Since this is our first game in Python, we are limited in our options. We'd like to develop a game that allows players to be invested in their character, which think this theme works well for. Our game will be about a child's room, and the child that lives in it, as they grow to adulthood. The game will be turn-based, with events that occur every few turns that will affect the child's life. At the end of the game, the player will have the option to download their character's biography. We want to develop a game where players would be able to talk to each other about the lives their children had. Whether or not this would really be considered a "game", I'm not sure. There isn't really a defined goal we would want players to have. I'm sure we'll figure everything out as we go along.

I was hoping this would be the theme. I'm not a good programmer so this constraint is something that fits nicely within my skill set (famous last words, no doubt). My band had a show on today so I wasn't able to get started until late afternoon. I started by thinking a point and click game would be cool to try. I haven't made a game with mouse controls before. I spent a little while getting the basic screen up and getting something to move to where the mouse was clicked. At this stage I was drawing a circle on a white screen. Ideas weren't really coming in that fast. I had considered the idea of "there's something outside" like a serial killer, zombie, whatever, but it seemed a bit overdone. I switched the colors up so I was drawing a white circle onto a black background, and all of a sudden it looked like a light passing across darkness. I like the aesthetic- one of my aims for this week was to keep graphics super simple. I then figured out a cool trick of drawing black objects across the white circle, and it looks like a shadowy outline. So the idea that came to me is this. The game takes place in pitch black darkness, in a fairly large room. You control an avatar with the keyboard- a small, weak figure. There's a small flashlight you can turn on which you'll need in order to see where you're located- within a tiny radius. In addition, the mouse controls a huge spotlight that moves (slowly) around. This can also be switched off. You have to get to an exit that you don't initially know the location of. Within the room are cosmic horrors of two types. One large, immobile type which will kill you if you step close enough. Another small, dormant one that will go into a rage if a light is on it for too long.

Some first experiments with a "dynamic" light source. Just a simple dark layer over the scene with a brighter spot for the light and then blit the layer with the BLEND_MULT flag. The result can be seen in the screenshot.

That's my first Python program ever, I'm learning while I'm coding. I thought I could make some kind of Snake Reloaded version. So I already draw a little border around the screen, got a little circle on the screen moving by himself in one direction (left, right, up and down) and you can change that direction using arrow keys, also I wrote a Text Test message (just to try). I think this could be possible in one week. Thanks to IRC channel #PyWeek for your help.

this night i did the bootstrap for my game, a little menu and a very simple player. my idea is make a rpg or something like that.

you can wacth my code on github

So after about 5 hours of work, we settled on an idea for the theme.
We originally had about 3 different ideas we were kicking around, but we really wanted to do something unique with the theme.

Our first idea was a cabin defense thing vs hordes of zombies, where you can hire new people, that upgrade, and position them around the house. You could also purchase weapons/ammo for your guys, and items to use to barricade (like tables, couches, refrigerators, etc.) - and fought different sorts of enemies, requiring different strategies for each wave.
As we got going we started to feel that this had been done too much and wasn't really a fun way to think about the theme.


Our second idea was basically to have a player in their house/kitchen (whatever) and monsters are attacking, and you had to use whatever was in the kitchen as weapons, to either chuck, or set traps or barricades. The idea behind it was the saying "throw everything including the kitchen sink" - so we envisioned a character furiously trying to rip down the sink to throw as a weapon.
Sadly this seemed to require a large amount of art (which I am still not very fast/good at) - and would really work well in 3d, not so much 2d, so we scrapped it.

We we settled on was using the room as a concept for your starting point. The idea going back to zombies, you wake up, and it is announced that the zombie apocalypse has started, you have two minutes, and various items in your room (based on which class you start as) - you can only take a few items, so choose wisely, and quickly. Once you select your items you emerge into the world, and must fight off the waves of zombies and locate the other survivors (the other playable classes) - as each provides a skill crucial to survival. Resources are very limited outside of your room, so the tools you select, and proper use of the skills provided by each character are necessary to survive.
The goal is to reach the evac point, where you throw a flare and trigger a zombie hoard you must survive until the helipcopter arrives, and then fight through to reach the helicopter. Points are awarded based on how quickly you finish, how many characters are left in your party at the end, and also how many of each characters sub-quests you complete. For instance, the medic gets points for each type of zombie she collects a specimen from. The soldier from each type of zombie killed, etc.



After we settled on the idea I spent the next 4-ish hours getting the basics down, such as relearning Pygame as I haven't used it since last Pyweek I participated in ^_^ - we absolutely knew we were going to go 2d, and non-networked, as those have been royal pains in the past. So we created a basic half-tile map engine (kind of like isometric, with 64x32 tiles, but they are rectangles not diamonds) - we got the GIF loader working, and created basic tile, character and zombie images (the stick figures lol - zombies are animated gifs as well). We also set up the camera following the player, and the zombie spawner to purge zombies that fell too far behind and to respawn zombies in the direction the player is heading.

I ran into a lot of initial bugs setting things up, due to the rustiness with Pygame, but overall we have a decent base. I hope that this time I haven't been too ambitious, but we'll see.


Hope everyone else is doing well!

The game will be about privacy, but not like the NSA side of the problem, but the crowd anonymous judgement/prejudice/accusation side. The central mechanic of the game will be hide your secrets to escape and try to discover other one's secrets. I'll need some procedural generated characters and dialogues them. This will be fun.

Story and pictures finished. Will begin gameplay tomorrow or late tonight. So far good! Art is a mix between pixilated and normal so it's slightly unique. Can't wait to continue!

We're very psyched that "One Room" was chosen. When we were discussing possibilities for the different possible topics this was the one we had the most possible ideas for. So far we came up with a working game name and set up our local repository for mercurial. Placeholder artwork is being generated and the basic framework pygame is being written with some placeholder classes to build off of. So far everything is moving smoothly and we are off to a solid start.

I'm working with python in the past months, almost only makings CLI parsers for text reports of a ugly public administration system (Don't ask. It's made in VB 6.) and earlier almost all my experience was with Qt. As a fan of text adventures I want to make some kind of text based game (I'm mostly a writer, not a coder, btw), not necessarily an adventure. These first hours was time to make some research and change some workflows. For the sake of portability I'm going to use Pygcurse[1] (My Void, as I could find there is none other curses-like multi platform python library), what means Pygame, what could give me some future possibilities. But thins entry is to talk about the strange sensation of making "GUIs" without widgets. Pygcurse let you draw on console, use mouse input, but don't have any buit-in feedback from interface to program. Some automatic things like change the focused button in a toolbar are left to you implement or not. This is strange, an unexpected paradigm shift, as I was expecting something almost like Dialog[2]. Let's exlore what kind of trouble or gain this can give-me. 1 - http://inventwithpython.com/pygcurse/ 2 - http://invisible-island.net/dialog/