I don't have much time these days, work takes up a lot of time.
I still managed to continue working on my game.  Basically, it will be two games in one game!

Both mini games are "evil" enough heh.  One of the mini-games will be a robbery of some jewels, while the other will be the kidnapping of a penguin. The objective of the first game is to get through four rooms with laser detection without being detected as fast as possible.
The objective of the second game is to shoot with a slingshot at people (yes, it sounds very harsh, I am sorry) so they go away and don't shoot at you, which would mean a loss.  It will include four locations.  The objective here is reaction!

Both games (choices) are considered evil, but which is less evil?  You have the choice and can play the game which you consider to be less evil!

Today, I tried to enhance my creativity and brain performance by hearing some meditation sound tracks in the background. For me it get worse especially when I am trying to solve a problem...this kind of music got really annoying...  Nevertheless, at the end I got some further things done. Again, not as much as I expected but ok..

Today's agenda was:

- analysing my current coding, thinking about how it could be restructured to keep it maintainable somehow
- experimiented with an explosion generator which generates random explosion and writes on a spritesheet (Explosion Generator v1.1 by Cliff Harris)
- thought on some guys who inspired me since i am got my feet wet with game programming:
--- Eben Upton as Inventor of the Raspberry Pi
--- Guido van Rossum as Inventor of Python
--- Pete Shinners as for pygame
--- Al Sweigard, Paul V. Craven, Sean Riley, Lennart Steinke, Andi Harris and Horst Jens for their great books and online material regarding Game Programming (with Python)
--- Richard Jones for his contributions regarding Game Programming at PyCon and for founding and organizing pyweek challenge
- reprogrammed a little class for handling the spritesheets from the explosion generator
- used Gimp for converting the background of the bitmaps to tranparency and exporting them to PNG format
- wrote an explosion class which I can use now for animated explosions
- wrote a kind of particle/fragment class which I can use for objects which should burst
- integrated the classes into the existed game logic
- learned again something new about pygame's sprite collision functionality
- made a screencast video with OBS studio and uploaded my very first video to YouTube - YeeeHaaa!!!
- maintained my diary here :-)

Good Night!!!


Some preview of my current work can be seen on YouTube.

Halfway through the competition and I am considering something much easier. Tiled files are just not working for me. I get to creating blockers and trying to create interactive points on the map and I end up with a program that doesn't work. 

I am thinking, one screen, a few sprites, something simple. Then maybe I will move on to something bigger.

1) coding in python is fast.
My main fear before the start was to not have enough time to deliver something sufficiently complete. I've heavily brainstormed the different themes when I've got the list to be sure to be able to start coding as soon as possible. And I've started Sunday morning. I had something appropriate on Monday (I was expecting to have it more about mid-week).

2) design: I like it, but I hope it will not be considered as cheap.
My idea was to work on a correct design since the start. I personally observe that I enjoy more a game that looks visually attractive, and I did not wanted to degrade the experience due to unattractive graphics. I am personally pretty pleased with my game's graphics: I like the abstract vibe, and some aspects are more fitting (Squares are better for left-right-up-down motion mechanics and I like it more than a rotating system that I have tried before). I'm just worried that people will judge it cheap, because it's easy to code (the squares are just squares). But I still think the game is prettier and has more character with those squares than with space-ship drawings.

3) guilt feeling about my work productivity.
Yeah, I have to say: I think my work productivity (you know, the "real life work") has slightly suffered from pyweek. I tend to do small pauses to quickly implement a small idea (or to write a diary entry on my lunch pause). Well, it's not so bad, I had worse productivity during some weeks with particularly low motivation. But still. Or maybe I'm too harsh on myself.

I wasn't that keen on this theme, because I was hoping to make a pleasant and relaxing game this year, but I just can't brainstorm anything good that meets the theme like this :).

I'm going solo this comp (Lucid is sitting this one out), and hence down on artistic talent and ability :( .. therefore I decided this was agood opportunity to go for something 3D. I'm doing a tactical space shooter (inspired by games like colony wars and x-wing vs. tie fighter) with a backstory involving working for a terrorist cell against a government responsible for the killing of your family. 

I'm going a bit different by avoiding opengl or hardware rendering, and attempting to see how far I can get with numpy + pygame alone. I've had issues with pyopengl and panda3d before on various machines, and I'm concerned about the playability of games with lots of dependencies. It's working out pretty well so far, although I've quicky learnt how difficult it is to create texture mapping using numpy alone in an efficient way. Most of what I have so far is flat shaded polygons, which I think will fit the bill OK.

I spend most of day 1 and 2 developing a rendering system for polygons and blobs that uses colour and lighting. I got some basic spacecraft physics working towards the end of day 2 and some modelling, other visual effects and a basic HUD working day 3. Making good progress, but concerned still that I'm overscoping on this one :) ... oh well, thats all part of the fun, isn't it?

Day 2 and 3 - It's been interesting...  Seems like Pygame doesn't quite work well for my Mac.  I installed Pygame, Python 2.9 on my Mac running El Capitan (v10.11.6), doesn't seem to work properly.  Imported the pygame module, however it errors with "no matching architecture in universal wrapper".  Yikes, not good guys/gals.  My backup is to try installing it with another machine with a different OS.

In the meantime, I've got a rough sketch of my ideal for the game.  It's not easy developing a game.  I'll try to see if I can get Pygame installed and working on my other machine.  Otherwise, I think I may be screwed.

I'm liking all what I've seen from the other screenshots:)  Great job guys/gals!

Today I made steady progress on a number of fronts.

I got the dialogue and interaction system complete enough to start writing the plot dialogue. Like Legend of Goblit, it's based on a DSL, but this one is quicker and dirtier because it doesn't feed into an extensive animation system. It's also less scripted, and based more on seeking out information and growing your knowledge. When you know more, you can ask more searching questions.

I've also started to clean up and adapt the initial artwork I drew on Sunday to tell the plot. There's a fair bit more to do, and the plot has some loose ends I need to work out how to tie up, but it all currently feels on track.

Coming at this as a complete newbie to Pygame I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  I've spent most of my time so far creating engine basics such as transforms, different game object types, layout/alignment system, state manager, etc.  Probably most of this is totally unnecessary and I am reinventing the wheel in some fashion or another but I have learned a lot.

Right now I just have the main menu and character create(one and the same in this minigame) working, and a basic tiled grid on the game screen.  Hoping now that this part is out of the way I can build an actual game in the remaining time, but that depends on work schedule, energy levels, and a demanding three year old :)

I spent my time in renpy forums and documentation, i writte very few.

 I lack medium sized open source examples on renpy.
I was stuck about navigation troubles.

 I resolved it with half-solution which are entire new problemes. It's still totally unplayable, maybe tomorrow...

Forget arcade or tactic minigames, i just try to finish pyweek with a dirty demo about using renpy. But maybe it will give ideas about "add-on" or "mods".



For the context, it's about french king Louis XIV which spent his life on reaching GLORY through Arts (Versailles, le Louvre, Paints, Litterature,...) and
crushing his european neighbourg.
 It was very hard for him to balance it , and his taste for laddies and religion was complex to manage, and avoiding people starvation and revolution.

He was always choosing on which "vital need" to cut to feed the other ones.
Which was The Lesser of Two Evils ? Its depends which part of his life.