Hi, everyboy:


My Game can play in now.

Okay, we have found out something, let's hope we will have enough time to finish. Kukkerman will do most of the coding (poor him), I will try to sketch some gfx.

Because our game will be awesome, we decided to publish boxed retail versions in all major software stores, so I thought a box cover art would come handy ;)

Or not?

I got rock-throwing and a nice Baddie class in this morning, and people were asking for a video, so here it is:

http://pymike.pynguins.com/downloads/bubbman2-shooting.mpeg

Alright, I haven't spent the quality time I want to yet with this thing, but at least I have something fleshed out. Currently, I have character movement, grid restriction, little dumb AIs, and obstacles, but nothing is really rigged up to work yet. I am also probably going to change the style of this thing so its not such a blatant robotron style rip off :D The level grid cycling color thing will probably go first, as thats just sort of wasted cycles for some minor eye candy. I also might switch the pure black to something more appealing to the eye.

Try the [DEMO]

Explanatory text.
Colon:

I've had less time than I thought this week, but I am making progress!

It doesn't look like much (this may be a trend this week) but I'm pretty happy as I wrote my first flocking algorithm (thanks to the excellent tutorial by Conrad Parker, based on Craig Reynolds work). The routine is really cool in that it's built up from small components, so it's fun to play with by adding and subtracting things.

Of course there are a few sticking points I'm keeping my eye on, but hopefully won't have to worry about too much. Currently performance is OK, and my laptop definitely isn't new or top-of-the-line -- if things do start to drag I have a vague plan to use NumPy and the Doom inverse square root function ;). Second I haven't quite nailed collision avoidance in combination with flocking. I'm just using rectangle collision and under certain parameters of the flocking routine, the sprites still collide. So I'm not sure how to deal with that -- except by tweaking the parameters of the flocking ;).

Hoping to work on some audio tonight. My concept with this is not that ambitious (about the same as my Ludum Dare entry), but I'd like to get something more complete done by Saturday.

(accidentally posted this in the wrong section sorry.)

Well, day 2 has ended for me. Feeling more optimistic than I was yesterday.

Have quite a few problems already but am pretending not to notice them. The only way is forward...whichever axis that is along :-\. I need to improve my OBJ exporter as right now I'm sure I'm drawing far too many lines in a far too inefficient manner. I also need to figure out how to get some animations happening. I am going to need some art help but am not sure how to go about that just yet, I am also very apprehensive about how slow any particle effects are actually going to be.

I set up a repository here: http://code.google.com/p/imptux/

and here is my first real screenshot:

praise the lords of python \m/

Well its day three and i'm fairly confident that the game will be finishable by Saturday night, Its actually not been too hard for me this time, our game idea mostly requires zb to produce mountains of artwork, might i say what a fine job he does at that though! If i can keep him focused until Friday then we'll be fine ;)

I thought I Would take some time out to talk about a few of the technologies that I have been using in the backend.

• The most interesting thing I have been playing with this time is QuadTree's, No one else seems to go for them for some reason, favouring one giant list of objects to render. I used this method last time and ran into problems, ended up having to create large display lists of large area's of geometry just to reduce the size of the python list. Lesson learnt - python does not do well with giant lists.

  Quadtree's however a nice idea, you partition the world space into buckets, once the bucket gets full you split it into four more smaller buckets, in doing this you create a tree of spacialy organised data. Retrieving the items that are in a certain spacial area is trivial then. Quadtree's basically let you create worlds as big as you like without having to worry about speed problems :)

• The second technology I am playing with in this setup is trying to stay true to the backwards incompatible ideals of opengl 3.1, the codebase does not require opengl3.1 in any way (at the moment it should work on anything that has vertex buffer object support) but its a rather interesting way of coding.

  Basically the major change is the removal of

  glBegin() ... ... glEnd()

  Instead you are now encouraged to create vertex buffer objects for everything in your scene, Its a system that works quite well and is especially speedy if your not switching buffers too much. I'm not going 100% gl3.1 though, namely in that 3.1 glTranslate() and such are depreciated in favour of you modifying the matrices yourself, I have done that in the past and its not the most fun, especially not in python, that would be rather slow :)

• Oh and as usual inkscape is being used as our level editor, not much to say about that though apart from this time i designed the game to be using inkscape from the ground up rather than hastily adding it half way though, the code is much cleaner :)

Well, I now know what I'm making, though I have no idea if I will finish. Its called Kettling, which is one of the tactics used by police in London during the G20 protests. The lawn in question is where the protest is going to take place... and your job in a simplistic RTS is to kettle them off the lawn as it were. Consequences shall be plenty. I'm hoping to make the lawn in question parliament square, just outside Whitehall palace, where it is of course now illegal to have a protest, unless you fill out forms where they will say no if you request more than a few people. But modelling that, even in the simplistic cartoon style I'm using, would be tricky. I might add the bribing of politicians to get useful laws to improve your odds as well if I find time. (some of which will be real laws that have been passed, just to make the point.) Anyway, right now I have a test level, 'bobbles' which are my human substitutes, as I don't have time to draw humans, but due to the use of ODE for physics they move really rather awesome. I have the ability to make them walk from a to b and some basic route finding setup but not yet used. Next step is to integrate that, at which point I should have a protest. Then I need to work out how to control the police and add camera controls, at which point I have a game.

Just added the first screenshot. We need to get a better grass texture, all of that green is hurting my eyes! But the bugs are crawling. You'll be lucky to get off of the lawn alive...