Well, Don Blake was able to come up with a great idea, which offsets nicely the lack of idea I had. Our first day consisted of taking turns playing Warhammer beta, and doing some programming of the engine. Our idea is this: adventure/puzzle game, where your character is made of one long piece of string. In the environment you will find other pieces of string which you can attach to yourself to get a longer piece of string to solve puzzles that you run into (such as gaps you need to cross). Sometimes, you will have to reluctantly leave some string behind, by cutting it off of you again.

The basic engine is already in place, leaving us pretty much the whole week to create the levels and polish things. This is the best start we've ever had for pyweek I think. You can unwind your string, bring it to you, throw the end of it around, tie it to things, tie on new pieces of string, cut the string off, and we have a map editor that lets us edit the tiles as well as add string. Opting away from physics, instead going for the "nibbles" method of the character's string-tail, was a wise decision I think.

So far, while not quite a game yet, with no goals or real puzzles, it is a very fun prototype to just mess around with, which bodes quite well for the rest of the project.

A basic intro sequence, with music.

http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/stuff/eyestabs_2008_09_08_1.zip

I do have an idea, a concept, but not a good design yet. Am I worried about this? Not really....maybe a little? I am just repeating to myself, keep it simple, keep it simple, because I know if I get into anything with a lot of content or tricky programming I will be in serious trouble! Waking up this morning I heard a little tune in my head for a musical theme, got up and worked it out, so that was pretty fun. One thing I am realizing is that I should have had my production tools ready to go before the week started...oh well!

The game got name: 'Kiko the circus hero' and tentative descriptions for ten levels.
Silly history, done.
Main character got draw, no animation.
Done SplashScreen: 1st aproximation
Done 1st level sketch, partially coded to experiment. No physics to the moment.
Partially done : animation infraestructure.

It fells slow.
Tomorrow must get more speed.

Some Cool pyweek messages I read: the animator editor ( uber cool!), all the presentation of animations, the idea of an 'ant-lemmings' over strings game.

Played some UT to relax. And walk.
Time to sleep.
God night and god work tomorrow / today for all!!

So far we are making excellent progress.
We're planning a pretty original tbs game, and already have most of the major mechanics done.
Now we need to piece them together and add the gui and art :)

We did have a couple problems today.
I spent about 6 hours trying to figure out how to merge two polygons into one. About got there, but missing the final couple of pieces - so we are laying the stuff we planned with that aside for now - probably will make everything easier later on anyways :S

Besides that, no serious problems as of yet, though a few minor ones. The big tests will be ai, and possibly multiplayer (we're trying to decide if we even want to pursue that...)

Should see something playable in 2 or 3 days I hope, then we're splitting up tasks:
Me - AI
Markus - art, networkings (maybe)
Pymike - art, feature addition
Keeyai - bugs, features, anything we missed

Along with the rest of the team filling in when they get a chance.


Overall, I think this is the best, most unique, and most "get it done in a week"-able idea we have ever had :D
So I am very pleased.

Cheers all - lots of good entries so far XD

This was my most-hated, least-favorite theme, and I didn't think it would win so I didn't have any game plans for it. Guess I'll be doing a snake game. Here's a video of awesome snake physics (using pymunk):

http://dump.omgcats.com/snake-1.avi

The way the snake parts are linked together gives a "slithery" effect when the snake makes rapid movement, cool.

Just worked on the game a bit, I mostly got the menu, pause, etc. working. I also got a very prelim amount of work on the main robot character. Controls are A and D, and space is jump. And use the mouse to point the arm.

Download here :
http://media.pyweek.org/dl/7/Cthulhu32_v7/SaveScience0.001.zip

No screenshots yet, but after day 1 and a few hours, finally and idea and a bunch of static images on a screen!

Actually, thanks will have to go to Team XKCD - after I searched the posts for inspiration, I came across their post, saw the word 'Fates' and shazam! Inspiration! Not sure how that one slipped by me, since I love Greek mythology... but anyway, the idea is currently based on

Lachesis and Atropos going on a wild night out, leaving the fate-string business to interns. When they return, they found out their interns were fruitful and multiplied, and they're fresh out of their own business! World domination ensues.

Off to bed for now.

Well, Forrest went to sleep three hours ago and I'm useless as a programmer (curse you time zones!). I've been thinking about some gameplay ideas. The basic concept is similar to the Tower Defense line of flash games, but with a few twists, some to accommodate the theme and some for originality. You start with a limited number of string and then select the starting spool to place another endpoint at. Then, you have string stretching from Point A to Point B. Enemy gets near string, string attacks enemy. Enemy touches string, enemy attacks string. String has cooldown. Enemy doesn't. New segments can be built from either the main spool or each successive endpoint.

So far, we're gonna get a blank map with a generic background texture working first. Afterwards, we'll add snow and water to slow and stop enemy movement, respectively. Some challenges will be writing a pure Python pathfinding engine that's efficient, drawing the sprites (neither of us are graphics guys), and lots more. Stay tuned for details.

So my wife came up with the best idea I have so far: Hangman. But of course I don't just want a remake of your standard hangman, so I'm letting the idea ferment a bit and see what kind of twist I can come up with. I haven't had any time to code yet; hopefully will have time to write something.