Ok. This is my first time. I have very little experience in writing games. Did a Pac Man-clone in flash and a Pong-clone with pygame. Allways liked to try a top-down-shooter so this is it.

Hi Folks,
here is the fist day diary:
i've found an idea, the game will be a kind of tribute to Wrath of the demon.
As a solo entry the game will be very simple, my main objective is to finish the game (yes ;)).
And because i didn't find any gpl sprite sheet for...  don't expect too much ! ;)
It will be probably ugly.

I've settled on the game i am going to try build.

Nemesis is the goddess of divine retribution against those that show arrogance before the gods. So, you are Nemesis's little helper, sent to earth to punish those pesky humans.

Its going to be a multilevel fight game. But as this is a solo entry, i wont be doing much graphics, so it will be quite abstract. Circles and stuff. Hopefully i can make it look decent enough. Maybe steal some nice palettes, do some gimping.

My main objective is to try to work out some interesting game dynamics. Where its all about tension and release. Combo buildup and release at failures.

So, with no graphics and only gameplay to worry about i wont be able to blame the amount of work i had to do if the game sucks. So to try to help the tension/release idea i want to have some generative music that varies in response to the game situation.

As i enjoy being over ambitious, i will try to do a dsp network like sound generator for each note. Something akin to an extremely simplified puredata. This way i can really vary the music in response to the situation without having any external dependencies.

My schedule for the competition goes like this:
Day 1: Finish game mechanics and some levels.
Day 2: Add enough details (intro tut or stuff) so the game is playable and can be play tested.
Day 3-4: Fix what went wrong with play testing and add more levels.
Day 5: Add sound/music
Day 6: Improve on graphics
Day 7: Polish (intro, death, 'cutscenes', score, etc).

Yes, i dont think ill make it either.

Lucio.

So I spent Day 1 coming up with a game idea (which I'll explain shortly), and coming up with a roadmap + schedule. The latter two are something I wished I could've had the last successful Pyweek I participated in, so I made sure to do those first.

My game idea is very similar to the NES game Bionic Commando mixed with a bit of Metal Gear Solid. You get one "weapon" - if it could be called one - a grappling hook. You use the grappling hook to kill enemies as well as move your player through the levels.

However, there is a twist: You must proceed through the levels unnoticed by laser trip wires, security cameras, guards, and various other hazards/enemies. Getting noticed will either end the level immediately unless whatever noticed you has the ability to shoot you - getting shot will end the level.

I don't have any concept art or a GitHub repository to show at the moment. The latter will be created in a few hours when I wake up, and my schedule and so forth should be uploaded along with it.

I've paid a lot of attention to scheduling and structure this time - let's hope it pays off. :)

Thought hard about the theme of the competition...at first I was thinking a "nemesis" is just a foe or enemy.  But I soon realized it's more than that.  A nemesis is someone who almost always beats you.  Someone you wish retribution on.  I wanted to come up with an idea that encapsulates this idea.

So I've settled on an idea that might be a little complex for one week, but I'm going to try my best.

Here's the idea:

You're a farmer trying to eliminate pests trying to eat your crops.  Eliminate too many of the same type of pest too fast, and you become their "nemesis", and these enemies become stronger and faster.  The strategy to this game is to try to vary the order in which you kill enemies.  I want to try to have the critters turn from cutesy to "evil-cutesy" when you become their nemesis - kind of like the bunny in Monty Python (HA!).

I am a little worried this will be a ton of work on the art side, since it does depend on a variety of different sprites to be made (I am NOT an artist). Hopefully some simplistic pictures/animation will do the game justice.

Today I got all the high-level coding framework in place, as well as some simplistic collision detection.  I also found some public-domain farm graphics I can use.

Not exactly what I expected, but it's coming together none-the-less. Right now there are some collectible items and a movable star. However, nothing does anything after that. I'm remembering how much I despise collision detection, and, looking at some of the other entries, I'm not the only one. 

Well, it really is Day 2 now since 27 hours have passed :p

So I was kinda hoping for "sidekick" since I could've done something that had to do with controlling two things at once, but I'm doing fine now with the current theme.

My game involves climbing the obstacle-filled floors of your nemesis' tower for no real reason at all. There's going to be levels where the player navigates through mazes, and there's going to be boss fight levels, where the player has to shoot bullets at his nemesis while dodging waves of other bullets that are coming from him (or it?). That might happen every fifth floor or so.

My artistic ability is next to nil, though, so everything is literally a pygame.Rect right now :p Also, before this challenge even started, the only experience I had with PyGame were through a bunch of tutorials; I never made anything for myself using PyGame before this. It shows in many places in the code...

There's quite a few design decisions I made to simplify things. One of them is that every level is the size of one screen; that is, there's no scrolling. Another thing is that everything is going to be a square to simplify collision detection, which I have had a ton of trouble with so far, but as of this writing, everything (mostly) works. There's three levels so far, although I'll definitely have to change them since they are all for testing purposes. Right now, I got player movement working, as well as pits and floor tiles that turn into pits, and I hope to add turrets that shoot square bullets.

If I have time later on, I could get better textures, and add freely licensed sounds and music, but we'll see :)

I guess that's all I have to say right now. :) Everyone else's stuff is looking pretty interesting.

Pyweek begins, a little late mind but it begins nonetheless. After bouncing between some "ghost of christmas past" style encounter with the Greco-roman god Nemesis visual novel esque thing and something where you had to fight your way out of Hades, helped by Nemesis to get revenge on your killer I settled on a gladatorial game. Nemesis was the patron of the gladiators.

As an aside, I may have made a boo-boo. I am using the 3D rendering library Horde3D which might be a tad bit abandoned. About 6 months to a year ago, I stumbled across it and some python bindings that hadn't been updated in a while and managed to shoehorn some older bindings together with a newer renderer DLL. I told myself I would release the new bindings, but never did. D'oh. So, I will release the bindings alongside whatever I make this week and any improvements I make over the next week. Since my improvements before today consist entirely of carving out sections that throw errors, I hope people don't consider this cheating.

Back to the gladiators. Aside from getting a window working that resizes and closes as it should, I modelled the arena today. Texturing will come at a later date though. http://imgur.com/a/VRjX5

Still debating what form the game will take though. 

I decided to go with a very abstract interpretation of the theme. It's not much to look at yet, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Networking is implemented and works great, so there's that.

Concept: I am going to use "Nemesis as goddess" interpretation. Especially this line from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(mythology)):

    Nemesis, winged balancer of life

Name: Balancer of circles
Gameplay: there will be two types circles (red, green). They will it each other Osmos (http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/) style. You will control triangle. You will need to collect smaller circles and shoot them into bigger ones by splitting them into smaller ones. Winning/Losing? I do not know – I just want to test and implement this game mechanics.

Concept art:


Screenshot from current implementation:


What works:
- Moving around
- Rotating depending on mouse position
- Circles' shadows moves depending on players position

Repository:
https://bitbucket.org/petraszd/pyweek-16-balancer-of-circles

Rant. This time I am trying to make my first pygame game. And it is frustrating. I've already few times caught myself thinking: "Screw this. Let's take pyglet, drop to opengl level and be done with this.".