Last night I figured out how to render oblique views of 3D objects by bodgying together a tool chain involving Sketchup, Preview, Seashore and Intaglio. I know, smart people use Blender for that sort of thing, but it doesn't fit my brain well enough for use under pressure.

Used it to create a nice-looking lunar lander unit. Also put together the beginnings of a resource system.

Woke up this morning thinking that I need to have a separate Mission object for handling the various actions that a unit can perform. That may have to wait a bit, though, as non-Pyweek duties are calling. :-(


Lander, and some ore and water deposits.

Today hasn't been great, but well... that's "planning" in my book.

I did the collision detection and I'm very happy with the results. I tried to make the movement as fluid as possible, making "subtle corrections" in the trajectory to make easier to the player to move around without getting stuck (some locations may be a little bit narrow).

I'm too tired to explain how it works, but I can point you to this post instead: http://old.troygilbert.com/2006/10/the-movement-and-attack-mechanics-of-the-legend-of-zelda/

I've been worrying all the time that implementing that kind of collision detection would be too expensive but the end result is really smooth and the frame rate is still 60 FPS with plain Python and pyglet (no numpy or fancy stuff like that!).

Then I started to deal with the animations of the scene (ie. a door opens) and there you go, three hours wasted :(. Basically I had to rewrite the rendering engine to render different layers in different steps so I could animate the doors in the foreground layer without wasting time with the background layer. Now I can invalidate just one layer. Again, 60 FPS. Yay!

I misunderstood how tile layers work in tiled and turns out that what I was planning to do can't be done :'(. I've been looking for a solution and I think I can make it work but I guess that I'm moving the "spaghetti code" expression to the next level. It's all right, that's part of a PyWeek :)

Finally the story is more or less clear. I think I can provide a good experience (don't know for how long).

The spirits are high, although I have lots of things to do and only two days left!

Ok so the whole running out of time thing has me a little stressed but that's good, I work best when a little stressed. I've gone over my plan and realised I really don't have time to complete it all so I've simplified my concept to be more like Space Invaders. Rather that having freedom in 2 axes you're going to be constrained to the bottom of the screen and the aliens shooting the asteroids are going to be constrained to the top of the screen. It's not ideal but it'll have to do. I think I'll probably continue this project after pyweek has finished and flesh it out into the game I wanted.

We've made some huge progress today, but the most exciting stuff was visual.

We got an excellent title screen image from a good friend, which has really inspired us.

One of our number (I'm looking at bob) has taken our sketches and used art-magic to make awesome images that are much more evocative! I'm sure we'll get one up here to show off.


At the same time we've been working away at the backend economy, which has been fascinating. We need to have a functional system before we introduce the player's actions and getting something that behaves the way we need is quite involved.

We've also added some actual player actions. You can't do much at the moment, and the actions we have in place are more for debugging than anything else, but you CAN have a profound effect on the aforementioned economy, and you can kick in heads... who needs more, right?

The more we do, the more I'm psyched by all that we can achieve together. And the more I think it is fanciful dreaming that we could possibly finish this in a week! What was I thinking! :) Away with the fairies, I say! Fairies or Lunes!


Best to the others who are working away out there!

I finally found out, what was causing pygame to segfault. I was drawing aalines outside of the screen (I admit, way outside the screen). This apparently caused a segfault. I'm glad I found out, although it cost me much time. The bug had his origin in my movement logic. A direction vector got really long, still not sure what it caused it (maybe a calculation error or something). Today I will start making the map and art. And then I have to combine all things to sort of a story line.

Got level 2 into a working state... I think there is time for a level 3
Speeded (sped?) up player and baddies in level 2 and made the landing pad bigger in level 1
Made an 'instruction' or 'intro' screen for each level for a bit of storyline and instructions
Decided on what level 3 will be like. It's going to be one of those running games...

Todo:
Scoring in level one is wrong :p
Thinking I should *actually* draw some moon for the landing pad to sit on...
Make proper backgrounds
Make proper graphics
Sounds for in game events (but it's in space - you can't actually hear explosions!)
Maybe sounds for button presses in menus
Make background stars varying sizes or at least smaller!
Level 2 doesn't have any scoring...
Graphics, backgrounds, sounds and sprites :p
Level 2 has terrible framerate at times :/
Level 2 player sometimes spawns on enemy - equally enemy may spwn on player, weapon or helium  may spawn on anything...
Level 1 is still sodding hard - should make landing pad bigger!
Should make a countdown for weapon in level 2

Yesterday's progress had been quite slow. I wanted to 'parse' the contents from the TiledMapEditor json-file into the game. It got very messy, so I started again, and somewhat again. :(
Well, late at night I got 3 ok classes, with wich I'm satisfied - well, for now!   ;o)
I'm looking forward for today's work, with hopefully some actual moving and coliding.

I got my state machine working for game ai, but now I get pygame segmentation faults! Ok, even more debugging!

It's way too late, so just briefly: we almost finished work on the gravity, decided to make a visible circle showing, where the gravity works, and also we made gravity constant in the whole circle, so the levels would be more enjoyable.

We finally put some nice clothes on our engine:



You can see our hero in action. We actually found out, that the black outline is very hard to see on the dark background, so we need to remake most of our character animations (that means loads of images). Another thing you notice is the ugly blue circle. I found out there is no way in pygame to render nice aa circle, so maybe we let it as it is, or will try to make some kind of dashed ring...

Next step: animations, enemies, pickups and other enviroment objects!