Ahhhhhhh! "The length of a piece of string?" I don't get it at all. Where did that theme even come from? Ok, string, that makes sense. I could see a lot of game ideas from string. Or stringy. But it can't be any old string, it has to be a piece of one. That's funny that string always comes in "pieces." I've never thought of string as "pieces" of string, but that's what they are called. Very odd. Oh, and length is important too, which makes this theme a bit specific.

Well, my plan for this is to have my crackpot team brainstorm today, design tomorrow, and then goof off the rest of the week, finally swooping in with an epic 60 hour coding session the last few days and making a game. Ok, so we should plan very small :)

Another plan is to build things iteratively. The game isn't going to rely on fancy features, but when fancy features are able to go in, that will make it better. My last game relied on a fancy feature that took the whole week to write, and no time was left to make a game. Our game before that was founded on an idea that relied on the whole game being in place to find out if the idea was good or not. So basically, we are going to make a "level1" which is as basic as it can be, but polish that up enough that just that piece could get an adequate rating. Then we add a "level2" that makes it that much better. That's my plan anyway. We'll see what happens.

I don't have a ton of time, so I don't have much hope. I have a job, am addicted to the silly warhammer mmo which is going to open beta this week, one of my other game projects has a release due in the next few days, and my other even larger game project has a release due in the next month. I am certainly a busy fellow. Keeping the scope simple is going to be essential.

Good luck everyone! The game quality was outstanding last time, I expect it to be even better this time.

Thinking of previous "string" experiences in the game world, I recollected the endless hours of fun using the "ninja rope" in worms2 to cleverly deposit all sorts of things (e.g. holy handgrenades) by my enemies. Some people in my dorm attained an astonishing level of skill (this was freshman year, 1999).

Fast forward to pyweek 7, me with a freshly opened beer, and the beloved tools of pymunk and pyglet. I think i will reverse on my desire to do 3d, as my explorations have revealed complexity involved (especially in making reasonable controls!), plus my sister is visiting next week, which will eat up alot of otherwise pyweek time.

Hopefully a reasonable working prototype of the ninja rope before i call it quits tonight, and a screenshot!

The way my game is shaping up, it's going to be a Lemmings-style game, with ants trying to cross a chasm over strings that are placed by the player. The available strings are limited in length and number, forcing the player to carefully choose a combination of routes between the pre-placed posts in order to lose as few ants to the chasm as possible. As an added complication, overloaded strings will break.

Hows about a motherload style game, where there are various minerals, and peices of cotton under hte ground. You need to collect both, and when you reach the surface. (By climbing the string) then you need to get the cotton added onto the string. However this costs money, to get more money you need to sell minerals.
You must also spend money on refueling your tank, and any other bells and whistles you want.

Here we go, just put together some sprites and background picture for an idea for my game. So I was thinking "strings", why not have a main character have to put together strings to reach somewhere. So how bout some scientists, bad guys, robot main character, Knytt like graphics, and some rope physics. Probably too much for me, but we shall see.

I spent a while yesterday going through some libraries for use in this competition. We've settled on using just Pyglet and PyODE which has also influenced the game's mechanics.

For the graphics I think we will be using some GIMP, Photoshop and Inkscape. I'm not sure what we're going to do about the music or sound effects.

I'm currently setting up the project's environment (which I probably should have done earlier).

I have a great idea for this challenge

My daughter is in the third grade and loves playing computer games and prefers them to practicing for school, so I'm thinking about doing an education game. Length of a piece of string says math and she's learning multiplication. A math drill game where the possible solution to the multiplication problem will be strings of various lengths and the player will have to guess the correct string to win the points.

So thats my basic plan for the game. I will do some base layout stuff tonight then work on a pathing routine to draw the 4 possible answer string.

Okay wow, length of a piece of string won. Weird too, I expected fog to win, with OpenGL fog support basically making it over-easy for all the competitors to integrate fog. Then again, maybe we all just don't like the idea of making stuff too easy. Currently, I'm reading up on the help page and re-reading the rules.

I'm just sitting around, not really doing any brainstorming. Once Forrest gets on though, we'll probably use the rest of our night to think of ideas.

Length of a piece of string... Wow! Well, this will be an interesting theme. My design goal of simplicity == fun should fit in well here. Starting the design stage now.