Made very good progress today. Added a bunch of units and got it into a minimally playable state. Time for a release in case I don't get another chance.

Things remaining to be done, roughly in order of priority:

• Start with more than one loon
• A unit for training more worker loons
• Finish the help file
• Solar panels, power system
• Time limit
• Title screen
• Sounds and music

The final day - lots of little things to get completed today.

One of my posts from yesterday seems to have disappeared. I started having a performance issue late yesterday and that took a while to locate. I had created way too many forces with my "attractor" unit. I managed to solve it for now.

I plan to polish graphics, levels and get Gerty really working today.

Last night I tried to write a post but either my connection was failing or the website had problems, anyway... this is the second part of day six.

I was a little bit wrong about my workaround for tiled's maps, it wasn't working (well, it was almost working). I realized it was wrong when I had in a map two doors based on the same tile and when one of them was opening, the other was opening too. It turns out the hack was a good idea but it was bad implemented. Now it's fixed :)

Another problem I had yesterday and got me stuck for a while is the translation from screen coordinates to map coordinates. I did all my tests with just one map and it happens that my translation of coordinates was wrong but for that particular map wasn't noticeable. When I started to test another map... oh, I can walk through the walls! It's fixed but I'm worried something like this could happen by the end of the last day and it could be fatal!

I don't think I have time for unittest everything but I could use some tests. The engine complexity makes difficult to spot a bug; and when it's fixed, that could break something else and I wouldn't notice.

I have 6 maps already and I think I'll end with 10, so there will be a good sized moon base to explore ;)

I have several things to do in the last day, so let's do this! 18 hours left :)

I spent several precious minutes trying to figure out why "Factory.try_to_start_building" wasn't getting printed by this method.

  def try_to_start_building(self, cls):
    "Factory.try_to_start_building" ###
    missing = self.resources.use(**cls.construction_resources)
    if missing:
      self.missing_resources = missing
    ...

Pyweek is over for me as I'm at a wedding tomorrow. Arnav will continue tomorrow, to add new missions and tweak and balance the game.

I've not diarised as much this week because we have had less visible progress to show without giving the missions away. We decided to work on creating missions first, with visual effects, menus and sounds coming later, so that we wouldn't run out of time with a pretty but unplayable game.

Despite the problems people had installing Lepton last Pyweek I've gone with Lepton again, but it's now a soft dependency, so if it isn't importable the game will mock it out and you just won't see any particles. There's a better chance I'll be able to get the game running on Windows and do a py2exe port too. Lepton provides our thrust effect:



And this debris field that makes the explosions much more fun:

We are close to the end but still have fix many little things.
The game is pretty done, the biggest doubt I have is about the controls.
Right now you need both the hands on the keyboard... I don't like it.
I'll reserve some time tomorrow to try different approach with the mouse.

The wolf claw attack was fixed early this morning -- no more scuff marks -- and also got some new art. We got new floor tiles in two colours, as well as two kinds of terrain: acid spills, which damage our intrepid heroine, and patches of moonlight which force her to turn into a werewolf. OK, moonlight isn't technically a terrain. I have also been informed that it is specifically Titanlight, which is why I have made it orange. Science!

Aliens now spit acid blobs, which makes them a lot more deadly. You can make the protagonist shoot or claw semi-automatically by holding down Z, so you don't have to keep mashing the keyboard.

We added the interior of the protagonist's spaceship as a starting level. There are now some coloured keycards for opening certain doors. Most of the level is reset when you leave and come back, but some things are persistent, like inventory and doors that you have already opened. Exactly how this should be implemented was the subject of some spirited debate. The inventory is currently invisible.

Of course a lot of framework expansion and refactoring happened in the background, including many physics tweaks and bugfixes. You can no longer be shot by an enemy on another level, for example.  Oh, and we also have a working title for the game: Werewolf Sonata.

Being a werewolf is generally pretty awesome right now, since clawing is easier than shooting and the werewolf barely registers damage. Of course you can't pick anything up without opposable thumbs. We're going to need to add some more downsides -- we should have a better idea of how to balance things when we make all the levels tomorrow. (All the levels! We totally have enough time. It'll be fine.)

welp, school has started (university, mathematics and education), and the once great progress has pretty much gone to a halt.

being the end of the week, I'm going to play with luck and spend some time on this project, and then again tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to get what I want done, which is integrating the planet, moon simulation my partner has done into the interface and application code, and he can finish asteroid simulation, and then tomorrow I can put it all together with one level while he is at work. If not, oh well, it was a good experience! We'll probably get around to finishing the game anyway sometime in the future if not by the deadline--a neat game idea, I think, worth further investment!

good luck to everyone else!

Having been off the grid and without internet the past 5 days, I've been rather concerned how the game would end up.

But I've done what I could without any access to the internet, and the result is a small, little game with a story that's, well, not really fitting to the gameplay (and rather cheesy).

With only one day left (and with tomorrow being a very busy day of SCUBA diving) I now know that I won't be able to put much more effort into the game.

I would like to recap what I've been able to do though and what I initially planned to do, but haven't had the time or resources for.

Features:
* Randomly generated Moon surface using, well, the random-module.
* Destructible environment, much like Minecraft in 2D.
* Menu system. I made up a rather quick and dirty menu system, but it works just awesome and I like it.

Planned:
* Procedural moon landscape. I wanted the player to be able to dig as deep and explore as much of the Moon surface as he wanted to.
* Better gameplay. I should have worked better on the core ideas of the gameplay. The game can be challenging, but it will be repetitive in the end.

Never the less - it was fun putting myself up to the challenge and I can't wait to see what the rest of you guys have come up with!