How would you call a submarine racing game?

If you are curious about what kind of submarine racing game: is the obvious submarine racing game that springs to your mind when asked to do something about "the length of a piece of string".

Progress is slow, but I might have a simple name for the game, subject to change: Gnome Caves. It's a platformer game about one or maybe more gnomes in caves. More than that, I still haven't decided, but currently I'm trying to figure out whether I can do what I want with strings.

Today I get a level structure. The level data is inside a png, so it's easy to use GIMP as a level editor.

Also the player can die if he walk outside the main road.

Tomorrow I want to add shooting (the string thing) and two or three gameplay elements (barriers, jump points and level-exit tile)

Hi, folks. I just returned from my honeymoon and now I am discussing some ideas with the team. That was quite an exotic challenge theme, wasn´t it?

We have our first screenshot! Woo \o/. What you see is a draft of our main character grabing a vine.

The game idea will be to climb up a rope(string) as high as you can. There will be different kind of obstacles that try to stop you from reaching the top. We've progressed pretty well so far although we've had some obstacles of our own (school, work and other useless stuff like that).

We're probably have a better screenshot tomorrow when we've implemented some key features. Then you'll get a better idea of our game.

We have a "Who Slides Wins" entry blog at http://pygame-trials.blogspot.com .
We termed it as pygame-trials, because it is our first entry for a pyweek challenge and intial trials with pygame.
We have decided upon a simple sliding game. But a two player one! :) The computer and you slide on the random NxN jumbled picture and whoever slides in the less number of moves, wins the game.

Today saw lots of progress including some cool moments where gameplay just kinda fell out of the framework we'd been building.

I started the day adding some information to the user interface - some help and information about the currently active character. It's raw, but it's there (see screenshot).

Ehtirno added the beginnings of items and inventory management while also working on the character stats. I took that work and ran with it, adding some more functionality and generally making it work. The first result of that was giving our character a Sword and bashing the baddie (a "kobold") with it :)

I also tweaked the primary action interface, the popup menu.

I also got to load in the first piece of our musical score thanks to tee_skoowared and Michael Pearson. It's in the menu, and is really good :)

Then I caved in and let the NPCs also have equipment. abzde made them use weapons and now the stupid "kobold" fights back. Boo!

cfuller poked in and contributed some code to check line of sight. abzde incorporated that into his NPC AI to good effect. Then later I broke it when I changed the way walls work, but it was for the best, since we may now have tile edges that block movement but not line of sight.

Along the way I started creating more tiles for our maps, the result you see above. Yay for Inkscape. I added a second, very boring outside level to use the outside graphics I had created.

And I added ranged attacks with a bow. To test it I added a second character to the player's party (something untested until now) and was pleasantly surprised when both the ranged attack and the second character JUST WORKED :)

Ehtirno then made it so we could distinguish between the two stick figure characters :)

abzde added a waypoint system so the NPCs could patrol when they couldn't see anyone.

I finished the day adding a highlight so you can see how far your character can move in their turn.

They are double-six.

Well, those guys are already bungee jumping! They walk around until you click on them, and then they jump. Right now the length of the rope is the same for everyone, but that's the next step.

Today I had to fight with pyglet to scratchs fps. On my first tests, the fps count dropped below 30 with just five guys jumping and ten or more walking around. However, thanks to batch drawing and vertex_list(s) more than thirty gys can jump at the same time while a bunch of them walk around waiting for fun! :D

Spent tonight getting levels more fleshed out and adding attacks. You can now pick up a yoyo that's on the ground, and a little fade + scale animation gets triggered when that happens. The enemy can now attack you, which stuns you briefly. You can now attack the enemy, which doesn't really do anything except kill them and they pop out of existence.

Frustrated by an inability for pyglet to load images bigger than 2044x2048 on my computer. But still, I'm glad I discovered this rather than having the judges find it.

I feel like it's going really smoothly so far. Has all my experience coding python paid off, or am I just not seeing the difficulties that lie ahead?