I am curious to know how much time people spend on their entries. So far this week I've managed around 30 minutes each morning, plus an average of around 2-3 hours each night and maybe 30 minutes at lunchtime (such as now - very late lunch). Progress has been less than stellar ... but at least it has been progress.

Alright, at this point, I've just finished the main menu, the instruction screen handling, and the win/lose screens. I still need to complete a boatload of artwork and maps, but that might go quickly. At this point, no sound either; sound may be sacrificed in this competition. Time is starting to become a problem. Anyone else feeling the crunch?

Hi!

A working copy is uploaded. The game is kind of finished, I should polish the try-import-except-write_what_to_install part, and add more info to the readme.

The game is a mindless shooter, with some story appended.

Main dependecies are pygame, pygext, and through pygext Numeric, pyOpenGL, and maybe Polygon

Have fun!

My first task today was to finish off the user interface, which was done very quickly and I'm pretty happy with the result. I'm hoping that it's obvious what it's all about.

I spent most of today cleaning up the code, fixing bugs in the AI pathing.

Most of my problems today came from that old bugbear, multiple coordinate systems. My game world is predominantly a single coordinate system, the object space. A lettuce is about 2 units high. Movement, collision detection, etc. all work off the same coordinate system.

Unfortunately the farmer's pathing uses an A* grid, so I have to chop up the world into discrete pieces. The farmer is about 4 units (2 lettuces) across, so that defines my A* grid cell size (otherwise the farmer could be seen to walk partially through obstacles that should be walked around).

I generate the A* grid using the bounding boxes defined for all the objects that the farmer is going to try not to walk into (or over, in the case of lettuce). This was bug area number one. I spent a couple of hours tweaking the code that generated the A* grid "impassable" cells from the bounding boxes, and also the code that analysed the grid based on the current farmer and rabbit positions. There was a bit of refactoring in there too.

Next I realised that it'd be much nicer if the static objects in the game were better-aligned to the A* grid, so I spent an hour or so bending my brain over the forwards and backwards transformations required to get a 4-unit grid into the level editor.

So after all that I've got a much neater A* grid.

During all that I distracted myself by modelling up a new prop.

Oh, I also fill the grid now so that the farmer knows which cells of the grid are "inside" the farm (bounded by impassable objects, usually fences). This could be used in the future to have multiple farmers in their own farms.

I've got a lot of things I'd like to do to the game but I'm not sure I'm going to have time - my Saturday is pretty fully booked. Hence I've uploaded what I've got so far. No music, no sound effects, not particularly amazing level design, no flashy intro screen or "you win" screen. I'm not even sure whether "hard" is actually hard :)

Special bonus, if you're curious, try uncommenting the toon_program code at the top of map.py. You will need a shader-capable graphics card.

Implemented doors in side walls. Trickier than expected. Up to about the 4th version of the rendering algorithm now -- it's surprisingly hard to render everything in the right order in this kind of game.

Will try to do stairs next, maybe as a kind of sloping ladder. Then probably spend Saturday creating some more artwork and another level or two.

So its getting down to that crunch time of the week. I have to drive to Oregon tomorrow after work to stay w/ my fiance, so I'm starting to doubt if this thing is going to be finished as much as I'd like :(

However, I did figure out how to do bullets and projectiles, plus other cool effects like muzzle flash! I put the latest beta up, its pretty cool so far. I am really digging the overall feel.

Urban Ninja Beta 0.04

Key Controls for Beta 0.04 -

Up -             Activate Objects
Left & Right -   Move
A -              Switch Between Aim and Walk
Space -          Shoot in Aim mode

Result of brainstorming session. Obviously only a few of these will get done in the time remaining...

* Safety rails on the fire escapes

* Doors in side walls

* Stairways

* Make the lab colour scheme suck less

* Mixed colour beams, use shield combo to get past them

* Multi-level lifts

* Guards that chase you when alarm sounds, use white shield to evade them

* Make objects sit on the benches instead of the floor

* Objects hidden in cupboards, safes, computer files; keys, combinations, passwords to find

* Upload terminals to cash in on the info you've found

* Levels larger than a screen

* Reveal parts of level as explored instead of all at once

* Saving of games

* A way for the game to finish when you've found all the info

* MORE LEVELS!
- Reception/office area?
- Split lab into electronic/chemistry areas?

* More furniture and props:
- Lab equipment - chemistry, electronic
- Computers
- Office desks, shelves, books
- Bathroom fittings

Aargh! From too few ideas to far too many, in just a few days... can we make it a 2 week competition next time? :-)

Right, enough time frittered, back to coding...

Pfew, things are finally starting to gel a bit.. My insistance on rolling a new collision/sprite alignment system rather than using pygame's might be part of it ;)... although a good deal of concept is borrowed from Donal and I's last pygame adventure TrashVacHeroX.
Very little graphics so far... engine first, gameplay tuning, then resources...
time will tell if that's the right order.
Well.. some resources are in, our sound-man (and player sprite actor) came through in grand style, and the proof-of-concept player sprite is about half fleshed out.
so much more fun left though ;)

I just cut release 0.02 of my Pyweek entry. It has two major new features:

• Lots more text, completing the entire marsh area.
• Saving and loading!

The last was amazingly similar, thanks to cPickle. Python rocks.

So, we were able to get a tweakable
engine up before the work week began,
and have been hacking on it since.
There remains the Friday all-nighter.
We have excellent help with the art.
A full sheet for the protag' is already
complete. Booya. .

The end game of the comp is nigh.
Ready your endorphins and caffiene pills.