The enemies are a very important part of my game, so i work on them today. i wanna have several different enemies with a special behavior for each class, i passed a couple of hours trying to implement the A* pathfinding algorithm but at the end i wrote my own pathfinding code although don't work like i would want, i am good with the way that they do it. Also i add some basic HUD for display the player HP and to show actions messages. A screenshot will be uploaded soon.

Good progress again today. I finally got around to writing some story and dialog. I realised I had no real idea how to get the dialog and gameplay to work together so I needed to solve that problem. I have a partial solution and hope that the rest will become clear tomorrow!

Tomorrow will be dedicated to getting a playable form so that I can be tuning on Wednesday and polishing on Thursday (my last day). I'm probably a couple of hours behind although I think I have a bit more time than I originally though. Still, some of the more ambitious elements like charting might have to be regretted if the story/gameplay don't come together very quickly tomorrow.

Now we have a pixel perfect collision system and also learned to use cocos2d. We also have a graphic designer in our team. I'm having trouble separating things in classes in cocos2d and I'm considering to move to pygame.

All levels have been made (by iterating over a string), so now I can move on to animations between levels! And making the game make sense. Because I can barely tell what is happening in the game at any given time.

Another 24 hours has passed, and so I'll write a quick blurb here :)

One part of the plan is that each level with a group of levels interacts with each other somewhat. For instance, you might need a key on level 1-2 to unlock a door within level 1-1. Right now, I'm in the middle of making that work.

What I have done so far since the last diary entry includes collision detection, save files, and making enemies follow a pre-determined path that is defined in the level's text file. I also gathered more graphics and even some music. There's probably other things I did that I forgot about.

I have no idea if I'm falling behind, though, so I'm going to assume that I am :)

Done with almost all of the graphics; finished writing the base class for moving sprites. Yeah, it's going slowly, but I feel like the class I wrote will be quite useful. It is a base class from which other classes are going to derive. Tomorrow, I will try to get the basic game principle working.

So this is progress I did today:

• I made laser
• I drew character (yesterday I used image from last PyWeek)
• I made character animation having image for each direction
• I drew level art and made 1 level
• I improved language a lot

Have you seen the screenshot?
It's new program which tells robot to move right if it's on ground and it works.
What took my time today:

What	How much
Non PyWeek stuff	1 hour
Art and level making	2 hours
Improving language	5 hours
Improving robot	2 hours
Dealing with Mind issues	3 hours
Dealing with python re	3 hours

Note that I didn't measured time and it's all subjectively
You might thought that I'm changing Mind but I didn't inherit Mind classes, I decided to solve it on other way.
And for Regular Expression, well I tried splitting string by | or & but not by || and answer is: re.split("(?<!\|)[|&](?!\|)", s)
I didn't use re besides that.

Don't deal with languages if you don't know re and if you want to make programming game for PyWeek you better know re unless you have a lot of time

I'll be making development of this awful game as open as I can. See the git repository here. If you decide to check it out and see anything that makes you want to rip your eyes out or happen to have less intense comments about the code let me know. ;)

Idea: Bit switching nanobots have infected the game and are destroying the text, so you use you own bit switching nanobot to get rid of those and fix the game.

It sounds good to me, but might be extremely difficult for those that don't have ascii codes memorized. (Or have no idea what they are.)

Anyways, I have made the start screen that will be infected and a test level, (see screenshots) and should get more levels done soon. After that, animations and instructions.

So, while planning for this challenge, a number of very ambitious ideas crossed my mind, but I've participated in Pyweek enough times to know that when pressed to launch fast, you should perhaps aim low and polish the result. And thankfully I don't have the benefit of soul-crushing unemployment to give me extra development time.

Still, on Sunday I spent most of my time procrastinating. Rather than coding, I spent most of my time exploding trolls, orogs and other humanoids in Baldur's Gate. The problem, of course, was that even when I decided to aim low, my idea still seemed too big, and some parts of my brain were trying to tell me that by draining all my motivation away.

So, here's perhaps a list of ideas that I've considered before picking the current idea. Mind you, they were all platformers:

A game where you're given charts about the level overlaid on the level. These could be bubble graphs, pie charts, or bar graphs indicating information. There could be a bar chart indicating different level statistics, such as number of enemies killed, your health, number of times died, for example. And the idea would be that you'd be able to use said bar chart as stepping stones in order to reach the goal, and perhaps would have to deliberately die N times to increase that bar high enough so you could complete the task.

A game where you're shown snippets of code, or perhaps just a list of functions you could toggle on/off or call at will in order to navigate the level. Disabling the "updateEnemies" function lets you paralyze them, but you can't kill them either, for example. Calling "spawnEnemy" with the appropriate coordinate parameters might allow you to spawn that hole-digging enemy that might open the tunnel to the goal for you.

While those might still be feasible for other styles of games, their ideas are way too tied to platforming in my head, and getting the platforming right alone might be more than I'm capable of in a week considering full-time work and other personal life things taking my time. Those are ideas I'll think about, but not now. Now I need something simpler.

That's where the current idea comes in. I can easily display you a grid. I can also easily let you move left, right, up, down unconstrained or constrained to a grid, doesn't matter. I can also very easily check your intersection with rectangles, prevent you from walking over solid objects, harming you when you come in contact with harmful things, rewarding you when you come in contact with rewarding things, and so on. The world without gravity is incredibly easier.

So, I get that done in a couple of hours. Put on a simple straightforward visualization of maps and challenges on the screen so I can design the level, and then the actual fun of the competition begins. How many ways can I find to display to you the information about this map without downright showing you the map? Vertical and horizontal histograms of solid blocks? Noise frequency to indicate distance to the closest enemy? A detailed text description of the level and of your location?

I have a very strong feeling that in terms of being fun, this game will fail miserably. We typically don't like unfamiliar interfaces and we also typically don't like unfamiliar presentation of data, and this game concept has both in spades. I do, however, hope that the idea can at least feel fresh and that despite the general suckiness of the controls, that I can come up with a couple of interesting mechanics and level designs that will make it at very least a fresh experience.

The good aspect of the idea is that its core mechanics get done fast. And everything else in the game. Each new information visualization I can show you constrained entirely to how much time I have available to polish this idea for the game. And should I run out of ideas, I can always just work on the quality of the presentation of the data and menu. Sounds like the kind of game idea I should have tried to work with many competitions ago, but only now had the clarity to work.

Or I could simply be completely wrong and this is going to be another DNF for my belt. :)