At the moment all there is besides the tiles and walls is a little copter that flies around. Time to add some enemies I think! Got the spawn points working and added steam to them, as well as a ventilation system to save you from being overrun with steam. Also, I put some shields in which you can move through, but the bad guys have to shoot them down to get past. The enemies are pretty stupid (they're not designed to be smart) but still produce interesting behaviour.

Phew!

On top of that, add a few animated explosions for death animations, projectiles and random events to mix it up. The temperature guage at the moment is just the red rectangle on the bottom right. Very crude, but effective.

Then add the ability to pause, a crude level editor, the ability to switch between levels and restart levels, death and game over and a unique scroll-over menu system.

We're looking more and more like a real game, baby!

Ok, well at the moment there is only one-and-a-half levels and no sound. Hopefully I can get these fixed by submission time. If anyone could recomend some sounds that may be used for the purposes of pyweek, that would be fantastic.

Well, I'm really happy with what I've got so far, and from the look of the other screenshots everybody is doing really well. Congratulations! This is certainly the best Pyweek since the last!

Latest Snapshot:
http://www.wardtek.ca/steamrollers-day6.zip
OS X .app (tiger only)

Today we took a small chunk out of our to do list and actually have a playable game. If we had to hand in this build, it'd still be fun to play. Of course we're missing things like opponents and the like that'd make it more fun, but we have a nice time trial mode set up to practice on the tracks. And a much better handled menuing system.

Visually, we had Steve come over and he went through our big list o' textures and also grabbed some creative commons ones and redo one of the tracks with better defaults. It's much more dark and destopian now which is what we're going for. I also put in some of Don's car renderings in so it changes when you turn. It's starting to look more and more like what we first envisioned.

That said, it's very hard to keep from being burned out at the moment. Temptation is strong to just chat on IRC or read reddit, but we must continue on. There's just so much we wanted to do with it and we're constantly saying 'scrap it' and 'not a priority' more and more.

After a few false starts I finally got something working around about day three. The kind of game I decided to make was a top-down scrolling shooter. I was a bit dubious about this as I have tried this style for other games, and pygame just seems to go awfully slow with it. However once I got a tiled background and could place objects over the top I could see the game was running fine. Hooray!

As for the setting - it sounds a bit generic, but i think it works well - you are zooming around inside a giant space vehicle, which is divided up into different floors, or decks. There is the fire deck, the steam deck and the main deck. All the action takes place on the main deck, with different machines venting power up from the steam deck. Normally this works fine, but as Murphey's Law will have it, things go wrong. A malfunction in the machines causes some of the normally happy worker drones to turn mad, acting violently towards some of the more vital parts of the ship's mechanisms. First of all, the ventilation system goes kaput: so as steam is draws into the main deck, it's trapped and starts building up the pressure - cooking everything inside. All you can do to prevent this is manually vent the deck from dedicated control points.

Also, drones are continually produced up on deck and will fire on anything that still functions. Dangerous! Now, while these droid producing factories are active, they channel resources away from the main doors so travel between rooms is impossible.

So to get out of the room you are stuck in you need to take out the bad guys, get to the machine that makes them and destroy it. Sounds easy? Well, once the machine is destroyed an open shaft to the steam deck continually pumps the room full of scalding steam. Now, there are a few of these factories in each room, so soon steam is billowing in and you must run back to the vent system to manually release the pressure to survive.

That's basically it. Running from room to room shooting everything that is against you, while trying to survive against the hazards.

Thursday went mostly at work and I was busy with other things in the evening. I did, however, have time to implement shooting down blimps and colliding with them (spiced with programmer-arty explosion particles).

Two problems here. First of all, my entry does not have anything to do with steam in the literal sense. Rather, I have a woman who builds up steam to enhance her attacks (she's mad, because this game is just a contest entry and not a real game :).

Ok, that's almost not too bad. The second problem is, she's not exactly running on it. She can kill ninjas just fine without building up any steam; it's just easier if she does.

So, I will probably end up submitting this as a non-entry.

Accomplishments so far:

• Images of some terrain and backgrounds drawn
• Have sprites of the Heroine in different attacks
• Have sprites of one enemy, a ninja (because a guy in a monocolor suit is easy to draw)
• Scenery format in XML
• Game engine mostly feature complete; programming some attacks and integrating thing remain

With some luck I'll be done tomorrow.

Today I've added graphical polish, a timer to make it more challenging and some win/lose decorations.

I've also cleaned up some of the internal code a little too.

I might look into adding sound before the deadline, we'll see.

Atlast I have some graphics. (no thanks to glBlendColorEXT :)

Now to put some units in my game... (well its not a game yet ;)

Finally I'm done. Well, kinda. You can take a look at the latest version on my entry page.

I've pretty much all the featuresI intend to have so tomorrow will consist mostly of polish and content. The things I might still add are a few more powerup types, a score bar, and maybe if anyone wants and time permits an endurance mode where each level get harder and harder for eternity or till you die.

I need to start working on making a ton of levels especially if I want to get a high score for fun.

The idea of the game is to make it to the end of each level which is a flashing yellow dot. Eventually you will make it to the end but the difficulty should increase along the way.

I made two kinds of enemies: pathers and steamfeeders. Pathers just follow a pointlist and trod there way along. If you bump into them you get hurt. The steam feeders are far more interesting. They are attacted to the stream of fresh water coming from your behind and if there isn't any to drink they get restless and will attack you like a swarm of bees.

Both enemies can be killed by releasing smoke or death steam or something. Press x or ctrl while moving around. Of course using the stuff uses up your steam faster.

Unfortunately I only have three levels available but they have everything currently available in the game.




I was also wondering what I should do with this script after pyweek. Should I maintain and improve upon it? This is my first game so it probably a bit messy and poorly done.

Ok have fun!

Now with working main menu, saved options, three new static object tiles, and working load/save from the level editor.

Gameplay (tomorrow's job) will be a puzzle game of sorts. Levels will contain terrain and objects, but by default no track or trains. Track pieces will fall from the sky tetris-block style, and you will have to guide them to where they're needed - they can only be placed on empty grass, or on older track pieces. Each time you make a valid loop of track, a train will appear, netting you a bonus :)

Possible level goals could include creating a certain number of trains within a time limit, creating a single track loop to join all the stops in a level, etc. Another possibility is to have a running timer, attempting to create trains every minute (for example); if when the timer next comes round there are no free track loops and you have not completed the level's objectives, you will lose a life.

I've yet to see what will work best, but once I get controllable pieces, I'm sure I'll figure something out.

Aww.. we progress slowly. However, we have nice graphics and music by now, thanks to Goss and Syl.

The game logic is quite OK, if we are lucky, we can play a minute without an exception :)

There are still many to do (especially to unlag the network code.. I don't know how will we do that..)