decided on shoot em up and working on the spaceship

To avoid interpreting "8-bit" in the obvious way, I settled on the currency of the Spanish empire, pieces of eight, popular targets of pirates. But how to make a game about a historical currency? This is where I started to fall down the rabbit hole....

I came up with an elaborate backstory about how a mysterious person (strongly suggested to be a time traveller) advised the Spanish army, leading them to victory during the War of Portuguese Ascension. Thus the Portuguese Empire was fully subsumed by Spain, allowing Spain to remain the dominant empire over England, the Netherlands, and France, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The former Spanish colonies, still using the Spanish dollar, went on to become the 20th century superpowers. The opening cutscene would end with an astronaut planting a Mexican flag on the Moon.

Great, I wanted some dumb justification for a game about managing a global economy based on pieces of eight, and I got it. At this point I stepped back and asked "would this game actually be any fun?" and I'm pretty sure the answer is no.

So forget it. Thanks to Treasure Island people strongly associate pieces of eight with pirates, so I can just make a pirate game.

Got a basic waypoint system developed, so you can plot the course of your ships.

Different ships will have different gun ranges, so position is important.

The sprites are a bit thrown together at this stage. Trying to focus on getting something playable. I'm thinking more of a radar type look and feel, mainly in shades of dark green.

Next I'll get some enemy ships in, add some turrets to the ships and see if I can get some combat happening.

Today there was not much time for PyWeek but I did spend some time thinking about how to make a 320x240 game playable on a modern computer. Pixels have to be magnified!

I experimented with cocos2d but scaling pixels up in that is tricky thanks to OpenGL artifacts. Also, sadly, 64-bit Windows users wouldn't be able to play the game :(

So I settled on the brute-force pygame.transform.scale approach seen in today's screenshot on the right. It works OK and a 800x600 window is playable - it also works in fullscreen on a lot of computers (most, I imagine), allowing even more scaling for free. I think I'll stick with that and get more content into the game tomorrow night.

Also tweaked some of the graphics, reducing them down to 16x16 tiles and sprites (from 32x32). I still have to settle on a colour palette though I think I'm leaning towards the Commodore 64 palette... but then this more modern 16-colour palette is quite an improvement...

Edit: I've just noticed that the screenshot is huge ... I think because I captured it on a retina display so it's 4x the resolution it should be :-(

For my platformer, I decided to use Kenney's free sprite sheets. I think for my enemies I will use 8-bit sprites to keep with the theme of the challenge. At the moment, I have sprite sheet loading working, as well as basic acceleration and deceleration of the character.

I'm using the formula x_vel += (MAX_SPEED - x_vel) * .1 for acceleration and deceleration. It looks pretty nice for only a little math. A lot better than just linear motion.

Goals for tomorrow: Finish all the player mechanics, including the bouncing mechanic that the game will be focusing on. Maybe begin to flesh out the level and add enemies.

Github repo: Bouncy Shoes

Well I've been wanting to try out low-res and pixel arty things for a while now, so here's my chance.

I've decided to go for a side-scroller (or at least a side-view) game. My main source of inspiration is Knytt stories. Its minimalistic and fits well into the 8-bit theme but it also manages to do a lot with very simple elements.

My main technical goal is to use palettes to give the same set of images different meanings throughout the game by shifting the colors slightly -we'll see how that goes.

The premise of the game at this early stage is a journey into a shadowy parallel world.

Day 1 has gone quite well, though progress was a bit slower than I would have liked. Ive completed a tileset generator, and loading levels from file.

We have outlined all the mechanics of the game. Quite a few graphics have been created. The overworld code is coming along nicely.

We now have a working game available. Not a ton of polish yet, but you can play. And you can lose(winning still pending).

so the theme of the competition is 8-bit, I want to make some pixel art, I searched google for some inspiration, I found many good examples, the problem is that I copied or rather I based in these example to create my own sprites, perhaps i think that I can have some issues with copyright. but these examples are usually only a single image and I had to create the rest to make animations. an example of what I say:

the original:

my based sprite:

hopefully this is not a big deal

We came out of theme voting with an idea about circuit boards, but a lengthy discussion on Google Hangouts lead us to attempting a piratical adventure we're calling "Bits of Eight" (like Pieces of Eight, get it?)

We have a few bits and pieces to show already, including a first render of the pirate ship (which bobs to and fro in the water):

We are hoping to integrate the luscious ocean water implementation from here (and that it will be performant enough).

Meanwhile we're working on the more detailed mechanics which will involve resource management within your ship. This is the schematic view (drawn to match the Blender model):