Well yesterday we finally made some progress as you can see from the screenshot.
The game concept is quite simple: you are a wizard in a balloon and you're planning to take a journey into the clouds to carry out some experiments (right now it's a bit fuzzy why but don't care :) This journy turns out to be very dangerous because the sky is filled with hostile creatures who are trying to blow off you from their territory. You have to cast spells to keep them away (or better: make them die! :)
Spell casting is carried out with mouse gestures so you have to draw the appropriate rune into the air. Different spells affect different creatures differently (what a difference!)

Course corrections can now be made during flight (to a limited extent -- you don't have much fuel for manoeuvering!)

It's taken much longer than I thought it would to implement that part -- I expected it would take half a day at most, but I ended up spending almost all day on it. Probably spent too long tinkering with the user interface, but I want it to look good.

Now I need to get on and give the planets some data to be discovered, and the probe some instruments for discovering it. After that there's the probe design phase, and then all the basic elements of the original concept will be there. Two days left, two main areas of functionality... hmmm, might be doable...

Maybe I'm overlooking the obvious, but if I get an ACTIVEEVENT event (indicating that the user clicked away, or clicked back) - I see a variety of different states coming in as integers 1, 2, 6... maybe more.

Are the meanings of these numbers documented anywhere? I hardcoded my game to respond to the specific numbers, but I imagine there are some PyGame variables that match them that I probably should be using.

Also, how uniform are those activation messages? Is the pattern of messages that I get on Windows similar to the Mac, and to Linux?

• AI is minimally in
• score screens are in

tested on the mac - I'm getting weird mouse inversions there. Seems like I was sometimes not seeing that before, but I forget what the deal with that was.

I dropped my code into the Skellington framework for the first time, and with a little bit of hammering on run_game.py, everything runs fine.

The OGG playback on the Mac sounds really bad. I'm not sure what (if anything) to do about that.

About two days ago, I had these two goals.. I don't think I could meet them now...
# AI and enemies
# Item drop
The reason is this: when I added in the Item Drop feature, I realized that the game's fps rate fell below 10fps. The result was a choppy mess. Currently I'm using a simple loop - handle input, do logic calculations, draw, and cleanup. Apparently the logic portion is taking up too much time. If anyone has suggestions for optimizations or a better method altogether, please comment...

well we have good progress in couple of hours we will have units moving and killing us ... one more day of coding and another couple days of coding and one day of testing and we will be done!

Well, I got off to a really late start today and ended up only getting about 2 1/2 hours of coding in :/

The game is beginning to take shape, we have all major elements thought out and ready to be made,
the plants now die if you leave them too long.
Buying plots now actually costs something :)
I created a nice gui system with some help from pyglibs
We also have our first 2 final sprites done, the player and the plot-marker :)

All-in-all, I am about 3/4 of a day behind schedule, but I did schedule a spot between now and friday to catch up about that much, so as long as we dont have any more set-backs we should be good to go :D

I finally got the physics and collision detection to work for the platforms. :-D Tomorrow is my last day when I have time to work on this so I need to sort:
Animation
Menus
Hud
The actual point of my game.
at least...oh bollocks! Plus I now have something to waste time on ie bouncing around levels like an idiot. Anywho due to my dodgy haXX0rness I work best first thing in the morning (stupid zone) it's now almost 4am so better get too bed. 'night and good luck everyone.

gerry / trick went on a huge rally today and got loads of tiles done. We've got a number of folks helping out with sprites and stuff.

Got in nifty tile behaviours today as well as lots of magic codes to control how things happen. It's starting to feel like a game now.

Other code is generally getting cleaned up, bugs getting fixed, music getting made, etc.

Im amazed, that I always accomplished the things I scheduled the day before :-) you can see it in the screens + diary entries.

That of course doesn't mean I'm taking a break. I thought I would be finished with implementing all game mechanics by now, but two more must-have things came to mind:

• level editor + save/stream (Top priority. The auto-generated levels are okay, but to really show of the game I need to tweak the levels)
• one more enemy. A spider that moves "on rails" around the screen and uses the third weapon, a machine-gun.

Also, the list of "small fixes" is growing and growing... a cross-hair, different death-sounds, nicer hud, finish-menu,...