There you go, cyhawk. Three more screenshots, each in a different format (meaning every format pygame can save to except bmp), so you should be happy with at least one of them. The only one that actually looks like the level is screenshot3.tga, which may or may not be better than a bmp, since I have never used them until now.

I took what is to me an unconventional decision early in this project. The "scene" is a 1x1 board. By 1x1 I don't mean 1 tile, though, but a continuum (well, a floating-point interval) between 0.0 and 1.0. Due to the fact that I'm going to be designing mostly views to the map, it makes it easy for me to reason about how much space I want a thing to take when a 0.3 means always 30% of the length or height of the map, rather than 34, 67 or 103 tiles being the same. The oddity here, being that the player will have variable size between levels, and the player's level will indicate how big the level actually is (his speed is defined as a function of his size, so it still works)

The trade-off here is a loss in precision. I could be the case that dynamic entities' movement get visibly distorted due to floating-point operation updates, but my expectation is that the views you're going to get to the levels are going to be unclear enough that such imprecisions won't be noticeable. At the very least, I hope that they won't introduce game breaking bugs.

Today's work was establishing diagonal movement and reworking of the dynamic entity to wall collision detection and handling. I initially produced a bogus diagonal collision, so I thought of restricting player movement to 4 directions. After some sleep, I was able to think more clearly and adopted a lazy approach drafted from some ancestral memory. The code is not particularly beautiful, but it works.

I also got started with the concept of a Matcher. It's basically a filter of entities in the scene/level, allowing the view to select a subset of entities to describe. At the moment I'm suspecting that a better approach would be to assign a subset of views to each section of the screen and cycling through whole views, but the idea of cycling just through matchers might still be viable. Let's think about this again tomorrow after a good rest and an exhausting day at work.

(Sorry about the almost repeating name) All level transition animations have been completed, graphics have been fixed, and the level framerate is still 2. Now it just needs instructions, an animation showing the bots infecting the game and I'll be pretty much done. Also, as a followup to my question from yesterday, even if I am allowed to make another, I don't really have time, so you won't be seeing a (probably) awesome tower defense defense game this time. (Note: Typing defence twice was not a typo)

So, I created a bit of everything (levels, art, sprites...) but nothing significant.
Hoping to make more stuff today.

Might have gone to big this time with the amount of time Im able to spend. Still have a few more things to finish with the gameplay. Messy coding has begun, do not use my code for an example on how to do things :) Will have to limit the game to one level, wanted to do more but will only have time to make one good one (hopefully).

Very good progress today. One thing that really helped was that I was able to build a spreadsheet model of the core gameplay and use this to tune the parameters to get the right level of difficulty and interest. That saved me a great deal of time running the actual game because I could iterate around over parameters (there's about 20 of them!) much quicker and see how the whole game would play out

I also managed to play through end-to-end and I'm happy that the feel of the game is what I was looking for. I still need to complete the dialog (yes, still stuck at 30%!) and do some polish and tuning but I think I have enough time for that tomorrow before I have to submit.

Here's another screenshot.

My name is Jace, I'm the programmer on the team. This is my first time using Python to make a video game, and this will be the first game I've ever made. I've always wanted to be a game designer, but bills are a thing, so I've been learning as much as I can when not working. So, here's what I've got working so far. The platforming mechanics are implemented. All game objects implement a core super-class, and are managed by a level engine that performs calculations based on expected trajectory of related objects to anticipate collisions. The result is pixel perfect collision detection, every byte, every time. The concept is coming together. I know what I want the game to be; the only question is how much of the idea can be implemented before the deadline. At the very least we should have a game with good flow and challenging gameplay. There may not be room for much else :/ The art is on the way. Our graphic designer will be finalizing our character designs and the tileset should be ready by the deadline. Which is good, because no one wants to look at my hand-drawn goofy looking fart-art. The music will most likely be royalty-free, as we have no audio specialist, and I have no rhythm. The menus are...menus... The goal is still in progress. Although I believe it's possible to have a game with no goal, or a game that is its own goal. I guess we'll see. There's only so much play time we can cram into a one-week game in on an after-hours work schedule. Well, another all-nighter for me! See you guys on the other side.

The situation is looking alright with 72 hours left. I managed to implement the majority of the portion of the gameplay where you put the data fragments together, which can be seen in the screenshot I just uploaded. There's also other bits and pieces that I naturally forgot about already.

Other than that, I don't have much to say this time. If you're reading this and you're a participant, go work on your game :)

Basically, the game will be a shot-em-up like Space Invaders. The basic game (a test level) works, but there are still a lot of things missing. I will use the entire 5th day for coding more stuff and fixing this and that. On day 6, I am going to work on the sounds and music.

I could only get started yesterday and the rest of the team is still unspoken for! Anyway the core game idea is now playable. You move around a grid (the hard drive) and can pick up and put down blocks. There are two hazards: a corruption and a virus.

I meant the graphics as placeholders, since they were just clicked together with a trackpad. But I'm getting used to the looks. Maybe it will be good enough.

So now I can test the gameplay. It's not too bad. The difficulty can be easily adjusted by how much I fill up the board. The hazards are meaningful, but I'd like more variety. However the game is still a bit unrewarding. Some effects could improve that, but we also need some gameplay rewards. Something you can pick up and benefit from. Temporary flight maybe? A robotic helper? Will have to think on it.