Hello there,

here is a first impression of the main menu. As you may allready noticed, "Get of my lawn" is just a working title and will be replaced when something better comes into my mind. Maybe "Schrebergarten Wars", but who knows :)

You play a gardener who has to grab items (flowers,dwarf,...) from neighbour gardens and has to defend his own garden against the rival gardeners...

Not really innovative but fun to play!

MESSAGE BEGINS

This morning we discovered that BT had (meaning to upgrade his connection) cut off one of our team members. Unfortunately he was hosting our Subversion repository. In anticipation that it might return we started working on our working copies. At 6pm we decided it was getting silly... We needed to merge.

Basically two of us (Martin and myself) were based off 1929 and JJ was based off 1927. So:

• We copied JJ's WC, reverted it and committed it to a new repository.
• We committed a reverted copy of Martin's over that bringing us to 1929.
• We brought the WC for the new repository back to the 1927 mirror and brought in changes JJ had made, updated, merged and committed 1929a.
• We brought it back to the 1929 mirror and brought in Martin's changes, updated, merged and committed 1929b.
• Once more we brought it back to 1929 mirror and brought in my changes, updated, merged and committed 1929c (aka 1930).

It was a wild time travel adventure that made all of us appreciate why we use source control...

MESSAGE ENDS

I think I need to seriously rethink my concept.

I'm starting to get queasy just thinking about all of the stuff I have to get done for it, the art isn't cooperating, and I'm just tired. I'm tired.

I don't know what I'm doing yet. I may keep my concept, but I'll probably toss it and go for something simpler.

I kinda blew day one, but I was hoping to get something done today. I'm reeling from all the work I put on myself, though. I'm starting to notice a pattern of that in my work.

Like I said, I'm reconsidering my concept. I need something simpler, or I'm going to go into a tailspin from all the stress of it.

I'm not gonna do a Post-Mortem of it, though. I just want something that I can actually accomplish. XD

----

In fact, now that I think of it, these concepts have been the ones I have never been able to finish. I have always had trouble with concepts where it requires lots of super-fanciness.

Okay, and maybe I have a case of the Monday emoz, too ;-)

In all seriousness, though, I'm going to try something simpler. This is going nowhere.

So... Back to the drawing board! Let's find something simpler! :D

The skeletal animation system just isn't elegant. I tried my hardest, but it just won't come together.

That said, I'm going to refocus on making sprite art for the game. I think it'd look better, should it come together right, and it would make my life loads easier.

I know this is coming just after a post about my plans for the system, but it's just growing and growing, and I know well enough to abandon it now instead of slaving away at it only to run out of time. :P

My game concept is still the same, but will be simplified as far as enemies go: There will only be a few types of enemy.

I'm thinking this will help me greatly in the end.

---Akake

Here's a playthrough of the test level for my solo, BubbMan 2.

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

I've decided that it would be a good idea for me to rethink my skeletal animation system.

The parts that I have are (Mostly) good, but I'm running into issues as far as how to draw the images.

The method I was previously considering, drawing the whole skeleton onto a surface, then drawing that surface as a sprite, has turned out to be frought with problems.

Given that, I've changed tactics: Instead of simply flipping a sprite to turn the character around, I've added functionality to the animation bones to allow them to invert themselves. This may require some tweaking, but it should work better.
Doing it this way, I don't have to worry about how to align the sprite, which could get messy. I can also save memory by not drawing a whole mess of intermediate images, and I don't have to worry about the size of an intermediate image! ^o^

The bones will draw themselves thusly:

1. Draw child bones that are always below the current one (This is recursive)
2. Draw the child bones that should be below the current one based on the direct the skeleton is facing
3. Compute the angle of the bone and the offset for the image recursively (May optimize this if I have time)
4. If the skeleton is facing left, flip the offset (Which is still local to the skeleton
5. Add the offset that represents where the skeleton is being drawn
6. Rotate the image for the bone by the calculated angle
7. If the skeleton is facing left, flip the image
8. Get the Rect for the image, and align its center on the offset point
9. Blit the adjusted image onto the destination surface (Given as an argument, and also passed to child bones)
10. Draw the child bones that should be above the current one, based on which direction the skeleton is facing
11. Draw the child bones that are always above the current one
12. Finished!

It shouldn't be too much of a problem to get it working. ^_^

I've also been working on other parts alongside the animation system, such as the entity system and object factory, because I don't want to fall behind on other things. :P

And now, back to work! OwO

Didn't quite finish last night as planned, but it's basically all together, just needs a little finishing. And sound. And then all that packaging guff. We probably would've finished in good time if we hadn't switched art styles late afternoon. So here we are again:

Yes, I was slacking a lot, only was playing around in Blender so far. I think I'm somewhat disappointed I don't get to spend time on building a replica of Tatlin's Tower after all. Anyway, I finally have an idea. It's quite simply, sort of a mix of tower defense and RTS. And probably not doable in the time I have.

The concept is, you have a lawn, and you plant flowers and bushes and stuff on it (see concept art below). For that you use garden imps and flower elves. However, evil critters like caterpillas will invade the lawn and try to eat your plants so you have to build defenses to fight them off...