We kicked off sharp at 9am with a video conference to agree which game idea we actually wanted to go with. We had some ideas for a web-based MMO for "the Aftermath" theme, but there was some consensus that this was perhaps not well enough defined to make immediate progress. Instead we decided to mash up a couple of the ideas for other themes, and hope that good things will flow!

So our game is going to be tile-based, and we thought it would be interesting to attempt hexagonal tiles. I spent most of the day drawing in Inkscape, with the result that we can already start to design levels in Tiled:

I then had a look at some of the hexagonal tile maths and pathfinding, and discovered this is all handily documented with code examples at Red Blob Games! So one quick test script later, with a little copy-paste and rewriting to use the same coordinate system as Tiled, it works!:

It's been a long day, and we don't have our own game engine rendering our sprites yet, but I feel we've done very well out of the online resources that were available, and we're well-positioned for what we need to do over the rest of the week.

I have no idea to design my game, I find it is really a hard work to find pictures, to design the scene， to choose the background music... There is no time for me to design everything, so just type the code, imitate the Alien Shooter.

Alright, time to write our first diary entry :)

I'm doing a few major things differently this time around. This time, I'm working with a friend for this entry. His username is LegoBricker so say hi to him :) Also, we're using Pyglet, which neither of us used before. Inevitably, we've hit a few roadblocks due to not knowing much about the library, but we've managed to get the basics down. There isn't really any actual gameplay, however. So far, we managed to make a ball move around the screen with the arrow keys.

As for our idea, it's a bit silly :p Basically, it's a bullet hell game, but the player doesn't attack the enemies, which appeared due to some sort of catastrophe that we're probably going to figure out as we go along. Instead, the player must mow a percentage of the lawn to beat the level while avoiding bullets.

And that's it for now. We don't have any enemies yet, so we should get that done as well as a million other things...

Edit: forgot to add that our Git repository is here.

This was a successful day 1. Starting early in the morning, we got the skeleton and some basics of our game up and running and now we can head on to the real work. In the coming week we will try to create a game with all the goodies one would expect from a complete game to create a nice experience for you, the players.

"The Little Drop" as we call it, will be an adventure puzzle game about a little forest/water spirit which you get control over. Your mission is to grow new plants after a big fire has burned down most of them. We have a lot of ideas for features for it and we'll try to implement as many of them as possible. To be able to implement many features we will mostly use assets from websites like OpenGameArt.org and the like and concentrate on coding and fitting all the assets we find together.

If all goes well, we might even have a playable prototype by the end of day 5. For anyone who's interested in our development progress, we'll store all the code and assets on our github repository over at https://github.com/grimfang/pyweek21

As a little teaser, here's a screenshot of a current in development scene:


We'll keep you updated on the implemented features and general status of the game as we proceed.

Now all that's left to say is, we wish you all a happy coding week and may you all create great games.

Woosh - there goes the first day! Many other interesting and important things came along to distract me from PyWeek but I am fairly content with the start I have made. f only because it is still quite well organised. I think credit for that goes to PyCharm though :-) I doubt I will get more that 1.5 hours to code tomorrow though I can work on characters dialogue lines during my commute.

As is well known, the creatures most likely to be found in the aftermath any major event are cockroaches. From this observation was born our protaganist, a humble Gromphadorhina portentosa cruely thrust into a battle for surivival in a uncaring world after some epic diaster.

Progress was reasonably good for a first day of pyweek where we didn't really start doing anything until well after noon. We have a bunch of ideas for the game, a bunch of useful scaffolding, most of the menu system we need, the start of the level loader, a growing pile of art assests and some work on the level generation tools. Hopefully we can maintain reasonable momentum during the rest of week and produce something at least half as fun as our initial plans.

I guess this time I'll be using some free artwork from the web. I always spend a lot of time dealing with this stuff.

Whether or not I'll be using Tiled or not remains to be seen. I'm tempted to, but odds are I'd have a better time just avoiding "traditionally navigatable" maps altogether.

I've got most of the basic, lowdown stuff on my game, Stable Orbit. The idea behind the game is that we have been forced to evacuate the Earth after a major catastrophe. We can't live on the moon (like, there's no air) so we ought to build ourselves a new moon to live on (Do not try this at home). Once Moon II is released the control belongs to gravity. Needless to say, crashes with Earth or Moon I are forbidden, as is letting Moon II fly off into outer space. You'll need to survive until the Earth is safe again. Oh, and, what when it gets full. Gravity simulation is done, as is collision detection. Most of the none-UI graphics are done but I still need a UI, sound, and some way of controlling the creation of this new planet.

A little coding and GFX session before breaky...

Thinking of a life simulator after an apocalypse. Keep your villagers spirits up as you (Amy - see pic) become their leader! Plant crops and scavenge. Looking to use sqllite as a backend and simple chunky GFX.

So "The aftermath" won. That's good, because I always wanted to make a post-apocalyptic grass shearing game.

I will be spending all of today on making assets, and probably tomorrow and the day after.. but well that's what you get if you want to make a 3D game. MakeHuman will help with a character, so all I need to do for that is to merge the meshes into one object, edit the uvs and do some texture painting - I think 2-3 hours should do.

I already have most of the vehicle I want to use done, thanks to someone called "eezerz ..". I took his model:

and made it a bit more post-apocalyptic:

Oh, yeah, and I also set up a GitHub repo, but there's nothing there at the moment:

https://github.com/wezu/pyweek21


EDIT:
So 6 (six!) hours later I got a character textured and rigged, no animations at this point... oh boy, this is gonna take longer then expected...