i chose the name of my game, Jacobs vs Richard Boomer and the machines army in the fabulous 8-bit.

Game History:

my name is Jacobs, i was president and founder of the biggest company developer of artificial intelligence.

one of my most innovative and controversial projects, was the integration of human brains as part of intelligent systems, as expected this caused divided opinions in all areas of society, in the end i got government permission to experiment with death row inmates.

several months after, the test subject # 3bfg34-Richard Bomer, obtained the expected results from the study, the hybrid showed inteligence signs never seen before, intelligence based on emotions. the taboo had been broken, but never thought I would have to then pay for it.

not clear when, but it learned to communicate with other machines, also find out how to control them. and that was the beginning of the end ...

now my mission and duty is to stop what I began.

  I have to destroy Richard Bommer ....

Jacobs vs Richard Boomer and the machines army in the fabulous 8-bit.

I spent most of this evening working on the collision detection for our game. Cannonballs can now hit, and the ships can crash into each other. This was all done with spherical collision volumes because the maths is easy and relatively fast. I did this in TDD style with nosetests, which may have saved hours of debugging.

There was only one problem with integrating the physics, which was to do with using a simple translate rather than a matrix transform. To help debug it I made the engine draw the collision volumes... with full lighting, of course:

I also split the model into pieces, which allows the sails to adjust to the wind direction (and also swap out for reefed sails etc):

This actually results in rather more draw calls and material swaps so performance has dropped off a bit. I've started looking for improvements in the renderer eg. grouping by material, but for now it's time to turn in for the night.

Some progress today. I have basically a simple game with images, music, menus. I was also able to test the game with my usual tester, who seemed willing to endure playing for at least 10 minutes. Great!

I'll try to design some interesting levels tomorrow and then that will be that. No Pyweek for me on Friday and Saturday so I will submit whatever I have at the end of tomorrow.

Well I had a rough idea of this game at the end of the weekend but, what with work and cricket, I have only just really got anything done worth showing now. You can see me few lines of code and crappy sprites at bitbucket

The idea is to build logic circuits from basic units e.g. AND, OR, NOT etc. and gradually building up to more complex things. I have an idea to start with a half-adder then an adder and build up to 8 bits(theme!); then onto multipliers. We'll see how that goes.

Time for bed now, good luck everyone.

Today we decided that an effective resolution of 200x150 was not enough pixels for a game with lots of text in it. So we increased it to a luxurious 400x300. We kept the same palette -- let's not get carried away.

You can now preview squares as well as moving the robot. Legal moves are highlighted. There are more actions. If you lose, the game makes you feel bad. I don't know what happens if you win, because the game is hard.

I need to make this entry longer so that the screenshots don't run into each other.

The striped pattern on the robot is a homage to the markings of the only naja species endemic to southern Africa.

Now that we have all this space, we will soon be adding more information about actions to the squares on the board.

After a rocky start and bumpy road, we're making definite progress on our project. We set the bar even higher than our previous entries—a real challenge, but one we were prepared to face. After some technical failures and complications with several tools (especially the exporter in our pipeline from Blender to the 3D engine), we've kept up with development schedules for the most part.

So far, the work impresses me. I'm pleased with our interpretation of the challenge theme "8-bit" as eight bits, or pieces, as the central driving force of our game. As well, our interface design for collection and manipulation of items, being somewhat experimental and rarely seen (as far as I'm aware) in other adventure games, improves immersion over the conventional intrusive inventory interface found in most games of this class. The size of the map should also prove appealing, providing a sense of grandure and mystery.

We're currently in the phase of programming puzzle mechanics and implementing sound effects. Further work on detailing the environment is also on the agenda. We want this to be our best entry ever.

I had hoped to get to some fighting today! Other things have take time up but at least there are a range of passive monsters appearing in the dungeon.

Spent the time on the village but laid a lot of the groundwork for combat so should be straight into that tomorrow. Also an assortment of GFX, sound and font work helped with variety.

Slightly worried by the time and energy levels at the halfway mark. Reflecting on progress made is reassuring. Off for sleep!

Well, I'm definitely not on schedule!

Today I kind of finished the map renderer, although a bug got me stuck for way too much time. I couldn't work on the player character, let alone collisions; just-render-the-map.

At least I implemented the HUD:

• Grid scan: you play against the clock! Once your character is "uploaded" to the grid, the anti-intrusion system will try to find you with a grid scan. If the 8-bit counter (of course) gets to zero, you're disconnected and your mission is over! You can crack terminals to get more time.
• Link: you only have 5 bars of signal, if the grid runners defending the grid zap you, you'll lose one bar. When all the bars are gone, you're disconnected and your mission is over! Again you can crack terminals to recover your link.

I'd love to add the radar too (it's in the original spec), but I don't know if I'll have time for that.

I'm tired and I think I'm going to call it a day and hopefully tomorrow I'll advance a little bit more!

Here is the first screen shot of the game. i've managed to finish the powerup implementation (all three of them). Now i have to get to the Inventory and the main screen so i can call it done :) its' a fairly simple game, requires that you understand the binary representation of numbers. You can check out the code @ https://github.com/vkbsb/bitris or just download the zip and try it out. Has a results screen so you should be able to understand the score. :D

Welcome, since beardog's diary entry, I have learned how to use basic JSON and I added a Player module where you login. Just today, I fixed some bugs in it and added a bit of a story line to it, next I'm hoping to add Base and Shop modules. In your guy's opinion, do you think we'll finish in time? -M0dem