Well, the theme is here and I also have a game idea now, so so far everything seems to be in perfect order. The game will involve a man, an umbrella and climbing, but I think I won't reveal the rest of the concept until later. I bet we'll see a lot of climbing-centered games in the competition this time, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve which might just make my game stand out from the crowd. I hope it turns out good, and I wish everyone will have a great time making their entries. So have fun, everybody!

I decided to program a game where you could try different jobs or other activities. I don't know how it will be playable.

My first day (the comp starts at 10AM local time and it's 11PM now) has been pretty productive. I got the basic landscape rendering (not what you see in the screenshot - much prettier) and character movement code working (including animating fydo's first excellent sprite!)

On the downside the game as it stands runs at a measly 3 FPS on JDruid's Radeon 9250 system. On my 7800GT system I get 300FPS. That's without a lot of potential optimisations (I'm switching contexts far too often) but it's also minus a lot of intended bells and whistles.

Hrm.

It's going to be an interesting week :)

I got a few hours programming done last night before I crashed, so heres what we've got...

I started and finished the physics engine(unless it has bugs)

Wrote a texture script that will load images and convert them to textures, automatically scaling the image to avoid a glError

downloaded Richards OBJ loader from the pygame cookbook and customized it for my texture class and my resource mananger

Finished at least part of the particle effects engine

And we finished hammering out our idea!

We werent planning for this theme, but in retrospect we already had an idea, and this theme fits it best :)
We also decided against going for multiplayer, unless I finish the programming in an insanely short amount of time ;)

We arent going to reveal the game idea yet though, you'll just have to wait until we get a working version up going...

The idea for this times contest wil center monty pythonesque theme. You will play a foot which will need to squish balloons (which float to the top of the screen). We have ideas for different balloon types etc. Our artist will try to create nice handdrawn art. Now that we have our plan it is time to start coding :-)

• A jumping game - jump up really really high
• A spaceship launching thing
• An escape from the evil villain using a jetpack game

These are just what I thought up in a few minutes at 8:30pm while supposedly studying for the previously mentioned chem test.

its lunch-time, just got home, got a bit of a hangover (nothing western medicine can't cure). the theme I was hoping for won - juhu!

Today I won't to come up with some gameplay-mechanics and maybe start trying those out in the later evening. Right now I think it'll have something to do with plattforms, where you have to get up as far as possible while avoiding... hm... we'll see...

I'm going to have to start scheduling.

• Sunday night (now) - think of ideas while trying to revise for chemistry test.
• Monday - think of ideas after said chemistry test and start making a proper plan.
• Tuesday - in between catchup work and studying for software test, start prototyping, making art, etc.
• Wednesday - *hopefully* start coding
• Thursday - hopefully continue coding in between work
• Friday - work on art materials etc.
• Saturday - do everything else

More will be revealed later.

After a couple of hours contemplating, I've decided to make a platform game in which the goal is to get to the top of each screen. This will be accomplished by the use of ropes.

I've just started experimenting with PyODE for the first time, and I'm stunned at how straightforward it seems to use! Why haven't I tried this sooner?!?

No screenshot yet, but I have got the basic rope climbing/swinging coded (thanks in no small part to the PyODE tutorials!). Now to stick a toe in the murky waters of collision detection!

I was half-hoping I'd get some minimal gameplay done by the end of the day, but no such luck. I did start to sketch in the beginnings of the different game states, and there's some crude interaction already.

There are 7 python files, 2 text files (not resource files, design/production documents), and 0 graphic files. So far. I'm working with line graphics to get to the gameplay ASAP. Deciding what the actual graphics should be will wait for later.

Everything's checked in to my local SVN server - a few competitions ago, as I was testing my packaging, I lost a lot of files. Ooops. Back up early, back up often.

The basic gameplay is deliberately simple, as I can't count on having a lot of time to work on it over the course of the week - maybe some polish here or there, but if I can at all get the game working and vaguely "fun" by this time tomorrow, I'll be in good shape.