I said in the previous diary entry that the game needed some immediate rewards to become less tedious. It worked! I've added a pretty diverse set of rewards and it made the game much more fun, even at the hardest settings. I've also added a ton of sounds, and I think that helps too.

Got to get a score screen and some menus done tomorrow. Congrats to the few that have already finished. I'm amazed!

(This pattern is barely visible in the game, but I was so happy with how it turned out that I had to show it off at a higher resolution.)

Bitstream Manipulators has been completed! It now has an animation showing the game being corrupted, instructions telling you what the point of the game is and how to play it, and a screen that tells you if you won or lost. Sorry, no high scores, although I could add it in fairly easily if you ask for it. Graphics are still pretty bad, and there is no sound since I have no way of recording any, but that shouldn't be a problem. I highly doubt this game will win anyways. So here it is: Bitstream Manipulators!

I have a strange bug today. I think I have a memory leak or something like that.

Edit: to run the game you have to create a .env file at the same lavel of the main.py with the following content BROKER_URL="amqp://guest:guest@162.248.9.21:5672/%2F" Right now using the game is simpler because there is a feed server that accept connection from everyone, it sometimes crashes if this happens please let me know and I'll restore everything.

Well, I'm almost done. And that's good considering I won't have much time tomorrow. I'm thinking of adding a couple more levels (there's not that many, and there's a sudden increase of level difficulty near the end (plus, I haven't integrated some of the bugs- sorry, features)). Maybe a menu/splash screen is needed. Not enough time to do art? Should probably sort some of the dicts before displaying; it's currently in an arbitrary order. But yeah, looking good, much better than I was expecting :)

Well I reached the end of my time for this pyweek and the game is done. Not done, done, but kinda done!

I'm reasonably happy, or as happy as you can be at 2AM after a day of work and 7 hours of coding. I had a nasty bug that really put a downer on the last day. I squashed half of it but the other half is lurking there. If you see some weird disjoints in the conversation, like there's a missing line ... then that's the bug. It's not my horrible writing!

There's some other weird things too. Depending on how you play you may run out of dialog right at the end. (yes, I wrote 219 lines of dialog and you can still run out ;) Also it takes like 20s to start on Linux. Just a few seconds on OSX, so I'm not sure why that is.

But overall I'm very happy with it. It has the feel I was going for, at least when I play it.

When you play, it tells you that you can only play the game once. That's the idea. You are supposed to try to experience the game as a single playthrough (12 minutes) because it is a game about using incomplete data to make hard decisions. So playing it multiple times sort of defeats the objective!

Anyway, I'm off on a short trip and back on Sunday, so I could conceivably update this version in case there were show-stoppers. Good luck to everyone. Hope you get your games finished (and not at 2AM!)

That moment when you realize that you are not an designer. These days I been working on my graphics, I have to work several hours until i can get something that i like it and i have to say it: my graphics are not the most beautiful ones but i like create my own sprites so, I can deal with it. i still have some much to do, no time for more details i hope end tomorrow night.

Over the past 24 hours, I managed to complete the "putting together the fragments" part of the gameplay, and I had some time to finish the main menu, world select menu, and the story screen. I suppose I'm going to put a story in the game itself after all. It's probably not going to be very good :p I also added music and am currently in the process of finding sounds. Of course, the commit log probably says that I did more than that...

The aforementioned part of the gameplay was tricky to implement, especially once I decided to add some features that weren't strictly necessary, such as highlighting the fragment that the mouse cursor is pointing at and showing a preview of where a fragment will be placed. I feel that it enhances that part of the game enough to be worth implementing and might help prevent some gameplay-related problems, such as in the case where two fragments of the same color are next to each other on the grid.

I still need to add additional levels, so after I find some sounds I like, I'll probably dedicate the sixth day to level creation in addition to writing the story, which I haven't really done yet either.

Naturally, the code is starting to fall apart, as evident by the 1000+ line long menus.py that has copied-and-pasted code and more than just menus, but oh well...

OK, the goal is in place. We have something to work for, and end to reach. Still, this game has definitely become its own true end. I won't go too in depth here, but the platforming mechanics are unlike anything I've ever played, and in the best way. Of course, its not going to be polished, but it is unique, fluid, frustrating, and challenging in all the most pleasant ways. I want to play my game now, and that's a good sign. Now I just have to finish it. ANOTHER COFFEE!!! *in the voice of Chris Hemsworth*

The game is getting there. It is playable. Tomorrow I should have a boss fight hopefully. The code is a mess but heh.