Well, we have started to finally move :)

You can now buy plots, choose which kind of plant to place, buy plants, and harvest plants :)

There is also now 1 enemy, it was farely easy to implement him, so I dont expect to much trouble with multiple enemies.

Tomorrow I hope to make a level-loader
implement player-enemy interaction
implement nourishing
create new tiles
allow win scenarios
add menus/between level pages.
and if I can, make a few more plants


It seems the frame-rate has now dropped to about 45-60, with and without psyco, would anyone with a slower comp please try this and tell me if it is doable?:

http://media.pyweek.org/dl/4/TLP-2/TeamQuicksilver0.5.zip

BTW the music in the background was made in musagi, and is only a test, and will almost surely be changed, so if it makes you crazy you might want to turn off your sound :)

Mission starts to show results - NASA officials pleased

Planets now have data, probes have instruments to detect it, and the collected data can be displayed.

Still some time left today to start work on the probe design phase, too!

This is finally starting to look like a game! The balloon, crows and parachutes are all doing their thing. The most important part not implemented yet is the wind. So at this point there is no way to use the wind to move left or right, which isn't that great. :-)

Things still to do:

• Wind layers, and visible indication of wind direction. I haven't decided yet if it is going to be flags on the trench walls or moving clouds that will indicate wind direction and speed. Clouds would be cool but flags may be easier to do.
• Improve collision detection - pygame's rectangular detection scheme doesn't work great on a round balloon. ;-)
• There should be water at the bottom of the thrench of course...
• Win (reached top of trench) and loose (you're in the water) conditions that end the game.
• HUD bars indicating lift and fuel level.
• A menu to start the game, quit and maybe choose a difficulty level.

Too much to do... ok back to work now.

New goodies:

• background
• secret rooms
• bubbles
• more badguys
• more stuff
• no levels!!!!

If you're interesting in having a part in building this game, join us in #toba and volunteer to help build some levels. We'll use the best ones for the game!

Yesterday morning was spent writing AI for the baddies. This was actually easier than I had predicted: no path finding, but some good anthropomorphic behaviour from some simple rules. Here's a particularly nasty fellow about to make me somewhat deader:

The pink structure is just the collision geometry at the moment; replacing this with the real visual model will be today's focus.

Also managed to add the cutscene, health display, a crosshair (ok, that was all of 4 seconds work), the skyboxes and particle emitters.

2 days left, and I finally have something playable!

It's still running a bit slow, and I'm running out of optimizations. Tomorrow I plan to change a large amount of my per-pixel alpha channels into colorkeys in the hope that'll speed things up. Also in the pipeline are difficulty/display options as well a few tweaks here and there to the gameplay. If I have time I might even add a few graphics (currently only using one cloud texture for example).

Well, we had a bit of a rally today, and got the core "engine" of the game running.

I'm planning a late night now, and a long day tomorrow, to try and get this thing finished before saturday :)
That way if we are actually here on saturday, we can spend the time tweaking/testing/packaging the game up!

Well the game's a bit ropey but I'm pretty happy considering I've only worked on it since Monday and my artist had even less time. It does at least do something so here's a final submission and lets see if we get any points. Cheers and good luck in the rest of the comp.

Let's lead in with our regular dambuilder screenshots:

What this shows are various new features:

• We got enemies. That is, birds and fishes that for some reason like to damage the dam you're trying to maintain. Only the birds succesfully damage the dam after today, but the fish will gain this capability tomorrow.
• There are various resources (trash items) floating in the water. You can go and get those and using a conversion device (we see it in the first screenshot at the bottom left, but it's probably going to change) you can transform this into the material you need.

Not visible are countless, countless tweaks.

Testing status: discipline of maintaining code has gone down as tweaking progress and I've been engaging in more hackery and copy & paste programming. The existing tests still work, but I've extended them little further today.

I do think they are still of value though. They helped me getting the core behavior of the game correct faster than I would have when looking at the screen each time, and they saved me several times as I broke stuff. Now that I'm programming enemy AI and tweaking gameplay, the scope for test-driven development is somewhat less, especially as I'm in an awful hurry. :)

Still, lots of cleanups can now be made. I hope to find time to clean this up after the contest, as the simulation currently has untapped (and not fully tested) potential, such as support for multiple dams.

Tomorrow I need to focus on the following things

• Game over when waterlevel on land is too high.
• High score screen
• Startup screen
• Fish should also create mayhem
• Windows installer. I aim to have at least a Linux source release and a windows download. We'll see how far I get, though.

If any time should remain, there are countless tweaks I still want to do. I don't expect to have a lot of time on saturday, so most of it will have to happen tomorrow.

I'm finally content with the features I have. The following days are reserved for game-tweaking, level creation and possibly some optimizations

I'm sorry for the hard level that comes with the current version, but hey: the editor is working, so you can erase some enemies or whatever

top priority now:

• rope physics must be rock solid
• level creation
• speed optimizing (I found the strangest loops in my code... you won't believe it)

I'm tempted to implement an online-highscore to encourage global competition... but we'll see.