So, now what?

The theme I thought would come in dead last won. Heh, guess that means I'mma have to rethink things.

My most complete idea so far is a "Bionic Commando-style" platformer, but I have a few other ideas, not many of them are to my liking, but I'm going to have to pick one eventually.

I like the thought of a steampunk game integrating String/Rope as a gameplay mechanic. I'm not sure how to implement that, though.

The Dilemma for me is thus:Do I do a platformer and have potential issues with programming it, or do I make something wierd and have problems thinking it up even if I can think of something simpler to code?

Grah, it's not something I should be thinking about late at night. DX

All things considered, though it's a tough theme, it kinda lends itself to some fun, whimsical games. I admit, I didn't like it at first, but I can kinda see what the people who ranked it as a high preference of theirs saw in it.

I can't think of anything right now, but I know for a fact that I can think of something fun. ^_^
Just gotta keep plugging away. Keep plugging away.

I'm tired, though. I'm prolly going to go to bed soon. The real design work begins tomorrow.

Hmm "the length of a piece of string".... now what can I do with this one. I'm drawing a total blank, but I can see potential for either String Theory, rope physics, some type of string monster, I have no clue. Maybe I'll start sketching and come up with something.

Well, here we are, about an hour before the compo. It's beginning at 8 PM in my time zone.

Truth be told, I'm kind of nervous. Not so much about whether I can finish, but about whether I will be able to make a high-quality game.

Thus far, I've had trouble making really good games. I've made some pretty okay ones, but never one that was full-on awesome. That's really what I'm hoping for.

I will most likely be using rectangle-based collision, as anything more complex is beyond my knowledge of mathematics, and grid-based games have been problematic for me in the past.

Geez, in an hour, the first competition of any sort I've been in in a year will start. I guess at least I'm somewhat in my element.

I will be developing my game on my laptop, and will be committing myself to only using Pygame. I mean it, I'm not even going to use Numpy. That way there should be few to no problems for people running my game from source. WINE has not been able to get Py2EXE working for me, and I have no other viable way to package a Windows executable.

I'm nervous about whether I can make this game great, though. I know I can finish it on time. I'm absolutely certain. I know my focus is going to have to be quality. I've gotten well-made games going, don't get me wrong, but I have trouble staying focused long enough to create depth in a game. That's my problem. That and my mediocre Inkscape skills, my below-average GIMP skills, and my neurotic coding habits (IE:"NO!!! It CAN'T just copy the coordinates without copying each one separately! I don't care if it's a tuple! ARGH!!!")

Don't get me wrong:I'm reasonably certain I won't, you know, mess up really bad, I'm just a little nervous. ^^;

Geez, this has taken me fifteen minutes to type. XD

But, yeah, there are my thoughts going into this as a first-time competitor, in his first year of community college, and with little to no knowledge of high-level geometry, any calculus at all, or even a solid foundation in the sorts of mathematics that might be useful in a game development compo.

Man it feels good to get all that off my chest *Sigh of relief*

In anticipation of the competition, I've done a final release of Squirtle, our SVG mini-library for Pyglet. This fixes a few bugs which were found since the last release. I'd recommend that all users upgrade. You can find the new version here. As usual, I'd appreciate any bug reports. If you find anything during Pyweek, please let me know, and I'll do my best to fix things. Just send all reports, along with relevant SVG files to martin@supereffective.org.

I decided that I will talk about my basic gameplan before the competition begins. I plan to create a 3D game that, I hope, will be rather diverse with the interactions, goals, and world designs. This will be quite a challenge, but I am confident that I can do it.

I will be creating a simple 3D game engine from scratch, which is something I had quite reasonably been able to accomplish during the last Ludum Dare -- though I didn't have much time after those two days to complete the actual game.

Some may be wondering why I am not using something like Panda or Soya. This basic reason is because I want people to be able to play the game from source with a minimal number of dependencies -- just PyGame, PyOpenGL, PyOde, possibly NumPy, and the standard modules. When I tried to test out Panda it actually didn't work on my machine. I didn't bother to spend anytime trying to get it working, but I figure I might not be the only one to run into problems using it.

I expect the PyOde physics and collision detection to be the most complicated aspect of the game's development. I originally did not want to bother with using PyOde, but considering Python's speed I think it might be the only reasonable way to go. Back in the last Ludum Dare I rather successfully implemented ray-triangle intersection tests and were able to test about 60 intersections per frame at 60 frames per second -- which was somewhat reasonable. However there is only so far you can go with simple ray-triangle intersections (for example my character's head and upper body would pass through low ceilings.)

As far as the actual game design goes, I decided that I will not wait for inspiration. I will immediately begin programming the sort engine that I want to use. I would inevitably come up with at least a few good ideas of how to put it to good use. My brother, of course, would no doubt also come up with a few ideas of what I could do with it -- though I will be doing pretty much all the work.

The first day will be used for programming the actual 3D engine part. By the end of the day I expect to have animated 3D meshes and a basic scene graph up and running. The animation will be achieved by simply swapping out meshes (either display lists or vertex arrays) for each frame. I considered using simple vertex interpolation, but my initial tests were not too promising -- the slow down was unacceptable.

The engine will have next to no optimizations. Instead of geometry culling I will simply be using low-resolution meshes and textures with graphical detail roughly on par with the PlayStation 2. Worlds may be divided out into rooms or areas connected by doorways or paths (similar to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and many other Nintendo games.) This will provide, I believe, sufficient optimization for what I would want to accomplish. The lower mesh and texture resolutions should also help speed up the graphic design work.

Here is a basic run down of my planned schedule:

1. 3D graphics up on the screen with basic animation and scene graph. Music selection.
2. Game states, and beginnings of Ode based game entities. Testing and tweaking Ode.
3. Character controllers, entity interactions, simple effects, music and sound effects, etc.
4. Finishing programming. Beginning graphics.
5. 3D Graphics, textures, animations, world designs, etc. Integration of content into game. Testing.
6. 3D Graphics, textures, animations, world designs, etc. Integration of content into game. Testing.
7. Tweaks, adjustments, final bug fixes, final testing, polish, etc. Release.

Hi Mocker, I believe you've made a mistake and selected the wrong "Kevin" on your team. Please change it as soon as possible. Just to let you know, so you won't find yourself with the wrong guy on your team. Thanks!

First pyweek entry! Not much to say, other than that I expect the next week to be filled with much sweat and typing.

I'll be sweating and my parter will be doing the typing.

I'm sure I have too much to do with work and other projects (with looming deadlines) but I thought I'd throw my name in the hat for PyWeek. My goal this time is simple, submit something. Each day I'll have something that runs that might just be the final submission. My first time out I spent six days working on a design for a game then spent the seventh day prototyping only to submit a mess.

Still using miru which was announced before last competition. Note that hg repos has moved to bitbucket..

And miru depends on pyglet.

We've just registered, but we (Alfred and I) need to get some artists to join officially.