Huge streak today. The project is finished. Maybe I'll add some extra stuff tomorrow...

Just a quick update, since I'm so tired. I can't be around tomorrow so I'm wrapping up Pyweek tonight. The rest of my team will carry on.

Tonight I added the rest of the combat mechanics and a basic AI. I made painful progess in spite of having written a few tests: the ships are so slow it's really time consuming to assess whether they are doing the right thing. I found it useful to view the action from high up above:

Meanwhile Arnav was working on the control scheme, which is via a WebSocket server that you access on your mobile device. It doesn't have all the features we dreamed up on day 1, but the concept is there. You can issue orders and see stats (well, one stat, the angle of the wind direction to your ship). This is it running on my Nexus 7:

I hope the team has a good day tomorrow and polishes up some of the rough edges. I'll catch you all in the judging!

Quick update before crashing. Today saw a lot of additions:

• Music
• Loading, saving and resuming games
• Chess moves
• Glyphs and action symbols in text
• Splash screen
• MSB flag on robot working
• Tile juggling actions
• Building JSON from YAML to avoid an extra dependency
• Centered text
• Windows packaging
• Python source distribution packaging
• More sounds
• Various difficulty levels
• Start of puzzle mode
• In game instructions on how to play
• Cheat codes
• Less whimsical credits
• Fixed long-standing box_width bug

One day to go.

My game is reaching its critical point! Today I implemented almost all the elements required to design the stages:

• Lasers: you can cross them, but they will give away your location (meaning: the grid scan will be faster and it will spawn enemies!).
• Terminals: you can crack them targeting one of four items (access: will open nearby doors, lasers: will disable nearby lasers, link: will restore your health, firewall: will add extra time to the grid scan). Each terminal can be used once.

Also the collision detection is pretty good, I'm happy with the character movement. I composed a bg music for the stage, and general sounds effects are already in place. I left sound for the last minute in my previous PyWeek and it was a very bad idea, so I'm trying to make everything at the same time, although it means I'm overall slower in the process.

Things to do tomorrow:

• Make the lasers and doors react to the terminals (link and firewall are already working).
• A "disconnected" screen (because you're out of link -enemy impacts-, because the grid scan got to zero or because you aborted the mission -you may need to do it if you choose poorly the targets to crack-).
• Enemy grid runners (important).
• 10 levels! I'll try to add a "overview" screen before each stage explaining your mission and it will work as a tutorial too (I plan to use Tokyo and Madrid stages for that).

Ok, that's enough for today. I think the game is looking good so far, I'm looking forward to finish it and see how it plays!

see title

Well, we survived. It took about an additional 20 minutes worth of debugging and bug fixing after our hour ended, so I present not our 1 hour PyWeek entry, but our 80-minute PyWeek entry. While we may have missed the mark, we all had a blast and are still coming off the adrenaline high. Here is our design doc/script that choreographed the hour. Unfortunately the computer that was processing the time lapsed video that I wanted to post lost power while saving and so I won't be able to share that. :(

Today was a bit of a write off. Not much actual progress and I still haven't finished the first level. Oh well. At least the camera is now a little more interesting. It occured to me that since the camera is at its core just a pygame rect, I could apply things like acceleration and velocity to it. It's a bit buggy right now, but I'll fix it tomorrow.

In other news, I'm officially hitting the wall in terms of motivation. In order to finish this game, I'm basically treating it like a job. It's rewarding, but it's a pace I'm not really used to. I've never been more productive, but at the price of feeling a bit burnt out. Maybe after today I'll suck it up and sprint to the finish line. We'll see...

Goals for tomorrow: Oh god there's so much still to do...

Github Repo: Bouncy Shoes

Lots of work today. I was much more busy than I expected for this project. However I have a working prototype. What is missing now is a finishing touch to make it pretty.

Here's one of them:

I started this evening by tuning the sailing physics so that heeling works more or less right, and the sail power varies by different points of sail. I like it, but it's rather hard from a combat perspective, because when you're heeled over your guns shoot up into the air at a preposterous angle, or down into the water. I like the sailing physics but it might need some tweaking to make it fun.

The rest of the evening I spent on particle effects, like gunsmoke and shrapnel, which looked pretty good until I remembered that like the key feature of wasabi-scenegraph is the per-pixel lighting, so I added muzzle flash and was completely overawed by how beautiful the results came out.

Adding textures to the ships was actually only a 10 minute job with Blender, now I know how to do it:

Finally I did some massive hackery to create the normal-mapped water we've been dreaming about since day 1:

Tomorrow night is the last night I can spend on Pyweek (though other team members should be around on Saturday), so I'm hoping to finally tune the combat model so we have a game.