Dang, it is getting awfully long to get something playable. =|

I'm really hoping to finish working on the game's functionalities soon so I can focus on story writing and game art.

Some screenshots are up already.

Okay, the game is all coming together. Still need some polishing and what not, but the main game is there and running. Here's a screenshot...

Well, it'll be a race to the finish line. A lot of unknowns still standing before me. My lack of experience with pyglet is has really been slapping me around the face. Changed my object importer a bit, made a couple of new graphics. Fixed a few things. Generally fiddled around with things (tm).

Am still pretty optimistic about getting this game to a playable state for the end. Sleeping now even though I don't have to work tomorrow, hopefully that'll avoid any burnout tomorrow. A friend said he will look at making me some music, provided him with a number of songs to use as a guide, am fairly excited to see what he will produce. Found a free-for-personal-use font, have contacted the author, hopefully everything is good with that.

I've got my level loader made! I've uploaded a demo and a screenshot of the test level.

It's a little (Just a little) bulky, though, because I got excited and packaged the SVG images with it. :P

Eh, I'll take them out (Create a separate folder without the SVGs) when I've gotten the enemies working. There'll be another demo then.

After that, the level progression system shouldn't be too hard.


I'm really happy I went to a text-based level storage format. WAY simpler to parse, and actually not too much hassle to work with. (Which was my main worry with it.)

--

If anyone wants to play with the level, it's located under "rose-ninja-1.0/data/levels/test" as "0.lvl".

The syntax for the level format is as follows:
Player Start Point:"player start: x,y"
Enemy Start Point:"enemy start: x,y" (Enemies don't nevessarily work right now, and haven't been tested. Use at your own risk!)
Ground Terrain Area:"grass area: left,top,width,height"
Spike Terrain Area:"spikes area: left,top,width,height" (Note, though, that you can currently touch spikes as much as you want. This will be fixed, however.)
Level Size:"level size: x,y" (Note that objects can exist outside of the level, but the game camera is locked inside the level's area. You can still fall off, too, but that will be fixed in the next release!)

Also, the space is important. You can add spaces around each line, and also after the colon, but not between the arguments (EG:'player start: 25,10' is fine, but not 'player start: 25, 10')
This may be relaxed in the next release, though! ^_^

---Akake

OK, I coded it in Eclipse and here it i
Get the progress to see how it looks like. Requires Pyglet and Pymunk.

I just about killed myself getting it to a playable state tonight. It's still not what I would have called playable a little while ago, but since I have to wake up for work in an hour, my standards are significantly lower. Here it is anyway.

The controls are still a bit confusing, but I hope to make some in-game explanations to clear them up. For people who want to try it, fertilizing speeds up buildings in progress: select an acorn, move it next to a building, and pick Fertilize. Dew drops recover damaged buildings. This is complicated. Select an acorn, pick Get Dew Drop, move it next to the damaged building, and pick Use Dew Drop. I'll try to have a button that does that all in one click.

I need to tweak about three dozen numbers to get the challenge level right. It's currently way too easy. The object is to "cover" at least 90% of the lawn. An area is covered if it's within range of a Star Plant. The only way your victory is acknowledged at this point is with a subtle effect of those glowy bits.

One more night and one more day left. Here's looking forward to the end!

I wonder how I became a gfx artist for this project, but I spent a lot of time yesterday making animated characters for the game. In my earlier Pyweeks there's always been someone skilled to make graphics, which is cool, because without experience it has a kind of a trial-and-error component that takes time and the result isn't that great. After some frustration with OpenCanvas I switched to Paint.net, which is more suitable for pixel work.

Other than that, we are in a bit of a hurry. We've got some stuff going on but it's not much of a game. All our coders have been busy with non-Pyweek related stuff, so I'm kept on my toes. For example, Pekuja's grandma turns 90 today, so he'll be away. Happy birthday, if you'll ever read this.

To those who really expected to see something cute here, here's a picture of a seal.

It's about 4:25AM here in Mittenland!

It was 4:20AM or so when I first typed that, but I felt compelled to sing a song about my morning. Because I'm a little groggy, and a bit disoriented.

I woke up morning at 1:30AM or so, and I felt very ill. I was shaking and cold, I had a fever, my throat was parched and DRRRYYYYY~

I laid in my bed,
Put my hands on my head,

Perhaps I'd caught the SWIIIINE FLUUUU!!!
But then I remembered I had work to do,
And I remembered the things taught to me by YOOOUUU!!

(Ahem!)
Sorry bout that. I'm still a little dizzy... X-D

But yeah, I woke up sick, but I feel much better now. :-)

Today I hope to get my level loader together, and then maybe get enemies going.

I'm still a little out of it, but I should be able to work in a couple of hours.

Excelsior!

----Akake

I decided to scrap all my "almost exact collision" ideas and replace them with a smooth ball-terrain interaction potential approximated from the terrain, using verlet integration for the physics timestep. Besides being simpler, this should be more realistic, since grass is soft after all.

The verlet integration (time-corrected) was pretty simple and fast to code, but tweaking the ball rolling physics and controls (even just to behave well on my flat-plane test potential, though the code to behave properly on sloping ground is supposedly mostly there now) took almost the rest of the day (of the pyweek part of it anyway).

The only thing I had time for after that was making a very fake actual-lawn potential -- not even energy conserving, since it only pushes straight up -- but good enough that you can run the ball into a hill and jump it that way. (Whee!)

I did some thinking about gameplay ideas too, but the best one, a two-player mode (try to knock the other player off the lawn -- if he/she dodges, you might go off instead), I probably won't have time for until after the compo. (And a non-networked two-player mode might not be tried much during judging, anyway.)

So tomorrow will be: realistic terrain potential, then flat-out on the simplest gameplay idea I can come up with. (I have only 1.5 usable days remaining.)

Most important thing -- it's still fun, and educational. (Even though -- or maybe because? -- I'm "reinventing the wheel". Or should I say "reinventing the ball"...)

Didn't get to work on the game as much as I had hoped today, but I still managed to make some good progress. Here's what I've accomplished since the last update:

• Added "mouse spawners" and mice to the game. Each mouse spawner starts with a limited supply of mice, and it releases a mouse into the game map every few seconds. Some spawners will start creating mice immediately, while others might wait a little while before spawning their first mouse. Also, spawners are scattered around the perimeter of the level, so mice can invade the yard from different directions.


• Added a garden shed to the game world. Reaching this shed is the goal of each mouse.


• Added a simple HUD that shows the number of mice currently roaming around, the number of mice caught, and the number of mice escaped (reached the garden shed)


• Moving the cat to within a certain short distance from a mouse results in catching the mouse (the mouse is removed from the game).


• Added a game difficulty system. Increasing game difficulty results in faster moving mice and more mouse spawners (and thus mice) to catch.

In the next twenty-four hours I'm planning to add collision detection to the game, and then implement some kind of pathfinding or waypoint system for the mice. I also want to give the mice the ability to sense and evade the cat. Then, on day seven, I'm planning to create two or three more game levels, implement the main menu and instruction screens, and do some final testing and tweaking. Looks like I'll be able to get something playable by the deadline, but I have my work cut out for me.