module and "blank" modules.

Hopefully I can actually get something playable out of this, if not I am still pretty keen to explore this Idea after the competition.

Also there seem to have been a fair number of site outages, I assume this has been for everyone not just me.

I had intended to add actual gameplay mechanics today, but I got distracted.

Instead, I spent some time tweaking the graphics, although that needs further work, and also poking at getting the game running on my phone. After some running around in circles, I managed to get it running. It's not ideal - the interface feels clumsy, and I'm not sure how to fix that, but it at least works.

Now I really do need to add more gameplay, and also finish the level editor.

Yesterday, Site threw up 500 on me. So, I will post yesterday's update today.

Yey – movies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvZCURxRxDs

What's done:
- Same colour circles eat each other
- Different colour circles bounce each other
- Multiple resolution support. So, I can put this game into fullscreen mode.

What I really need:
- Player interaction with balls
- Figure out how to win/lose (this one will be hard)

I started a few days late but am on my way now.  You play as a group of survivors frantically fleeing the Nemesis, an all consuming goo.  You can't out run it, but through the sacrifice of your friends you can delay it long enough to escape.  Imagine a top-down scroller with tower defense elements.

The goo spreads through 2D convolution (signal processing FTW).  To make it run fast enough, I start a convolution server (multiprocessing) to process frames in the background.  For added speed, I've decimated the goo mask by half for processing and the resize it back up again for display.  The terrain will scroll under the player (right now, a yellow circle) and is generated procedurally.  Because I can't draw.

Next up adding obstructions, stats and power-ups.  Then on to the tower aspects.

Exciting Grass: The grass scrolls!



Terrible Goo: The goo grows! 


Progress To Date: Putting it all together.

My game is a little retro-type shooter. I love the genre and I couldn't resist, despite promising myself that I'd try something else this time. Oh well.

I using some important mechanics from the old Nemesis (aka Gradius) game series, chiefly the powerup system. I will try and work other elements in, but the powerup-meter was central to all of the games and so the most important to me thematically. I have included a screenshot of my work thus far. The red square is the player, the little red squares are projectiles and the green squares are enemy ships.

Finally, the Oxford dictionary states that the root of the word Nemesis is "late 16th century: Greek, literally 'retribution', from nemein 'give what is due'", and so rather wittily I have named the game Retrobution. Ho ho, I am a card.

The code (if you really want to see it at this stage) can be found at: https://github.com/davechristian/Retrobution

Its been a hectic last two days at work and Ive only just managed to get the 'board' graph up and running. Nodes that have been claimed by players now spawn minions that start travelling along the edges of the graph to the enemy's base.

My idea has evolved somewhat, mostly due to the fact that my original idea had a few holes in it. Now the objective is to claim as many minion-generating nodes as possible to overwhelm the enemy (yes a bit like DOTA) whilst improving your character for your showdown with your nemesis. Im toying with a few possible ways to make it more unique while still keeping things simple.

I still dont have even basic gameplay going and theres lots more to do besides that. Tomorrow Ill have more time to put into this but I really need to make some serious progress if Im going to finish on time.

Well, looks like wrapping my head around Cocos2d is going to be a real challenge. It is a powerful library I can feel it but unfortunately I don't know how to use it (yet).

Anyway, today I've been working on the actual game, drawing the board and kind of drafting a strategy to implement the mechanics, although I'm way behind of what I was expecting for today. Not a big deal, my expectations were probably too high.



After getting totally confused by Cocos2d a couple of times, plus the rage of realising the library won't take care of bleeding between adjacent images in the same texture (I fixed it adding 1 pixel border around the images and removing it when creating the sprite), I went back to Inkscape one more time... with some results. Yes, I'm very proud of that cow (what? "the cow" will be one of the ultimate weapons, for science!).

So that's it for today. I have cash, shield and four attacks (rocket, laser, meteorite and cow). I'd love to have at least one more attack, but I'm not worried about that. I MUST implement the game mechanics before is too late.

Tomorrow is going to be exciting!

Well, we will not be able to really work on the game until Friday, because we have an exam on Thursday, but we have made some improvements, and fixed some ideas.

The game will allow two players to work cooperatively on the same keyboard. The mechanics and objectives would be the same if you do so, but you would get double fun.


Cheers!
Aka

I have now finished most of the game mechanics.  This is a simple platform jumping game with randomly generated levels.  I've decided to rather focus on making a complete game that works well than a half finished complex game.