Ok, so I was once reading about the difficulty in modern freight trains of going over a hill, because of the weight of the entire train gets concentrated in the links between the cars, not to mention the inertia etc.

So I decided to make a game where the goal, in exaggerated simulation fake phsyics of course, is to get the train over the hill via a combination of cautious pulling by the locomotive and braking by the caboose... or so i hope.. this could easily be either 1. extremely confusing and difficult to make an intuitive interface too, or 2. just plain dumb. Ah, the fun of arbitrary programming contests!

Check out my screenshot! Also, feel free to listen to my background music, I put an mp3 here. Its very simcityish, I composed it in garageband last night.. not much of a musician, but I think its enjoyable.

if anyone is trying to use pgu.isovid and are having troubles, please get ahold of me, and i'll send you a patched version. we're using it for our entry, and there are a few odd-ball bugs that could make it hard to use! Hope that helps!

I'm interested to see what people think about my current version. I also want to know how well it runs on a mac. I've got the steam, player, powerups and platforms working on a basic level so far. All that is required to play is pygame.

Using PyODE instead of a fake dynamics engine means that you have to try to use realistic values to get the behaviour you want. This can leave you with kind of awkward numbers for things like drag and lift.

On the plus side, you don't have to build your own force integrators.

Currently our hang-glider lifts pretty well over steam, but glides a little *too* well on its own power. Gotta work on that.

Well I guess it “runs on steam” is a bad theme but good for me - I can work in any thing it into any sci-fi type game setting. I would just the ships collect steam that is floating around in space near stars and use it as a basic building block. The H2O is needed to fuel the ships in some way probably for the still semi-organic brain they use … so every thing will really run on steam as the main fuel source.

simple gui and network stuff is under way ... will have screenshots soon some work still on design...

Finally I had an idea based on the theme... more or less.

I'll make a game with the casual gamer on mind, I guess. The idea is simple: manage, somehow, a soft drink company which is completely steam powered.

Yes, I know that it seems weird... and it's because it is! :-)

Now seriously, I almost lost the competition's first day to work out an idea and I don't want to spend the remaining days working on a game beyound my skills. So I "designed" a simple game that is simple enough to make in a week and complex enough to spend the whole week! :-)

I'm still thinking about game's details, not working on code yet. But I already have set up the subversion repository and the trac project on my page.

If you want more information about the project go to the project's page. Of course I'll post more entries with updates and screenshots... when I have them ;-)

p.s., please forgive my poor english, it's not my native language. So, sorry if something is not understandable.

Ok I've uploaded my current version. I've been trying to fix this stupid problem and I cannot figure out the source of the problem. If you run it as is the yellow block works as it should but if you comment the lines that are noted as such then it starts jittering. I split it into two blocks to figure out why it might be jittering but to no avail.

Well, after a few hours I have a working title and a preliminary design:

Evil Genius on the Oregon Trail

It's a bit long, but it gets the idea across. I plan to have a screenshot by the day's end today of the preliminary layout. I'm most concerned about creating menus, level transitions, and sound, so the game engine needs to be done quick.

We're using some place holder art, and starting on basic game play. What it shows here is the basic layout of the interface. with the three status boxes on the right, and the iso view in the middle. It also shows the start of a pick up coal dialog when the robot goes over some coal. There's a bunch of bugs with it at the moment.