Well, I gave up on opengl lights. I think I would get them working properly, but that would take too long.

What I have done instead, is have two textures for the floor (light and dark textures). Normally, the dark texture shows, but when an enemy is looking in a direction, I overlay it with a light texture. Some interesting math in display.py, if that's your thing...

Finally, you can't see it very well, but the sight triangle is actually cone-shaped, and can be partially blocked by walls.

Now to start coding it! Heh... I'm going to be surprised if I manage to polish this game at all, but I think I'll have time to implement my idea (which will be a Chips Challenge clone with a few ideas thrown in for good measure) before the end of the contest.

After my pre-contest support for the (unsuccessful) campaign to make "use of theme" a voting category, I guess I was asking to find myself in a situation where the only game I could think of to make was a copy of something else with the theme shoehorned in ;)

Alright, I gotta get organized and make a checklist or this thing is not going to get done!

• Finish Player Artwork
• Create Classes & Interactive Code for Level Objects
• Finish Player Interactivity Code, attack, action, hurt, etc.
• Create Enemy Graphics
• Place a score/menu/life at top
• Give Enemies Interactivity with player
• Give Enemies AI
• Play Test!!
• Enhance AI, add Extras
• Create Menu, Add Music, Extra Work

I imagine that for a lot of contestants, some game ideas were already forming in various minds before the competition theme had been decided, with some flexibility being baked in just in case one's favourite theme didn't end up on top. In our case, I had an idea which would have worked quite well with my top two choices - a nautical theme which rides on the general favour bestowed on the previous PyWeek winner - and as luck would have it, my favourite theme ended up as the one chosen. So, how can the nautical theme be combined with "The Disappearing Act"? Well, as one other team have discovered (and the warlord and I are not "sharking" off you, whichever team you are!), anything nautical plus anything involving disappearance must suggest the Bermuda Triangle.

Having the "sawn in half" theme would have provided a more amusing and more contrived nautical entry - it's a shame it didn't finish first. Perhaps that variation can be cooked up as a post-PyWeek release!

Now, all I have to do is to find the time and energy to get this done. Perhaps the warlord will help me out...

For my game, I planned on doing a simple overhead-style escape-type game. I needed a level editor fast and I didn't have the time to learn pgu from scratch, so here it is. The beauty of the level editor is that almost all of the mechanics are created for gameplay (with the exception of moving sprites and wall enforcement).
I needed to move quick since I couldn't start until Monday night. Schedule is becoming quite compressed at this point...

I spent most of today playing with my daughter but I did get some time to code a little more of the game.

I modelled up some new props too, since those don't take very long to do.

I added the higher-level game structure (menu, level progression) and some transitioning to and from the actual game itself. I've also implemented a couple of aspects of the difficulty system. Easy is easy (but probably not easy enough) and hard is quite a challenge.

I also cleaned up the A* routine a bit - the code in there wasn't very optimised and thanks to RB[0] the farmer can now walk angles. There's still a slowdown sometimes from the A* firing so I need to figure how to split that over multiple frames.

Its winding down to about 2:30 AM, I've been working on my pygame since about 8 or so pm, so I think I took a good chunk out of it. At least I know EXACTLY how I want the game to be played now.

I started on redoing the ninja so he's now a cool super cyber ninja

but then I tried to do a full walking animation and its turning out to be a challenge. You can tell how tired I am by the fact that each frame gets messier :)


Oh well, a lot of fixing to be done. If you want to see what my screen looked like about 10:45pm last night, check out http://media.pyweek.org/dl/3/Cthulhu32/currentscreen_9-5.jpg

Ok, enough diary, sleep time.

First Day... I Organize a game structure and create the standard classes... I made the sprites of a helicopter and player! ... I'ts All Cya! xD

Day 3 went better than day 2, but not as well it seems as day 1. Still, there are now weird looking squiggles and awkward blocks across the landscape of my game (which is a good thing). Also, there is one type of object which has a randomly selected behaviour, and opens up the door for other types of objects your player can collect. The player can now collide with things using very rough collision detection. Today I need to do some other work but I will continue with the pyweek game later in the afternoon.

... I have two completed spritesheets available if you want to take a peek. ;) Just take a looking at our entry listing.

I also did a nice looking menu/splashscreen, but you don't get to see it until it's 100% complete.

I think this is shaping up to be a decent looking game! I just hope I'll have enough time to finish everything we need.