Our game has progressed somewhat, although it feels like we are treading water after the 3 hour sprint that bestowed upon us the first bit of gameplay. The only level at the moment, is the first test level that we made, and the mechanics haven't much improved.

The good news though, is that it seems like it is getting to be more or less stable enough to continue, and we will have more time in the coming days to have a marathon of level creation. Whether the mechanics lead to interesting puzzles remains to be seen. It is still fun to play with the string though, as can be seen by this insane screenshot:

This was produced after discovering a string duplication bug. After going to a new screen, you keep the string currently attached, but your tail gets saved into the screen you left. So when you come back, you now have twice as much! I played with this bug for a while, until there was so much string the game crashed. Ah, good times.

The game basically will work as follows: As Tommy Threadbare (name to be changed), an exiled stringite from the stringdom of string (description to be changed), you take your stringy self and use your string to overcome all obstacles you are faced with. The game is not divided up into levels, instead consisting of one big map (to be created), similar to a zelda dungeon. Along the way, there will be checkpoints to help for when you mess up (because it will be possible to lose string that you need to solve a puzzle). Some of these checkpoints will be "achievement" checkpoints, which will display a "you must be this long to pass" sign, and not let you continue if you don't have the required items. These will be very frequent. In addition, there will be checkpoints that refresh your length of string and make sure it's up to snuff. These will be more rare. At any time, you can reset back to the last checkpoint. Also, when you quit the game, it will save exactly where you left off.

Puzzles include: locked doors, chasms, keys, objects that need to be dragged around or thrown across places, and various other yet to be revealed puzzles. There will also be some form of story to tie it together, making it a bit more of an adventure/puzzle game than just a puzzle game.

If there is time, graphics might be improved, but it's probable that they wont.

Now we have a more stable string, made with BallJoints.

I don't have enough time to complete the game.

God bless me!!!

Huzzah!

So it seems that day 4 is some kind of turning point... if you are still here it seems that you have something interesting, or at least playable, right? There must be something somewhere written about the psychology of creating something complex complete with such a close deadline!

Well, as I planned yesterday I was able to complete the collision system today, so jumpers may hit the ground and other jumpers. I also added a primitive 'special effect' class to draw onomatopoeias (mostly when colliding) and the groundings of the scoring system. You earn money with each successful jump, but you lose money is jumpers hit the ground or collide with each other. I want it to be a little more complex, so you can multiply your income if jumps are long or risky enough (jumpers almost hitting the ground or flying really close to other jumpers will pay you more). That's for tomorrow.

At some point I'll be forced to start drawing real guys and a nice background too...

Well we've got a game idea, a look-and-feel, and a name for our game.

I've spent more time than I probably should have learning Curses to do the ascii graphics, but overall it's working well. Sadly, Curses doesn't work on Windows. So even though my teammate and I are both developing on non-Windows systems (OSX and GNU/Linux respectively) and can run Curses natively, we are targeting the largest demographic of Pyweek developers and players, which is Windows. So in order to keep using curses, we've borrowed and are modifying the Pygame-based Curses emulator that Alya wrote for Isle of the Cursed Phoenix. It's a thin but fantastic piece of code, and it's been great to learn how to use curses while expanding the emulator that Alya started.

Spent too much time doing ascii artwork and animation for our RegEx Express train, but we're pretty excited about the theme and throwback to the old "Conjunction Junction" style rhymes, puns and whatnot.

All aboard!

I had classes today, including my Only-Meets-On-Some-Days programming class, which extends my school day by four hours, because while it's a pretty standard two hours long, it's scheduled two hours after my intro to information technology class. @_@

I may or may not be coding, but the good news is that I have little homework to do, and no more classes until after the compo! \o/

I just haven't had the drive to code anything today. With school eating up a sizeable portion of my free time, and no real drive to code anything, I doubt I'll be able to start properly working on this until the closing days of the competition, if at all. I might just shelf this, develop it after PyWeek and hrh. Progress I have made since last diary entry includes creating the basic room and feature (static object that cannot be taken) classes. One can now press L (look) and be shown a menu of all examinable objects in the room (including the room itself), and be served descriptions of everything. I'm scared I'm just going to give up and not try coding the harder stuff (an algorithm to create a map of rooms, place locked doors and keys in sensible places, actual puzzles and stuff) and end up crashing and burning and ugh. I'm going to try for a team next time, I just don't have the attention span.

Garfio can shot string things! Tomorrow I'll gameplay elements to hook the string in.

Halfway through day 4 and I'm really pleased with what I got :-D Give it a play!