I forgot to hit "Save Changes" on yesterday's diary entry out of exhaustion, and didn't realize until this morning. So this is gonna be quite a long post. I'll try to summarize as much as I can.

Game modes

I added 3 different game modes, each with their own purpose and challenge.

1. Classic Mode - The Default Game Mode where you can win by getting a certain number of cars to the exit, or by avoiding a certain amount of crashes for a certain amount of time.
2. Survival Mode - This is a mode where you can have no accidents happen, or else it's Game Over. I'm planning on adding a local highscore board for times in this mode to see how you can "survive".
3. Free Play Mode - Remember when I said each mode had a challenge? I lied, this one doesn't. This mode isn't supposed to be challenging. It's just supposed to be there for practice or just general messing around with the game.

Menus

I added almost all the UI for the game. I added the Main Menu, a mode select, a level select, a settings screen, and a [temporarily] blank how to play screen. I added fully functional buttons w/Keyboard Shortcuts just for fun. I added on/off sliders for the Settings Menu. I'm mostly done with this aspect of the game, so I don't really have to worry about it, so that's pretty great.

Core Challenges

Of course, every game has a challenge, or else it's not fun. The challenges are just basic things like goals to win the level or penalties to stop you from winning the level, such as:

• Car Accidents (duh), you can be slowed down and penalized by them depending on the level/gamemode. Also, I added easier ways to track car accidents by putting a yellow "Warning!" symbol over the crashed cars telling you that they've been in an accident.
• Time Limit, you have to finish the level in a certain amount of time or else you lose, or you have to survive for a certain amount of time or else you lose.
• Unhappy Drivers, this is a new feature that I'm pretty proud of. When Drivers wait at a stop light for too long, an angry face will pop up over their car and if it grows to a certain number, your amount of time to complete the level will be penalized.

Other "smaller" things I added

• Fullscreen Mode
• Pause Menu
• I switched the Graphics for the Traffic Lights to a solid colored bar, to make it more apparent to what setting that light was in.
• Turning on one traffic light will turn on the one parallel to it (in the same lane).
• Buses, they're slow, they take up space, you don't like driving behind them, so of course I had to add them into my game, because why not?
• New cars, and I hope to finish all of them tomorrow as well as add motorcycles.

Okay that's everything I did today but I'm not done yet...

Things I plan to finish tomorrow (this is mostly for self-reference so I don't forget)

• Starting work on levels
• Start recording Sound Effects (except for a car crashing one, I don't want to re-create that)
• A better way of switching lights on and off.
• A better Level Select Screen
• Motorcycles with higher speeds. (mentioned above)
• Finish all cars.
• A name for the game. (That might be a good thing.)

Still not done yet. I still have screenshots.

This is the main menu:

This is a picture of Gameplay with indicators above accidents and unhappy drivers:

Okay now I'm done writing. I'm going to bed now.

Since I was too lazy to change my shader to look like flowing water... you are now flowing on snow. Which has some red color you should avoid. Which in turn leads to a bit of gameplay! If I have time (haha, as if) I can make multiple levels with different types of heightmaps. Also, I'm having fun right now trying to get multiple of the purple wizards to the goal so maybe this will be final gameplay - multitask to guide several of them to flow down the snowy mountain safely. Or I might go back to the initial idea and have the other snow-raft-riders be AI control trying to beat you.

We make a lot of progress today; both the visual style and the game mechanics are coming along.

I drew some explosions using Inkscape. Animation is one of those things that is hard in Inkscape, but I've become practiced at anyway, so I think this looks Ok:

Larry has been hard at work on the flow mechanics as well as being able to interact with objects already in the world:

While I think we can create puzzles using these mechanics, the details aren't completely worked out. I started sketching some notes on this on paper. But we have a text-based level format that will allow us to iterate quickly, and we have 4 days to iterate on the puzzles, so that seems like enough time.

Youtube Link (External)

Day 2 has been fruitful as well as joyous.

Enjoying PyWeek so far!

Man this took forever