It's 9am here in Pennsylvania and I've managed to make a decent foray into a Robot-themed game (I forgot to sleep last night). I've decided to go with a side-scrolling shooter, a la Duke Nukem. The game will have a Cyberpunk/Noir feel to it, with heavy narration to make up for my complete inability to draw.

I've written up an introduction for the game, so for anyone who's interested:

What defines humanity? My mantra, my curse, my salvation. I ask myself this question every minute of every hour of every day, ever since...

It was raining, that first day. The sky was rent asunder, icy droplets cascaded down like blood from an open wound, freezing the once bustling metropolis in it's corpse-like grasp. To think, none of this would have happened had it not been for the rain on that god-forsaken day.

I was on my way to the Lab that morning, when Heaven ripped open and tried to flood the world again. In a way, it did. That torrential downpour sent tendrils of ice through my veins, and froze my very soul. I ducked into a Café, as much to escape the deluge as in the hopes of a hot cup of coffee to restore the warmth of my soul. I waited patiently in line for my turn to order. I was in no rush that day, it would be weeks before the specimen was ready for Phase II. When I finally got my hands on some coffee, I basked in it's warm radiance filling my core as I drank, slowing undoing the damage incurred by the storm. I sat down at a table facing the storefront, and watched as the wind and water vainly attempted to reach me, to strangle the warmth from my soul. The storm battled ineffectually with the window, as I sat back with my coffee enjoying the duel.

How could I have known it was at that moment that Hell would choose to break loose?

A pillar of flame erupted from the direction I knew the Lab to be in, flashing the water to steam. The shockwave hit moments after, shattering the window the storm had tried so futilely to defeat, hurling the shards at me like so many knives from the mouth of hell. My body was perforated by the flying glass, and I blacked out as one particularly large shard embedded itself in my eye...

Alex is making me draw stuff and won't let me muck around. Here is what I've done so far.

-Biccy

So robot it is....

It was obvious to me, that the robot theme was one of the most preferred but considering my 5 design ideas it was my number 4....

For those who might be interested, here are my ideas in short:

First Place: Jig - Arcade puzzle game where a bouncing ball has to pass a maze consisting of movable parts.

Second Place: Mashed - Worms like game with simple mash physics where you fire different types of mashed potatoes into a landscape to remove obstacles or fill holes to clear the way for Pete the potatoe bug.

Third Place: Formation - Realtime strategy game where you control a swarm queen that can send units to gather resources, build and upgrade units and defeat enemies.

Fourth Place: Robot - Tower Defense style game where waves of scrap are transported by a conveyor belt and the player can build different types of stationary industry robots to handle the scrap.

Fifth Place: Shuffle - Control a robot which consists of several segments (movement,body,head) which can be changed at platforms (movement=chains,wheels,spider legs,...). Each segment has pros and cons and are needed to guide the robot through different types of terrain and obstacles.

I'm not that satisfied with my robot and shuffle idea, so i tried to come up with something new..... And TADA!!! a shower in the morning can be very inspirational :)

Hold on for my next diary entry for my final robot theme design.

I guess ill' be working on something like a rhythm game.. still have to put a lot of pieces in place. But.. im' working on the input mechanism and stuff. Hope it works out well. Good Luck all.

I have had 2 hours to code as well, and not done a thing. :(

I have however comeupwith a rather simple idea for a game, I hope it works.

My evil master plan involving skipping one night in order to fall asleep early and wake up right about when the theme was announced failed! I slept 6 hours too many and am feeling sluggish.

SO! Robots, is it? Nice, though a little expected. Now we can skip all the gore programming (which was to be used if 'mashed' won) and...yeah, what now?!

Brainstorming the ideas with my daughter seems to have got me further than I usually get this early in PyWeek ;)

I now have a simple "game" in which a robot may kick a ball. No animation or anything fancy.

As a treat I've included another robot image :)

(thanks to rjones on #pyweek!) If you want to use pyglet.resources with skellington, you need to add the following lines to data.py after you import pyglet: pyglet.resource.path.append('data') pyglet.resource.reindex() Then everything will work.

Theme is robots, game idea is set, tasks are assigned. We are go! Happily had another member join the team at the last minute. I agree with eugman's assessment of the theme; I will see where I can add his challenge ideas to our design. Unfortunately the screen restrictions are out for the idea we've settled on, but I can probably get pause in there! Finally, good luck everybody!

So I sat down with Abbey, my 4-year-old daughter (my inspiration for a previous entry) and we decided that my game will involve to friend robots who live together and have a football (of the International Game).

Haven't got much else except a sketch of one of the robots. I don't think I'm quite up to making an actual football game. I guess we'll see :)

And now the nice robot has a friend