Hopefully soon after this PyWeek challenge I'll have time to finish adding spatial hashing to speed sprite collision detection in the Arcade library. That, combined with sprite merging and batch rendering allows a large map to be used with very little processing time.

Not going to get the time I'd like to work on this, but I at least have a working game.

1. Inventory works
2. You can converse with characters
3. There are two keys and a scepter
4. A character can give you a key
5. You can win the game

After editing all the images, I started on a really simplistic animation for the game intro.

It will spell out the game title: Around the Worlds in 80 days.

Then probably just lay them out spelling the words as a whole sentence(Not one giant letter at a time).

I fixed up animations, added some nice background things, and added music! (PilotRedSuns 'Greetings')



I need to add more sfx and images, more obstacles, and finally design levels I have friday off so that day will be a complete coding marathon.

I setup my workflow around an editor called cocos creator. Wrote a script to be able to handle the scene creation and all but what I realised yesterday was that there are bugs in the editor plugin that I a. Using to export the scene. This could potentially be hard to recover from., Have to tread very carefully while editing a scene. 

Otherwise I've gotten the story in place have the features I'm going to implement listed out. Bare-bones gameplay is ready. Have to ensure I can get the story branching nailed down. 

Any time you decide to have combat in a game, you have to set about the same old task list, which is always a slog. It goes something like this:

• Player attack effect
• Enemy hit effect
• Enemy attack effect
• Player hit effect
• Enemy takes damage
• Enemy dies
• Player takes damage
• Player dies
• Player respawns
• Enemy AI

So I'm about half way through this list - players can kill enemies. Oh, and players can now speak to each other. Not much to see but here's a screenshot just to show some progress:

I lost some days to things I had to do in 'life'.

Decided to edit a bunch of letters for my game introduction.

Probably not the wisest idea if I want to finish an actual game... but oh well. I'm trying to have fun in this pyweek, and do whatever I feel like.

So now manually touching up the images after they were image processed.

Today's biggest achievement has to be the transitioning between worlds. I have included this mechanic as a scroll that will transport you when read. I intend to also make a trap that'll accidentally throw you in too, when you've not planned for it! Going to the magic world spawns a new dungeon at the same level as the normal world dungeon you were in, going back returns you to the next dungeon you would have been in, i.e., the next normal level.

At the moment the only real differences are in the monsters and the scrolls that you find, I've kept potions neutral. Of course, the monsters and scrolls in the magic world are a significant difference to both tempt the player there and keep them cautious of going. But this will be changing. I intend to only have magic wands in the magic world and normal weapons/armour in the normal world. Before I can do that, I need to code some magic wands! My projectile code should underpin the wands quite well.

So I made lots of other progress today too, my git logs show scrolls, projectiles, name generation and a stacking inventory for today. I don't remember what I did with the scrolls?! But I've used a Markov Chain based name generator, seeding it with old Norse names, to obscure the names of potions and scrolls until they are used or identified. The inventory got fancier too, items now stack so you can have 30 arrows, and not just one!  Implementing both these features led to a bit of bug squashing as the underlying data structures changed. I also spent a bit of time doing very basic, rushed refactoring. By which I mean I copied and pasted some functions into different files for a more sensible structure. Still looking forward to really tidying up the code when the challenge is complete!

On my todo list for tomorrow there's food, wands and death. At the moment our adventurer doesn't actually die, which makes testing easy! But permadeath is a big feature in a roguelike, so it will be included. After that we''ll have most of the features required, but there's more that I'm wanting to add before the end of the challenge.

I've spent a couple of hours this evening adding the objects from the "real world" that our "paper world" based friend should try to avoid. It looks a bit naff at the moment because I only have three types of object (a pound coin, paper clip and coffee cup) and they appear at random, rather than in some way that aids game play / progression. I've also added the collision detection needed to check if stick figure has hit any real world objects (although this fires, it doesn't actually do anything yet because I've not drawn the death animation).



Things I've noticed:

* Writing code is easy. Manipulating / creating / finding game assets is hard (in a time consuming sort of a way).
* PyGame Zero rocks. I especially like how you catch a glimpse of the underlying PyGame framework and it's not a problem to dig down into that layer if need be.
* Just having a side scrolling "thing" isn't enough... I need to tell a story and demonstrate a sense of progress with an end goal. That's tomorrow's task.
* The game itself is still only 121 lines of code (and I want to keep it under 200, thus making it manageable for teachers and learners to grok).

My kids have agreed to help me record sound effects... a "hi-ya" for the karate kick etc... which should be hilarious to do. On a positive note, they're very interested to see how the game is progressing which bodes well for student interest if I shape this up into an educational resource. They're full of suggestions (like the karate kick) and are starting to see how relatively easy it would be to change things around.

Onwards and upwards tomorrow...

The game is more simpler. It lost two character support and some special effects. I have to change the story. Now it is about super humans who can travel between two worlds. Ordinary people call them "Twins". There is only few differences between world one and world two. The most important thing is that in one you can walk fast and in second you can jump high.