The old man now wanders aimlessly and avoiding it is starting to be interesting. The goal is the rescue of the ball in this somewhat X-COM or Jagged Alliance-like game. (There are no guns though.)

The tactical component is nowhere near complete and I even have some light base-management planned for in-between missions... We will see how far I can get!

I neglected to think about the theme!

The evil mastermind who stole the Capsule-series was none other than...
Doctor Kruntzerpuntzer! From my first concept! O_O;

Yes, doctor Kruntzerpuntzer, angry that he missed his chance to be in a video game, has stolen an entire line of robots from a massive corporation!

Now, he has declared to the UN that the entire mainland United States is now his lawn! He has further gone into detail that if the United States doesn't get off his lawn, he will let his own Capsule robots loose on the world! After that, he'll probably go yell at Mrs. Kruntzerpuntzer to make him a sandwich.

It is up to Capsules A and B to stop Kruntzerpuntzer, destroy the evil robots, and rescue their fellows from being rebuilt and converted into superweapons!

Well, it's been a pretty fast start this time! Something I learned from the previous Pyweek is having a game idea for each theme, or at least for those I liked most, so I can start coding as soon as possible!

This time, I'm lucky to work with a friend and a great artist who will draw and compose while I code as fast as I can. His sketches are inspiring, but the final artwork is simply stunning. Take a look at his website , if you wish to know more about him.

Well, the game idea was quite clear from the beginning: you control a Lawn Fairy who must prevent bugs from eating grass blades (and flowers, if we have enough time!). However, you can only fight against them blowing. That way, grass blades shake and bugs fall from them.

Yesterday, I managed to hack together a simple menu and some code from my previous pyweek entry (there's one screenshot showing some early blades with guys on top of them) as a technical demo. It seemed to work, so I went on today working with grass blades and some crude player movement. They already move as I expected, so I guess we can be happy!

But there are still many many things to do. Bugs, grass evolution (growing and flowers), blowing mechanic, scores, animations, sound... well, the whole game X)

It's been a slow art day in that I didn't get as much done as I had wanted. Been working on the mockup for one level, here's the results. Thumbnail cause its ridiculously long now.

Once I fill out the last part of this mockup I will have maybe one more location to do. I think. I swear we're planning this and totally not making this up as we go along! After the locations are done I guess I'll be turning my attention to character art and animation.

To commemorate emo monday (too many real life friends getting 'mo, including myself) heres Jeff Buckley

-out

Today, we made an effort to bring some life to our test-level - and it's been crawling all over it!*

So, for most of the day, bugs were swarming the place - unchallenged and unstoppable. We now are pleased to announce the arrival of THE TOWERS.

Different types of towers can be bought, requiring a certain amount of some undefined resource, and placed on the map. Some day, they might even serve some purpose. :)

* Sometimes also lagging over it.

We had a bit of a slow start. Basically we didn't have all the members present at the same time and nobody had quite got the inspiration it takes. But look, then Idlework joined us and we've had some brainstorm-kind of thing going on and generally things have gone from not happening to happening.

The idea at the moment is to have a game about keeping your lawn clean and messing up your neighbour's. At least a single-player mode is supposed to be implemented, maybe multi-player too. As an awesome artist, I made this reference screen. The actual game may not look as awesome because I'll be busy making the music and updating the web-diarrhy.

As a wise man in IRC said, "if it has poop it can't be bad".

ok, i have my idea. likely be using pybox2d and pyglet. isometric pixel graphics and shotguns.

Day 2 is over and the game begins to take shape.

In my last submitted screenshot you can see 4 little gardens. For each garden there will be one gardender that sneaks into other gardens to steal stuff for his own garden. Only one gardener is played by you, the other gardeners will be controlled by the KI

Until now the menu structure ( which is the most important part of any game;) ) is working and a sample level is loaded. Neither are there rival gardeners nor any objects you can take to your garden. Only one gardener which can move around. By the way he has super powers, he can move through walls and walk over water :)

Take the super powers from him will be my task for tomorrow. Then i will implement collision detection and on day 4 i plan to implement the AI. For the collision detection i'm going to use a mask file for every level that marks the the pixels that are passable and those that aren't. With the same file i plan to generate a datastructure with linked passable areas to be used by the AI for path planning.

So there's much to do but i'm optimistic to submit a playable game this time.

sleep well, i will :)

I woke up late, had a quick shower, ran to school, realized me and Jakob had to finish a report on our examination project, was generally mushy-brained, went home, procastrinated, watched some anime, went onto IRC, started writing stuff, finished the dialogue engine, centralized the rendering somewhat (yay, no more resolution-dependant coordinates!), procastrinated, managed to finish that report, wrote a diary entry...

...and the rest is history! Or will be. Tomorrow. I need some sleep.

Oh, right! Clueless is doing some great work on the character portraits:

The main idea behind my game is that there is a garden contest, where each gardener wants to win the first price for the nicest garden. So everybody tries to have the nicest flowers and decorations. And like always, the best things are in the neighbours garden.

So every gardener tries to steal stuff from the others until the time is over and the jury arrives and officialy declares the winner garden with the nicest stuff. Try to steal as much from the others as you can but beware: The do the same with your stuff :)

The player controlls one gardener and the others will be controlled by the ki.