Well, it seems like there won't be an umbrella in the first release version of my game yet, and thus no combat or parachuting, but I guess that won't be too much of a problem. I've got the basic game engine in a good, albeit hacky, shape, and I'm currently in the process of adding menus and more levels. I should be too, because I'll have to finish the game mostly by tomorrow evening (GMT+2). After that some friends are coming over to have a little party, and unfortunately it's not the kind of party where I would be making games. ;)

There are some other very good looking entries too. TOBA's game has great production values, and I can't wait to play the game. I hope they'll just have everything ready by the deadline. Also, the theme seems to have inspired a lot more variation than I'd thought. There aren't that many 2D platformers. There are a few aviation-centered games, but they don't look too similar to me.

As I've said before I may not actually finish this time - most of the other groups have almost-playable games...

If only PyWeek was one week later - I've got two weeks off.

That's it.

Serval is currently packing the final submission package of our small game. It is functional, and as far as we have seen bug-free (except a rare error in the AI-Script which needed special upfront preparation by the player - but we had no time to look further into this and create a routine to avoid this error)

We had to crop the intro sequence and the catscene to textboxes due to lack of time. Sadly, there are also not more than 2 levels in this version.

We probably *will* continue our work on this game after the challenge, which will mostly consist of cleaning up the code, adding some new "functions" to newly added "fields", adding character movement animation and adding a lot more levels!

For us it is left to say, that we had a lot of fun (and some difficulties to keep our sanity... ;)) during our first PyWeek challenge and that we are a little bit proud about our game - After all we learned alot!

Enjoy the rest of the challenge and good luck for your projects - some of you have achieved amazing things until now! o.o

After a day of (probably unneeded) optimizing. I've gotten the game to a decent level of completion where I can work on side features rather than the main game. The game is still pretty bare looking, but the physics and gameplay are good enough that I can leave it where it is. Any comments on the playability and difficulity are much appreciated!

With the "New Game" and "Options" menu complete, I've knocked off the last of the features I really wanted to get in.

I have a handful of remaining features in my "if I have time" list, and I want to take some time to churn out a number of levels to make the tutorial experience distinct from the "real" course progression.

I'm pleased with where things are right now, and especially satisfied that people have had fun playing the "work in progress" versions I've posted so far. Thanks to everybody that's tried the game and provided feedback.

I just did a quick estimate of how many hours I've spent so far on this, and I think it's around 46, not counting brainstorming before the theme was announced. In one sense, that's a scary high number - it's almost exactly all my waking non-work time for this week. On the other hand, I'm pretty impressed that I can get something this complete that fast.

Today I have

• Gotten fonts working
• Fixed the horrible structure of my code
• Tweaked the physics so that it works nicer
• Made a main menu (that works!)
• Made pretty much the entire engine for playing levels after eachother and so on... works nicely
• Found a (good) musician for the project!
• Made it possible to finish levels

And probably more...

Still left to do is

• Finish the level editor
• Actually make the levels for the game :)
• Get some more graphics for backgrounds and so on
• Fix the running of custom maps from the level editor
• High score table (if there is enough time)
• Uploading/downloading of custom levels to the interweb (if there is enough time)

It looks promising though. This game will be very nice :)

Well, I discovered that a major part of the problem was due to looping through the # of bullets and blitting them every loop. This resulted in a drop of 7fps. I'll go fix it by having it draw when truly necessary, and hopefully it will up the fps to 33fps.

With this in mind, I don't think I can finish adding enemies or items. I guess I'll have to cut my losses and stick with what I have... climbing a glacier and shooting at icy boulders falling down ;-).

My development is being interrupted by life and I won't have enough time to add extra features in during the next two days. I'll just make a very cool menu with a fancy ui, tweak the graphics, and do other small optimizations. The game is highly configurable at this point, and I think this will contribute to its fun factor :-)

Wow, is it THURSDAY already?!? Crap, where has the time gone.

Well my game does not look much different than the old screenshot, but damn does it do a lot more. Last night I implemented the following:

• Monster vs Projectile Collision
• Player vs Monster Collision
• Monster vs Monster Collision Thanks Feakk
• Monsters load according to the level
• Player Shoots Projectiles based on inherited projectile class throwingDagger rather than Projectile itself
• Player loses HP and reports back how much was lost
• Player can acquire a red key to unlock a red door and get to the end of the level

I spent a LONG time tracking down a few bugs that were my fault in the collisions which lost me about an hour of hard work last night. But things are looking more promising than last pyweek, my game feels a lot more solid and playable than my old one, and I am more confident that I'll be able to get it somewhat running how I'd like. Plus my object oriented design is sooooo much better, I know use a very nice scheme of Main loads Game class, calls Game.Run(), Game loads a scene class, scene displays whats in the scene, and goes back to Game when it returns, this way you can go in and out of a game without leaving the Game Class.

I also uploaded the songs I have so far in .ogg format. DrPetter's Musagi is a really sweet tool, i HIGHLY suggest it to anyone wanting some old school touches to their game.
Download Songs Here

Well, I won't be able to finish, all the huge progress of the last hour or so is a propeller added to the submarine. This leaves a todo list of:

• add side rotors to ship
• turn steering propeller according to controls
• main motor RPM gauge
• altitude gauge
• water currents, levels
• particles to see current direction
• other objects.. plants, fishes?
• surface (texture? sky? fog? light beams? water effect?)
• sound, music, menu, polish

We're almost there!

It's starting to feel more like a game than a tech-demo...

We've got an intro screen, music, sound effects, a goal (with progression towards the goal). We don't have the final "you won" screen yet (as indicated by this post's title ;)

Still a few important elements to do, a couple of important bugs to fix and a bunch of stuff on the "would be cool to do" list.