Well, Markus and I are still going at it, and we hope ot have the rest of the UI done before we go to bed in about 2 hours or so, but I thought we would give you a bit of an update:



As you can see, you can build three kinds of ships, you can move them, you can fight, you can draw territories - almost everything really necessary is DONE!

We are actually a little freaking out, as we are starting to test and polish now - and it is only Thursday (erm, ok, Early Friday) - and we never usually even get much to those, but neve before the last day!
Woot!

Wow, God bless me. I can fix it !!

You can fix it !!
We can fix it !!

I'm going to try my chances here... it's worth it for the feedback & experience, I'd wager. My idea is a side-scrolling game... you're a cat on a trash can lid being dragged down the street by a string connected to a "Yarn, Tuna & Catnip Factory" truck... you have to "surf" down the street and avoid obstacles while catching the goodies falling out of the truck that's pulling you. ...Here goes nothing

Well, end of day 5, and I see the finish line in sight! All the game needs is a boss, few more levels, and it's done!

Well, this is the state of my game so far, it's becoming more game-like, it has some rudimentary sounds. I'm feeling a lot better about it now than yesterday, mostly thanks to people on the IRC channel.

Things to add:

• Fuel - bar is displayed but is always full
• "roof terrain" - occassional roof terrain to make life a bit harder every now and then
• Upgrade, refuel and repair options when landed
• Menu
• Online score submission*

*if time allows

Regarding online score submission, is there any way to make that secure with an open source game? I've done it before with some kind of encryption, but as you can see the encryption algorithm, I can't really see any way to make it work.

any ideas?

Been busy on the engine and script, so not much to show. Just chugging along. Went along haphazardly and had to restructure the engine a bit. Can currently move around the various locations, meet characters, and read dialogue. Got an idea for a battle system, but not sure if I can implement in time.

Today we went out to take the pictures for the game.


Additionally, we tried to find a good font for our game. From experience, we know that using SysFonts, the results is varying enormously depending on the system. We had our eyes on this one, but since it lacks both numbers and the letters å, ä, ö, we would have to redesign the interface and would still not be able to display our own names. Where do you guys get your fonts from? Can you recommend a good one?

So I've spend most of the day trying to implement the battle system. Then it worked ok at some point but still had a few bugs. Then I kind of broke it and realised that it's just horrible.. I'll do it tomorrow. Properly.

At least I coded some other (vital) parts of the game. You can now travel between maps and encounter monsters (although the battle system doesn't work well ;)). And characters can now suffer from conditions - such as poisoned, dazed or dead. The funniest part was testing them because I just let the characters use harmful items on themselves, like Vials of Poison or a very deadly Loaf of Bread. ^^

Here's our latest non-fake screenshot (without the ugly UI):

Zahme has just finished the three main characters and a tileset. Wohooo!!

Well, day 5 is over and my code is... quite a lot. But then I read it and think "this is NOT python, this is what I have been doing all my life, but with some nice python tricks". But I'm sure I'm not using half of Python power (not even proper loops or conditions...). I'm planning to revise it all after Pyweek is over, and learn a little bit more about this great language taking enough time.

Today I added some nice rewards, and finally some graphics. A nice background and some visual signs (like dollar signs when you earn money). I don't have a menu yet, not even a meta-game loop (menu->game->ending->highscores->menu) but I guess I can do something after the game is properly working. I also tried packaging it all with py2exe and it perfectly worked on a friend's computer who didn't have Pyglet installed. Bungeeee!

I haven't been doing so well with my game, I've been hitting wall after wall. That style that I said that fits perfectly with my game, turns out, I can't make it fit so well. I had made before some design decisions that I thought would work, but in practice, I've realized they don't. I've learned that you have to be careful with envisioning games that are a bit more experimental, because this or that mechanic you think would be cool might not work so well in practice. And I just can't figure out the art for this game, you might have to play an ugly game.

Oh well. I'm going to look for workarounds and see what I can do. I'm just not sure I can make it fun.