I'm pretty ill, so i havn't been too productive today. I rewrote my rope class using verlet integration instead of euler, which has fixed the trouble I was having with it, if anyone else is having problems with a home-grown rope physics engine, look up verlet integration. I've also incorporated my ship into the game and made it movable, with the rope hanging off underneath it.

I've been following the string for two days now. In the distance, I can see a city. I'm a little anxious, because I've never been this far from home. I hope someone there can give me an answer to all of this.

We are proud to present the first "character art" from the forthcoming ConkWest game - some call him the Destroyer, others call him Jeff, we call him Jeff the Destroyer!
Fresh from the amateur circuit, Jeff is looking to make his name, and in the right hands could be a force to be reckoned with!

I've looked things over, and decided (While admittedly being nervous about looking like a flake, or like I'm just going to go between grandiose plans and forlorned moping through the whole week) to retry my old idea, but to think it all the way through this time. Instead of focusing my efforts on backstory, I'm going to focus on the gameplay.

(Sorry if I'm sounding kind of annoying posting stuff like this... ._.)

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Just as an update(Without making yet another post ^^;), I'm currently replanning the game. I hope to have at least a working demo and a few levels by week's end.

I'm rethinking alot of things about it. I've done away with combat completely. It's just going to waste time and lead to a game that relies on having the player Beat Up The Bad Guys instead of giving something actually fun.

I'm going to derive all of the fun from the platforming elements.

And... Now I'mma get to designing this thing! (Finally! XD)

I made a contribution to the code and gord made a contribution to the art! As you might guess we've been doing valve style placeholder art. It's orange... all the way down. The platform is kinda dark because of the lighting gord has coded up, and that background is 2 parallax scrolling layers. Can't wait till gord slaps on the shaders.

Most of the animation for Devika (thats the name of our character) is done and the engine is about 60-80% there so we'll be focusing on making some game play pretty soon. Gord's made an inkscape based level editor, go him! Trying to transition my brain into code-mode although I still have assets to make, I think more coding is needed to get us tweaking gameplay sooner rather than later.

Hewwo!

Team Spores is in and rocking the code. So far we have some awesome string-physics and some less-awesome graphics which we don't want to show you yet.

We have a quite clear game idea which is probably going to evolve through the week. The game consists of at least a long string, an anvil and some wild roaring.

I... don't have a Plan B yet.

I have lots of ideas, but I can't make a game out of any of them. D:

Worse, almost none of them fit the theme...

I'm kind of worried about whether I can finish...

Ah well, it's my first compo. I can't reasonably expect a resounding success my first time out, right?

I still wish I could think of an idea I could actually make a game out of, though. ._.

I'm sure I'll think of something, but I know the theme will be trouble for me...

*Sigh* All I have are fragments of concepts and dead-end ideas right now.

I have to stay positive, though. I... just wish I could find a good idea...

C'est la vie, and all that, I suppose. :/

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Bleh, I'm not going to get anywhere feeling sad about my lack of ideas.

Question for my more experienced fellow entrants:How important is the theme?

I have a handful of ideas that could be fun, but none even involve string, much less the length of a piece of it. If the theme isn't, like, super-critical, I'll have some ideas to use.

That's been my main stumbling block so far. I have next to no complete concepts involving string. :P

So, again:Would maybe just touching on the theme a bit, rather than tightly integrating it, get me disqualified, or would I be OK?

It's kinda bumming me out seeing almost all of the topics on the messages page saying things like "Idea chosen!" "Progress made!" "I have this great idea...", when I don't have a clue :P

All I can think of with string is tieing things up, and I can't get a complete idea out of that...

I had a design. I think it before the challenge start, but I changed a bit. To make it more simple.

Today the programming started slowly. Now I have a debug console for the game, and a simple player sprite.

I've now written a simple pygame line-writer, so that I can get the lazy programmer benefits of a text-based game in a pygame window (also to make the events thing fire properly without having to use either a graphical interface or pure console).

Also, I noticed the music mixer (which I'm using to crank out silly disco songs while the game plays) was repeatedly static-ing up on Ubuntu, so I googled and found a fix; however, it was in the copy-and-paste form of pygame.mixer.pre_init(44100, -16, 2, 4096) I hope this is within the rules! D=

Looks like we're going to do an offshoot of the game Qix. A lot of ideas were thrown around, so don't expect a clone!