I spent the whole day working on getting something going. I thought I would build a little momentum. But I couldn't even load a tmx script that I was planning on using. I went through Richard's tutorials and tried using his tmx script in there. I kept getting arcane errors for my maps. I don't think it even works on maps that have a Tiled Layer Format other than zlib compressed. At one point I got an error that a method needed EXACTLY 1 argument. When I tried to find a way to send one argument, I was told it needed 2 OR MORE arguments. When I changed it back, it needed exactly 1 again.

So, I may have a hard time pumping something out over the next few days. I will be lucky if I don't smash my head against the wall for that matter.

In the meantime, I am going to just review some other code. I would really like to move forward on the game, but I just don't think that it's going to be as simple as I thought to get Tiled to play nicely with me.

If anyone has any suggestions to make this easier, please tell.

Honestly, the countdown on pyweek’s entry page makes me a little bit nervous - Time seems to fly. But ok, feeling nervous doesn’t make it better.

I worked mainly on a object oriented state machine for hopping through the different game modes (AttractMode, PlayMode, GameOverMode, …). This is not so impressive to someone standing outside looking on the game, so I began to produce some graphics output. At the end of the day I had a nice parallax starfield and a spaceship which can be moved with the cursor keys and shoot by pressing space.

As my concentration decreased I took some time to look into the topic of packaging everything. Took a look into py2exe and the setup.py scripts delivered with the skellington package. Unfortunately, this seems not to be optimal for Python 3. So, after a little bit fiddling around I decided to try out pyinstaller. At the end of the day it seems that I can execute the pyinstaller executable without any error. More time to spend later. Good Night!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31808180/installing-pyinstaller-via-pip-leads-to-failed-to-create-process
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15221473/how-do-i-update-pip-itself-from-inside-my-virtual-environment

As usual, I'm not as advanced in my project as I planned to be when challenge started.

The choice of using a "fake" 3D engine using only CPU caused several technical issues that I should have predict. But now I think it's okay, I will try to complete a minimal game as soon as possible.

Thank Buffalo974 giving me an award, I do not know whether due to showing off my graphics, and now my code come errors. I use a lot of hassattr() to do the bool judge in my state machine, It would be OK if just run it only once, but I keep each state during the game running, so when next time flip the state, all the variables still works. It is an annoy thing for me, I tried to use del to delete them and finally I rewrite them. And also in my game, if the player press button B, there will be bomb effect, all the enemy bullet would turn into coins, then fly to the player. Normally, all bullet turns into coin, so there is no bullet, the player won't die, but it is not, I thought maybe the collision detection is before my bomb effect, so the player dies, and I just add a invincible state to player when bomb, just remove the player's hit box. well, The bug still happens, maybe 1/100 chance, the player dies, all the bullet coin fly to the player dead place. It is quite wired, I added a lot of print in my code, and nothing wrong. OK, I think I should just keep it for it is not always happen :) I will go on doing my bosses, I just finish boss 1, there is still 2,3,4,5 waiting for me. Time is limited. Come on!

After reading about Agatha Christie plot devices last night, I thought it was coincidental to find these Rules of Crime Fiction an author acquaintance of mine just shared.

look into game design

We've gotten our idea whittled down to one we may actually be able to execute by the end of this week, and I'm pretty excited. It was easy getting wrapped up in the concept phase.

Upper half of the screen will tie in the story, bottom half of the screen will be the main gameplay (you can probably see where this is going):

We have a cool idea but we're not sure how much we will be able to write yet, before the week is over.

For the first time I'm trying to make a codebase I will actually want to work on after the compo. I have a state machine setup to control the game state, complete with little fades to cover up while a new scene loads, and i've kept my class linecount down as much as possible. The only graphics so far: some neat little animated text rendering.

well, every thing goes well, now it is boss 1, graphics OK. I am not good at designing stages. I intend to creat 5 stages, for stage 1, eveyone can pass, even with bombs. For stage 2 and afters, the enemy number will increased, and player need some patience and skill. The next days, I will focus on boss design. They should have several attack mode according to their health. For innovations, I will give boss some skill, say the boss would give poison to the player, let the player weapon level down, let the boss health increase. All in all, my game is a shoot them up genre (well, how to pronounce this word ), Traditionally, the bullet should go straight, because delta_move = speed * direction, well, I will break it this time on pyweek 23. but I really do not know it is OK or not. Just try it. OK, go on designing my bosses.

I didn't touch a line of code today, and I only drew one new character. The effort all went into writing a murder mystery plot that involves all my characters and can be told without needing too many more features.

Among the resources I looked at, I found this excellent page of Agatha Christie plot twists and plot devices.

The first thing I wrote down was a little table of plot elements I could think of from crime dramas and what they mean. I didn't use it much, but it's a fun little aside. Here are some items from it that I don't think I'm using:

• An old photo - people in the photo knew each other
  
• A book - someone has an interest in or knowledge of a topic
• An earring - a woman was somewhere she was not expected to be
• Pool of water - the murder was committed using ice