Heavy stuff. Got the object layer to fall, and collide with the solid world layer.

Today I realized that PyTMX does not assign IDs to or load the coordinates for unused tiles. This makes it difficult to render the second frame of, for example, a bad-guy animation, if the level as drawn in Tiled only shows the first frame.

Instead, my game now uses a second Tiled map just for the characters. Each row is a single character and each column is one of the standard frames for characters like run or jump. The tiles, in a shared tileset, also carry properties to hold names like 'Hero', 'Skeleton' etc. (I am using http://opengameart.org/content/simple-broad-purpose-tileset). By loading the second 'critters.tmx' in the background, PyTMX gives me coordinates and properties for all the interesting tiles that don't necessarily appear statically in a level.

The game also handles gamepad hotplugging and removal properly, and as an optimization no longer draws tiles that are outside the visible area of the screen.

Finally put together an idea I think is fun and still doable with my limited python knowledge. The idea is something logically similar to "Oregon Trail" style games, but with a much different theme and play. I'll of course be using a dos or apple-esque graphics style. I should have a simple gui interface tomorrow.

I've been trying to create some new mechanic for the game. But looks like I'm not motivated enough to get it done. I'll try to replicate an existing game just so I don't have an unfinished entry. Have to get to the art too.

Added a guy and a cat, as well as some good old fashioned rpg dialogue!

...but I can't stop playing this... I think I made a mistake, this is too addicting to keep programming. Oh, I also added in some rad music that can change in real-time to fit the mood.

Up until now my game characters had been rooted to the spot. Nearly all my work today has been put into making them move around freely.

First I implemented pathfinding so that characters can avoid obstacles. Input to the pathfinding is just an image showing which pixels they should be able to stand on - easily generated with Inkscape:

The pathfinding downsamples this image and finds a route using the A* algorithm (note the debug minimap in the corner, corrected for foreshortening):

Lastly, NPCs are plotted onto the map, so you won't be routed through another character:

With this, the characters are coming to life! It's still not a game - you can't do anything with items, for example. But the engine is nearly done, and there's plenty of time left, so I think I'm on target.

After moving and shooting was done, the obvious next step was... getting the AI to do something other than shooting constantly. But I held off on that and went with doing visual enhancements first, instead.

First came exhaust for when ships are thrusting. Each ship got its own exhaust sprite, and that was simply displayed in the same place as the ship (by creating objects for them). Piece of cake. There was one hiccup, but that turned out to just be me being dumb and making the exhaust objects "inactive", which in the SGE causes animations to not happen (among other things). Easy fix.

But it still looked kind of depressing, a simple black background with ships on it, so I decided to add on the most important graphical touch: the background. I had already planned to use a nebula effect. At first I was going to just paste together some nebula images into a background, but then I decided it would be a lot cooler if the nebula was randomly generated, so I did just that. I generated nebulae nearby and away to create a nice parallax scrolling effect (and was excited when I found out that this previously untested feature only had one very simple bug), but then I decided to also generate nebulae in the foreground as well. The screenshot doesn't do the result justice; it looks amazing in motion.

Edit: I don't know why parts of the nebula show up as purple and light green. In fact, these parts are blue and yellow-orange, respectively. This screenshot shows the correct colors:

Next up is the AI, which I assume will be the hardest part, so it's a good thing I still have quite a bit of time left. I might end up adding some powerups as well later on; we'll see.

Wasted the whole day trying to find a bug in the viewport code, without much luck. Tomorrow I'm going to step through the programm with a debugger. Not really looking forward to it, but I see no way around it.

But first I'll try to get some much needed sleep.

The game now has 3 doors which will open when another goblin enters or close if the goblin has already entered. Also, the player can now shoot projectiles. Collision detection has been implemented for the fired projectiles. (Point-Line collision). The next step will be to add collision detection for the player (Mr. Clean), so that he can't walk over furniture or walk off the screen. After this step has been accomplished I'm going to add the Goblins, which will be the hardest part, but the most challenging, in my opinion. And after all that I'll clean up my code before I do anything else =).

I got it to work! It looks REALLY freaking cool watching the grid you play on change as if by magic. Also, apparently I haven't been doing as many commits as I should have been, because that last commit was MASSIVE. More updates to come :D