Fishing Frenzy

PyGameSF Entry for the September 2008 pyweek competion. Team members: Casey Duncan, Colin Bean, Eric Bieschke, Harry Tormey.

Tools/Libraries

-Pyglet graphics, sprites, display, game

-Inkscape

-GIMP

-Vim, because it is awesome (settings et shiftwidth=4 set tabstop=4 set autoindent)

Concept

The concept of the game is that you play a fisherman sitting in a dinghy casting a line to catch fish swimming below. The viewport shows the boat in the top left corner with a fisherman sitting on top of it (top 20%) the rest of the screen shows a below surface view with fish and various objects. Casting is done by clicking one of the mouse buttons and moving the mouse about in a set arch. Moving the mouse causes the fisherman to move his rod up and down and causes the hook and line to swing back and forth The faster you move the mouse, the more velocity the swing has. Letting go of the button at any time casts, the line goes forward at the selected angle/speed.

Once the cast has been made the hook flies through the air and eventually hits the water and begins to sink beneath the surface. The water is full of layers of various moving objects which you need to avoid in order to try and catch what you wanted. You can control the speed of decent/ascent (reeling the line in/out) using the mouse or mouse wheel.

The objects in the layers only interact with the hook, they pass through the line (string) most of the time. But there may be fish with scissors that can cut it (eat through the line?), etc.

Score is influenced by the speed of catching fish, the number of fish caught and not dying.

The types of objects you can encounter are: Fridges, reeds/seaweed, submarines/ships, Televisions, shopping carts, other larger fishes/monsters (squids/octopus).

The fisherman can select various things to attach to his line such as large hooks, hooks with bait, dynamite or weights (makes line descend faster).

- submarine or some ship could come by and obscure the fish. These can be blown out of the way with dynamite.

- Fridges/Tvs can be pulled out of the way with large hooks.

- Larger fishes or crustaceans can eat/cut through your lines and cut off your bait, delaying you by making you cast again.

- Reeds/seaweed can snag your hook, causing you to have to wriggle free wasting time (i.e, scroll wheel move mouse).

- Larger fish can cut your line or if they eat your line drag you into the sea and kill you.

- Explosives can wake up octopuses which will come up and drag you in and kill you.

The game dynamic of the moving objects is inspired by the classic game frogger where: "The lower half of the screen contains a road with motor vehicles, which in various versions include cars, trucks, buses, taxis, bicyclists, and/or motorcycles, speeding along it horizontally." and "the player must successfully guide the frog between opposing lanes of trucks, cars, and other vehicles, to avoid becoming roadkill."

Apart from frogger other notable game dynamics include the use of a string line/hook to manipulate objects.

Screen shot

Today, I plan to get to a point where you can move, jump, and attack with uneven terrain.

I should have it done at some point later today.

I have also simplified my design, and will be writing a "terrain" engine in place of hand-making levels. It will make random environments, and... Well... Oog.

My designs are getting revised alot. I think it may be a bad sign.

I keep second-guessing myself. *Sigh* I'm starting to think that I might be better off dropping this concept and trying something different.

At the same time, I feel like I'd look flaky if I gave up on this game. Don't get me wrong, if I gave it up, I'd still submit an entry, it'd just be a different game.

The issue I'm running into is that I can't keep my design focused. I'm all over the place, and I'm having a hard time keeping a single set of ideas for the game.

I have a question:How bad would it looks to drop this concept and try a different one?
Feedback is greatly desired. I've never entered a game development compo before, so I'm unclear as to how dropping a game in favor of starting over with a new concept is viewed.

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I've made my decision. I'm going to drop the idea in favor of finding a new one.

I don't think I can do make a good game out of this idea. I just don't.

I'll post Plan B later when I think of it ;)

Until then, I'm gonna sit and have a good think about it, and study for that test I have coming up.

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RIP:Friba the Freebnot - An endless series of design modifications that lost track of what it was originally about, and wasn't really a very original idea to begin with.
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I've got most of the plot eked out, which is currently displaying on console when the game module is run. Now I need to start working on some form of room format, user interface (to start off with, it'll be text-based, but I've been toying with the idea of using a Pygame screen to display such things as help and inventory, more persistent information in other words) once I've got the console stuff worked out. I'm going to custom-write this, which means it's going to suck awfully because I'm lazy etc, and will probably only be half-finished when I hand it in, but I'm sure by the next pyweek or the one after that I'll manage to program actual games and not just interactive console romps.

Hi everybody:

I want to write a dominoes game.
I hope that, it is good for theme title.

I'm starting now and I might have an idea. It's not too innovative, it's basically a one-screen platformer game involving strings and climbing, possibly similar to what other people are making, but it seems to have some potential for fun. Previous pyweeks I always tried to focus on innovation before I started the game, now I'll try something different: start the game first with a solid base, and then think of neat (possibly innovative) features I can put in it. I already have one pretty neat feature I like about this idea, but since I'm not too sure about it, I'll tell it later. :)

What I really mean is, this time I'll be focusing on the "fun" aspect, instead of the last times when I mostly tried to be innovative. I hope it works.

I just started coding. I'm rather happy with the theme, hopefully I'll be able to execute my idea properly.

Hello all,

yesterday we had a lot commitments and didn't have time to plan what we'll do. Today I'm starting to think about some simple games using one big string. I'll contact Gui (kamikaze) later to see what to do.

Later today I'll try to add another diary entry to report how things are going.

Wow, what a lot of progress.

So as mentioned in the last post we've changed the game completely, meaning that when I started this morning I was coding a whole new game -- except for the start menu which still calls it the old game name :)

Quite quickly had some basic level tiles for a top-down display, and had them mapped on the screen with cocos. Fixed a couple of bugs in the cocos tile mapping :(

Had lots of good discussion and clearing things up, setting the style for the musicians to aim for. Everyone else went to sleep so I beavered away with Michael hovering around. Started defining the game model (characters, NPCs, how actions worked) etc. and really got going. There was a lot of refactoring along the way, of course. By the time abzde had woken up I'd made a level and had a player moving around in it with a static NPC spawning. Ehtirno and Evergrey popped up with some artwork which looks pretty cool (the screenshot above has my lame art of course).

abzde worked on getting the NPC to do stuff, and I worked on the UI to allow character actions, and made them do stuff.

The end result is we have an actual RPG! The character can go bash the baddie to death, and the hit chance and damage are derived from the player's stats. The baddie will chase the player around, but doesn't hit yet. And we have support for a party of player characters.

Lots more to do, but this is a really promising start!

The premise is that someone has forced upload of several game programmers' consciousness' into a digital space. You are one of the victims. There is a passkey stored in one of several fragmented String objects somewhere in the space. You'll need to find the correct piece, offset, and length of the passkey to get out.

The game will be a simple visual novel. I always get carried away making unique features without any content to back it up. So this will force me to concentrate more on the script/art. A short week simply means a short story.

I'm late again...a whole day late...ok, I've spent my sunday watching Kung Fu Panda, drinking beer and resting from a really hard saturday night beach party...now it's time for this little piece of a string...