First, it showed nothing but my background fill

Now, it shows things, and the character's sprites change... But nothing else works.

You can't move, the string grapple goes in all sorts of wierd directions, it's a mess!

*Sighs* It's looking like I won't finish. I'll try my hardest, but it's looking less and less hopeful.

I really thought this was going to work. I just don't.

Pymike tried explaining his platform collision technique to me, but I still don't understand how it works, I've been absolutely killing myself over this, and it's just a big %#$^ mess.

It's unlikely I'll finish at this point.

Hopefully it'll all go better next time. ._.

Thanks to ZeroByte for the cheesy pun in the title. :)

We're letting loose a lot of our features -- sortof like disconnecting some heavy cargo cars from the end of the line because they'll cause you to roll into the station too late. "Better light than late", I says.

Our stack-based UI is working well, making it really easy to navigate within the game and add new sections to it. I think I want to write this up as a template structure for making a generic object-oriented game -- it's a wheel that I've reinvented so many times, I'd really like to template-ize this thing to speed up future development. Not that I want to make this a code library -- more just like pictures and rough class interfaces to help with partitioning / organization of projects, regardless of genre, platform or language.

So to recap, we now we have our curses-based UI, a class to hold our puzzles and load them from files, context-sensitive help, and our dynamic as-you-type regex puzzle interface.

Next stop, randomly generating puzzles, getting the animated ascii train into the main menu, and last but not least, scoring -- which will, incidentally, be heavily influenced by the length of your string. If we have time, we'll add in user testing, revise the tutorials, and possibly add a new game mode or two.

Keep up the great work, everyone -- I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's entries! The number of physics games this year is exciting. :)

(written along side to friday i'm in love by the cure)

Well its friday, only today and tommorow left. we pretty much have the game done now, just finishing up some of the levels and writing some code to tie up the story at the end of the game.

there are a bunch of optimisations i can do in the engine yet but that can wait till the game is properly finished and playable from start to end. at the moment it looks like the target machine spec for this game is about a 1.8ghz processor (no multi-threading so you dual core people need to have fast cores) with an opengl 2.0 compatable gpu (speed isn't much of an issue gpu wise, i have a nvidia 6200). you should be able to run it on systems with a lower spec than that, technically it should work on any graphics chip though. we'll have to see in the testing phase tommorow weather that actually holds up :x slower cpu's should be able to handle it with no gpu shaders also.

Today was a day of filling in more of the gaping holes of the game. cfuller found a couple of bugs overnight that were good to have fixed. Not much else though when I woke up this morning.

First thing to fix was the game "menu" interface. I replaced the placeholder menu with using the world map as the main interface. This then prompted me to implement loading and saving games, so I did that too.

While I was doing that Haragorn contributed some new tiles. Not sure they'll appear in the final submission because they're outdoor tiles and we're not likely to have an outdoor map.

I also added some missing items, and added costs and weights to all items. And I completely revamped the combat calculations, making them simpler to configure in the items and also having them use the item quality, magic bonus and character skill. This also involved me going over the characters and NPCs we have now and fixing their stats, skills and items so they were saner. Most of the quality/magic bonus/skills stuff will be transparent to the player unless a miracle happens between now and Sunday :)

More music arrived too, so now we have music playing while you're fighting in the dungeon, and there's a fanfare played when you win.

The game currently hangs if you lose.

I added a shop-lifting interface, and Ehtirno added money so it was a shopping interface :)

I was fortunate to have a friend (whose opinion I value regarding this sort of game) play it and he liked it, pointing out a few quibbles (and an issue on Windows which was good to fix now :)

Finally, you get awarded money and XP for completeing a dungeon. You can spend the money, but you can't spend the XP. You can see that you have XP, you just can't spend it. I really hope I can find the time to do something about that tomorrow, but it's not likely...

I've got a busy day tomorrow, so I don't expect to be able to get much of anything done on the game. And that takes me into Sunday, where I'll be busy being an admin rather than entrant, so it'll be a wash too.

Oops. We really did mean to make more diary entries this time around, and here I am on day six, making our first. We've pretty much finished the main coding parts of our game, and we're going to spend the next day and a half polishing, designing levels, and recording sound and music. To whet your appetites, here's a screenshot. It's not a diving game, honest.

Added walls that can't be walked through, improved step-climbing behaviour a little, added some more artwork and a couple of slightly harder levels.

Plans for tomorrow: Fix animation glitch when walking down steps; create a background for the title screen; try to do a few more levels.

Oi vey. I really should never do arithmetic. I have a degree in mathematics, so you'd think I'd be able to get my negative signs in the right place and know how to subtract x from y. I spent far too much time on such concerns tonight, in an effort to get the yo-yo to change its length and actually strike the enemies when it hits them.

One night of coding left. Let's see where this takes us...

We spent most of the day working on levels, I did end up having to bug hunt quite a bit. There are still loose edges in that regard, but few enough that the game can be waded through. Currently the dungeon consists of about 15 rooms, although many of them are fillers and don't have much in the way of puzzles. We have more rooms planned, but found out that designing the puzzles for a puzzle game is almost as hard as solving them :) Each room takes nearly an hour to really do well on, so we still have a lot of work ahead.

Here is one of the early rooms, before things get scary:


We are having a lot of fun playing the levels we are creating, although I do have some concerns:

• I'm not totally sure if we can ramp up the difficulty very much. It feels like we've plateaued, and anything else we try is just going to be a lot of repetitive busy work instead of an interesting puzzle to solve. On a similar but opposite note however...
• It's hard to tell what the difficulty actually is. A demo might help, but we don't want to give it away before the end of the compo. We may include a hint guide of sorts (maybe a snapshot of the winning state of each room?), just in case we mess things up. To us, the puzzles we are making are really easy (and we are playing each other's levels, so the levels themselves are fresh to us when we test), but innately knowing the mechanics is an advantage. We could try so hard to make it difficult enough that it ends up being much too hard.
• The controls are awkward. I think this is going to put a lot of people off and make them not really give the game enough of a chance. There are a few things that may help, such as fixing the gui so the actions displayed match a bit better with the context of the situation, and possibly combining some actions into the same command, but there's not a whole lot I could change. There are a lot of actions you can take in game. We will have a bit of a tutorial, hopefully that is enough.
• Oh, the bugs. Is there a possibility of removing all the bugs before this thing ends? I really doubt it. The bugs could end up making someone either have to restart the game if they screw something up, or just be so frustrating to work with in certain areas that it's just no fun. Most of the time the game is a blast, but when I get myself stuck because the interface lied to me, or something didn't work how it should, it gets frustrating.

All in all, even with the concerns, I think this is the funnest game we have put together. This also marks the first time we have actually built our game from the theme, instead of taking some game idea we had and trying to make it fit the theme. We would not have come up with this idea without the theme, and the game is that much more interesting through it's use of it. I have to say, I feel a lot better about that than trying to make some other game and go, "well, we'll stick this in it, to make it fit."

Finally! Stoopid rope working... what a headache! Progress will be quicker now! :)

You can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. 1,5 days to go and still lots of stuff to do. We are going to concentrate on adding some new decent obstacles and as many playable levels as possible. We're also working on the music and sound effects. Hopefully you will all like the results :)