I couldn't start until Monday night, so that's when I'll call Day 1. It took me a long time to find any non-cliche inspiration from this theme, but eventually I realized how something I'd wanted to code for awhile (rolling a ball around hilly terrain -- like Rollie in Bugdom(tm) -- and modifying the terrain as you roll over it) would fit into it. So my plan was that you'd have to escape from a lawn, but would find this difficult, and could only do it by building hills on it to use as ramps to launch yourself off of.

All I had time to code Monday night was some ball-terrain collision (which it turns out doesn't work well enough to use).

On Day 2 and Day 3 I got the lawn generated and drawn, got the ball character rolling on a plane controllably (with a follower camera), and got the realtime hill-building working well enough to know it's doable. But rolling on the lawn's terrain (rather than on a plane) is still not there, and might be too hard. If that doesn't come together tomorrow, I'll need to come up with some other goal for the gameplay. Fortunately, rolling around and building "tunnels" (i.e. "hills", but the ball remains under them) was fun enough to keep my 6-year-old son intrigued for at least a few minutes....

Anyway, I'm not expecting to have time for any art or sound (no loss, since I have no skills in those either), or for more than one level, but I'm still hoping to come up with something fun to do on that level. (And it's certainly been fun to get it working to this point.)

In the interest of getting the game done in time, we've axed one location and I've started on animating the sprites. I'm getting these done at the rate of about one animation per 1-2 hours. Hopefully that speed will be enough to finish all the animations that we'll need. So today I break my uberlong screenshot streak, can't be arsed to mock it up anymore but I have two animations to look at! The first is the character walking while the next is the character strutting his stuff about.

Once again I shall be optimistic and think that I can get these animations done faster if I'm not as knackered as I am right now. Whew. I'm going to sleep later and later each day.

In hopes of getting something playable by the end of the week, I've greatly simplified my original idea (which was probably way too ambitious) for the game. I've done away with the tactical RPG elements - now it's just a simple arcade-style game in which the player controls a cat defending his yard from a horde of invading mice. Each level features a different yard and several waves of mice to catch. The goal is to catch as many mice as possible before they reach the garden shed. A level ends when all mice are either caught or reach the safety of the garden shed.

Since the last update I've added code to render several more game world items, including: houses (with simple windows and doors), swimming pools, sidewalks, bushes, and (incomplete) flower boxes. The graphics are really simple at this point, and will probably remain simple and cartoonish.

I have enough done to post a first screenshot of a level I'm currently making. Here we see little kitteh wandering dangerously close to the swimming pool:

I'm hoping a plan will start to come together on friday when i have a mad panic putting together graphics and sounds. I think I will go for the 2600 look :) I'm hoping that things will be less buggy having some form of test harness. It's made me think a lot more about what I'm doing implementation wise. Probably too heavy handed, I wonder. We'll see. It's certainly limited what I can throw into the pot, which is probably a good thing. I'll be glad to just get something done, no matter how crappy it is :) I think I have the bulk of the game logic. The game loop should drive the engine the same way as the test harness does. I'm hoping the animation states and other nuts and bolts will need less thought. Well, I think they will have less thought, come what may!

Well, today I got in:

• Fish and frog baddies
• Water tiles
• Spikes
• The snow world
• Die animation

It's getting close to crunch time. I still have to implement a world map, menus, level saving, the guy that chases you in a giant lawn mower, a volcano level, and some other stuff. Anyway, here's a screenie for you.



Download W.I.P: http://media.pyweek.org/dl/8/8ball/BubbMan2-v0.2.zip

I'm going to reward my progress with a John Wayne movie... Good luck all!

Gameplay is shaping up nicely. You can turn on and off sprinklers, dogs jump on you, old people say "hi there", there is hearing (dogs and old people look in the direction of the sound if they hear something), you can pick up and throw rubber piggies (sound still missing on landing), pass soccer balls and run around screaming if your buddy turns on the sprinkler on you! I'm afraid with all the strange mechanics a hefty tutorial will be necessary, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.

I've also managed to speed up pyglet greatly. Try this:

import pyglet
pyglet.options['debug_gl'] = False
def zero_errcheck( result, func, arguments )
	return result
pyglet.gl.lib.errcheck = zero_errcheck

EDIT: Not sure if this does anything, it's possible that something else I did is responsible for the speedup... Starting with python -O sounds good too, thanks, Richard!

Download lawn-tftg-0.3.zip

Cursor keys move (press SHIFT to strafe), TAB switches, walk into tap to turn, walk into piggy to pick up, click soccer ball to pass, click piggy in inventory to throw. Click and drag (or approach window edge) to pan, mouse wheel zooms.

There is a stable branch today. We have animations, a life counter sounds, and a 25 wave level.

The next steps would be to add towers with splash damage and a "Get off my lawn" campaigne mode.

We also learned, that the svn merge message does not mean, that committed code cannot disappear.

Well, it's been though! I've had some problems with frame rates, but I think I've managed to keep things simple. However, I fear you'll need a good machine to move this properly!

Although I couldn't do much yesterday, I managed to get some good looking grass blades using OpenGL. While I fought against my own code, Kokoro created some beautiful sprites and an incredible background!

Today, I put all that together. The fairy is an animated sprite, there are bugs that are able to climb blades, and you can blow to create wind! Wind shakes blades and bugs move with them, so it all starts looking quite good.

Next step: three different bugs, eating mechanism (bugs kill blades if they eat them), complete blowing mechanism (that is, being able to knock down bugs with your blow) and complete sprites. More than enough for tomorrow!

If you want to join in this group as an artist, this is what i need:

• Animation of people walking
  Size: something that will go along well with the tiles in my screenshots
  Direction: from above, going right, toward and away from the camera (see: tiles)
• Tiles of ground(dirt), grass, and concrete
  Size: a diamond of 140*70 or something else with a ratio of 2:1
• Animation of a sprinkler, a food stand, and maybe more
  Size: should fit on one tile

As you can see, two screencaps uploaded. One is the starting screen (btw who the hell is wildvoeglein?) and one is in-game. The pink boxes represent players and white boxes are objects that are thrown around. Night and day alter and the sun moves.

Next we're making grass and have animals chew it. And of course we have to have bird poop! The objects will most likely be well, animals and maybe bombs and other stuff a lawn needs. The plan is that the lawns will be have 10 units of grass with a colour that depends on its "health". Eg. getting chewed is bad for your health and in the end it dies. I haven't started with sounds and music yet, but I have a feeling I'll do something funky, now that I have a wahwah-pedal too.