What I've discovered so far this week is that json is awesome. For everything. We have it as our map format and we have it for saving settings. With simplejson it is just pure awesomeness. Much easier than ini or any other format.

All the json elements convert strait to their python elements equivalent (thanks to javascript and python types having so much in common). I don't have to do any manual type converting from the settings file to python this way. Much better than any ini parsers I've seen.

The game is starting to really taking shape with the addition of a working casting system. Moving the mouse while holding a button causes the the fishing rod to move backwards and forwards bending slightly while the fishing line and hook swing round. Letting go causes the hook to sink to the bottom in a believable manor. The fish are now animated and the game has some excellent in game music, including win/lose sounds. Their is still a lot of work to be done but things are looking good.

Hi all,

There's a great sound-making on here: http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html

Unfortunately, there's only a standalone for windows, but he DOES have the source code available and I made a walkthrough on how to build it for Ubuntu. Thanks a LOT to _ar for his help getting this to work.

How to build SFXR on Ubuntu

1. First download and extract the source code from http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/files/sfxr-sdl.tar.gz
   
   
2. Now you need the library dependencies. For each of the libraries listed below run

   sudo apt-get install libraryname

   • build-essential
   • libasound2-dev
   • libasound2-plugins
   • libsdl-dev
   • libgtk2.0-dev
   
   
3. Then CD to the directory you extracted the .tar in and type

   make

That should work! If not, leave a comment and I (or someone else) will try to help you :-)

Cheers!

I'm really excited about this new game mechanic that came to my mind. I've found a theme that fits perfectly with it. I'm not going into details just yet, I'm just going to say I'm very happy with it and I really hope I can finish it in time the way I want. I've just finished establishing the design, and I realized there are a lot of things to do, and I've already wasted half the week, so wish me luck. :)

The current title of the game is Trace (subject to change, of course).

Basic liftoff achieved. I have a level editor. My character can walk around on platforms and pull bell ropes. Bells exist and can ring. Exits exist and open when bells are rung appropriately. What more could one ask?

Well, I spent the first few days of Pyweek dealing with uni stuff, going to classes, home work, doing assignments, stuff like that. Today I had the whole day to work on game art... This pyweek we're going with a different art style compared to our last game.

33 items not including the ones I had to redraw, I don't think I've ever drawn so much in one day.

Tomorrow I'll work on backgrounds and maybe animation if I have time.

Now excuse me while I go and pass out.

An interrupted day today as I spent some time with my daughter and doing some housework and buying new pants.

Overnight (for me) abzde did some work on the encounter map interface enabling non-turn-based encounters (ie. walking around a town and not killing everyone). Ehtirno added a bunch of new items and some party summary user interface to the tactical game display.

tee_skoowared is still plugging away composing music.

The first thing I did today was produce new character (PC and NPC) art and props. These are easy to make and thus can be consistent which is important. And they don't look too shabby, I think. The sword above is a small sample :)

I implemented the new character composition code so that characters are visibly equipped with the things they have in their hands in the encounter screen. While I was at it I implemented using armour and added some to the test characters, and it worked.

Haragorn popped into IRC and has started creating a world map for us. He started talking about the game's design so I also spent some of the day writing up the overall design of the game for the team's reference. cfuller popped in and offered to write the code behind the world map to make it clickable.

We also now detect when an encounter has ended successfully. I added a "Zot" action for characters when the --god command-line switch is used so I can just kill off any characters. We don't detect encounter failure yet though.

I finished the day adding a magic system. The test party now has a Wizard and Cleric (and a mace and another female person image). There's no pretty zappy effects yet, but the actions work.

Evergrey just handed me some new tiles to use as town buildings, but I'm too pooped to try them in the engine. Tomorrow.

At this point on wednesday i think i have made the engine we have feature complete so its worth talking about a bit;

It started off as being a generic world engine based on the open dynamics engine (using a 2d plane to clamp all the objects to 2d) and the early builds had nice ODE simulated boxes that you could push over as a stick man type person, the further we got into development the less important the physical dynamics were though, at this point in time the only thing thats physically simulated is our actor object, everything else just uses ODE to perform collision detection (ODE is smashingly good at that!)

the graphics engine is a custom built one that basically uses sprites to draw the most basic of things, quad polygons. i aimed the engine to be able to be playable on pretty much all machines, the most advanced thing it uses is GLSL fragment shaders but those are auto-deactivated for machines that can't handle it.

the actual engine uses three distinct object types, actors, props and geometries, actors 'do stuff', props are dumb objects that are physically simulated and geometries mearly provide collision detection most of the time. the only real problem we had was making it able to pass certain geometries (platforms when climbing up a rope) but that was solved pretty easly in the end, the whole thing has been really easy to code. its great! woo python.

oh and of course heres an obligitory screenshot, this ones from a way early alpha!

Just a quick note about my progress tonight:

visual effects manager added
talking enemies added
hug hearts added
level transitions added
cutscenes added
rudimentary menu added

All the primary game elements still look like ass, but that should change tomorrow as we get some character animations plugged in. Backgrounds look nice. And I gotta say I like the hug-hearts.

edit: this screenshot shows the "hug-hearts" I speak of

Things are going well. I've created a menu system, perfected the strumming code, resolved some usability issues, and finalized the feature list. It looks like I will actually have time to create a level progression this time (which really hurt my last pyweek entry). Overall I'm pretty excited. Rock out!