I can't believe it took me two days to create the room and character without anything else. Fortunately, I should be working five hours a day now instead of 15 mins.

It is the end of day 2 of PyWeek 19 and I am feeling quite good about how DD is going and the progress made. I have added the frames and labels necessary to make the HUD (Object clicked, actions, inventory, etc.) also all the objects themselves, most all the art, and the coding for clicking an object to bring up its' name under "Item: " in the HUD. Now all that is left is coding the actions for all the objects, the items inside the objects, the crafting combos, and the win/loose phases. So far PyWeek has been a great experience and am glad I entered this year.

Morning: Sitting on a flight from Manchester to Atlanta and then on to Houston. Not exactly the perfect start to pyweek but actually surprisingly productive! The fact that I have to sit for 8 hours solid means I have plenty of time to plan the game. I only have a budget of about 16 hours for this competition so I have chosen a game that I can realistically complete in that time. I'm doing a card and dice game. Should be quite light in terms of the engine and rather more time in the content and tuning. Evening: Arrived back in Houston and have most of the game and engine planned out. I’m thinking of trying the plane trick next time as it seems to work pretty well!

So after a quite a lot pain and misery. We have created.... a triangle:



At the last minute we said screw it, roll our own opengl binding. We had ran into some a show stopper bug with opengl on Saturday when doing some pre-contest tests.That bug i seemed to have replicated in our binding, now fixed of course.

So from here we need to finish up the shader class, write a matrix math library, and then start on texturing. Hopefully we can be done with that by the end of today.

Thanks, Matthew

P.S. Our github repo is located here: Cubix Github

My game will be about one room and an invasion of goblins, who try to turn this lovely, clean room into a mess. The player will be controlling our main character, Mr. Clean, who tries to stop this invasion by goblins for as long as possible by getting rid of them with a single weapon. The projectiles fired by this weapon consist almost entirely of washing powder. Anways, the goblins will thoughout the game enter through three seperate doors into the room where our Mr. Clean resides. They will constantly moving around, stopping, making a mess and such. Mr. Clean has got a broom to clean up the mess they create, but once the room becomes to messy Mr. Clean (and the player) has lost the game.

The longer the game lasts, the more goblins will enter in a given time. Also, I plan on limiting the max. amount of goblins to 10-20 at a time. If there are more goblins in the room than this upper limit, the player has lost aswell.

So far I am almost (at least to my knowledge) done with the graphics. I will now move on to the coding in order to get a first playable test-version where the player can move around, shoot and clean the room. After that I intend to add the mechanics for the goblins. I guess that this will be the most difficult and challenging part of my project.

I'm doing an adventure game this Pyweek. I've never done one before, but had been thinking over previous contests that it might be possible to write an adventure set it in a single room; that the limited environment might put it just the right side of too ambitious.

This is obviously going to require some cleverness in order to organise a whole story to happen all in the same place. I'm inspired by single-set stage plays, where some of the action happens off-stage, and the actors talk about it in the scene. People going in and out offers the opportunity for them to bring or drop props.

So I spent the first six hours or so of today knocking up a first draft of the script. I've written it in a Restructured Text-inspired format, which can be parsed and hopefully played back once there are characters in the scene. Here's an excerpt:

RALPH: You only just passed the basic certification!

.. choice:: I turned someone into a frog!

    GOBLIT: I turned a man into a frog!
    RALPH: That was a toad. And he still had man lips.

I started knocking up some graphics but the room is very bare still. Adventure games certainly require a lot of art, but the programming should be much more simple than some of my previous entries. I've kept the art style for the characters deliberately simple too, to make it faster to animate them.

I am going to take a break after a couple hours of coding and art. I have added the table on the left side to display your inventory, item you have clicked, actions available, and what has been accomplished. Though the only thing I got to before now was the click on the item and it displays what it is on the display. After the break I am going to code in most likely the inventory area, then the objectives, then the items inside the items (like paper in a desk). Finally after that I will add the crafting system and the win/lose system. It's a long road ahead of me, but it's been 2 days and I am most likely 30-40% done which is good. Wish me luck. -- Hunter K. -- Variant Productions

This entry will be far from my most groundbreaking, but I'm hoping it will still be good despite that. It uses several mechanics that have appeared in my previous PyWeek or Ludum Dare entries, and, like several of my games, it's strongly inspired by my all-time favorite game, Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters. At least the "one room" part of the mechanic will be original, for me anyway.

As you can tell by the screenshot, I am avoiding as much work on the artwork as I can at this point. This is because I hope to have a voice actor on board, and I want to be able to give them a completed script soon.

I created a sprite sheet for the main character with the Universal LPC Sprite Sheet Character Generator. This tile sheet contains all animations that I could need for the main character. Lucky for me. It would not have turned out nice if I had to create the character myself :)

Now I am working on displaying the correct animations in the game.

As I begin to make the base engine for Pacewar, I am reminded of why the SGE is still considered a beta release as I discover a few bugs that either crash the game or wreck basic behavior. I patch the copy of the SGE used for Pacewar, then send the same fixes to the SGE Git repo to be included in a release later.

At the same time, I am reminded of the reason I made the SGE in the first place. Despite the hiccups, I now have the basic engine for Pacewar basically completed. Flight controls are working perfectly (though I'll probably adjust the the speed constants in the future), and all that's left in that area is guns, and adding the AI to control non-player ships.

I opted to make the arena an enclosed space. This decision was made for two reasons: one, because it makes it more like a room; and two, because it'll be a lot easier to do the parallax scrolling effect I want to do if I don't have to deal with screen wrapping.