I had a church meeting tonight so I knew that my time would be limited so it does feel like I have slowed a little. A few more graphics added and some important internals for combat and characters worked out. Not much to see there yet. The main visual component are the portals. There will be a home village for the player where they leave for each cave - Mystery Dungeon style. Really want to add NPCs and a bit of freedom here. This has been added as an empty room (pictured!) save for a stripey portal which may be animated. This takes you to the cave and finding the diamond returns you to the village.

I have been pondering having 'mental health' for the player. I fear it may trivialise serious issues. Thinking it may be best covered in spirit and stress. I'd like the player to recover and develop outside of dungeon delving!

Today I started my "PyWeek time" fixing some issues I noticed yesterday, but it was time to go to bed.

After that I did my first refactoring (yay!). The project structure was starting to be annoying because all the scenes in the same file, meaning a lot of back and forth in a "large" file (not that much, but divide et impera). Anyway, tomorrow I'll start working on the map renderer.

I'm not advancing too much, but given that I need my time to do the graphics, I'm happy today I nailed most of the map components (more or less), that is: walls, terminals, doors and lasers. I still have to draw the grid runners though.

Hopefully I'll finish tomorrow the renderer and basic movement with simple collision detection (let's see how it goes, but it shouldn't be harder than what I did for "Lunar").

Also I'm still not sure if the game will be fun, but at least I'll try to make it look nice ;).

Finally I'm having a good time with pyglet. It's starting to feel very familiar and that translates in less time reading documentation and code!

homing missiles added

Over the past couple of days we have sprited:

• Player and necessary animations
• Two Enemy Types
• Player Ship and Particles with animations
• My favorite character so far with animations
• Other ships
• Misc Objects

This has been a blast so far. A little overwhelmed at some of the bigger sprites (more pixels more detail) but the mountain is probably smaller than it appears. I am realizing now that I haven't even begun doing sfx and music :X

I thought, surely displaying text will be the easy part of this adventure. Surely, there's some quite simple way to draw multiple lines of text on the screen.

Well, as it turns out...

I've spent at least 5 hours on text rendering. I've finally managed to get a general way to write an arbitrary number of characters/lines and even have them printed out character by character. But it wasn't easy.

a lovely flower drawn by mike

There's still a lot left to do so I can't relax yet. But I'm still feeling pretty good about the progress we've made before hitting Wednesday. The creative assets are coming along nicely (you can see the overworld map posted in our entry!) and there's still a lot of writing to do, but I am planning on having the data formats all worked out tonight or tomorrow.

I'm seeing predictable phase arrays, stage 2 emitters activating...now.

Yesterday I've managed to write some... well, for lack of better words 'code'. I imagine normal people don't need 3 list, 2 dictionaries, a tuple and 3 'for' loops to read and write some config values, but well, ain't got time to be bothered by such things, especially if it works.

The task for today is to setup the camera, environment scrolling and character movement.

So last night I had an overwhelming sense of doubt about my idea. Its far too time-consuming to manage dynamic image palettes, since every time I change one palette I have to do the same for all the others AND still update all the images. It also became quite clear that all that work does not bring much benefit.

Ive since been trying to adapt what I've already done to scale things down while still resisting the urge to resort to a blind clone.

I've run into this sort of thing in other pyweeks -I think the problem is I feel the need to do some experimentation otherwise I wont find the idea interesting enough.

I've lost a precious day, but there may be time yet to get something going -KISS to the rescue!

Finished the overworld map. Obviously with more time, it would be more feasible to add details or revisit parts I don't like as much as the rest, but it's time to move on to the rest of the game. Just gotta finish up the sprites for the animations of each of the map's regions.

Game is coming along fairly well. At this point, running, walking and jumping are all working well. The character's animations look nice. I still need to add the "bouncing" mode where the player is in a continuous bouncy state for a period of time. I think I'll make it so that the character will be invincible while in the bouncing state. He will only be able to kill enemies when bouncing, otherwise he will get hurt.

Item boxes are finished, with animations and everything. At this point a "Bouncy Star" power up appears when the box is bumped, but it doesn't do anything yet.

Tomorrow's Goals: Finish the bouncy star's animation, add the bouncing mode and begin crafting the level.

Github Repo: Bouncy Shoes

I have let about 2.5 days slip by and am just now starting. I had a good idea of the kind of game that I wanted to make at the beginning and have now fleshed that out and adjusted it for the theme. My game is a dialogue driven, "mystery solving" adventure. It comes from ideas I had for an RPG project that I worked on once upon a time. The dialogue is powered by a sqlite database and should hopefully allow for some interesting emergent gameplay.

However, there is a short amount of time for the scope of the project and only English words written so far. Tomorrow many of those English words should become Python words!