My wife gave me the idea while I was talking to her about the theme yesterday. Do a simple game due to my lack of time this week, and make it a grab and avoid game. So you're a kid trying to get items out of a yard, and an old guy is constantly on your tracks. I'll start off simple, get it fleshed out, then work out more complex details.



Part of the issue is that I'm closing on my first house on Thursday, then Saturday & Sunday are pretty much taken up, so I really only have about 4 solid days of dev & production. I am guessing I will not get this finished, but hey at least I can try :) Also, all the other entries look like they are really coming together! I'm looking forward to trying everyone's games out.

Since everyone is making tower defense games, we decided to go against the grain and make an adventure game. Ok, truth be told, we were kind of thinking along these lines long before the contest, and most of our candidate ideas were also adventures. These themes kind of asked for it!

Fortunately, most of the base engine is completed already, and we've made a head start on some of the art. Unfortunately, finishing the engine in this case is the east part - the art is going to be the most time consuming and difficult part of creating the game.

Day 1/1.5 progress:

I've been kind of out of it today, but managed to write some code.

Movement around our world map, and some character dialogue.

Testing the inventory code, as narrated by the same dialogue system.

After writing up that blog post about how I might do procedurally generated maps I sat down and did a few hours of coding. I was taking things pretty easy, as I did not want to overwork myself. I am satisfied with what I had accomplished, though. I have a start on a nice foundation to build a game on top of. The list of today's accomplishments include:

• A game state manager that easily handles switching, updating, and drawing game states along with event handling.
• An entity management system that can add, remove, update, and draw entities along with grouping entities by category and sorting them by their y value for proper layering when rendered.
• Loading of values from a settings.txt file, so game players can easily adjust the game to their liking.
• Scaling the game's screen size for people who might want to double or triple the size of the pixels.
• Thorough testing to make sure everything is working right.

Some things to do tomorrow might include

• Entity collision and response.
• Animation system.
• Media management -- sound, images, music, etc.
• Effects system, so effects like explosions, for example, can be easily triggered.
• Actions system for flexible and reusable entity behaviors.

Not much superficial progress tonight, but I modularized my sprite code. Now I can have more than one sprite at once, yay. I also did some extremely rudimentary avoidance algorithm, so that they don't all stand in the same place when you tell them to go somewhere. It's not nearly as smooth as C&C, but it'll do for Pyweek.

I added a few sprite classes. In addition to the acorns, I added little water droplets as resources (that's what plants eat, right?) and some kinda leaf thing that's a stand-in graphic for a structure. Isn't that great?

I also have a much better idea of where I'm going with the gameplay. Can't overlook that!

Well here's the state of my solo entry after an hour and a half or so... you are a sheep dog.. herd your sheep into the centre to make them disappear. Not much game there but I'll be working on it a little bit more through the week, if I have time.

DAY ONE'S PROGRESS:

I have most of a skeletal animation system. I also have a small portion of my image assets made, and I have a plan.

I'm going to be working overnight to make up for lost time. I have enough ramen and coffee to get me through the night. I hope.

I'm not going to make an excuse for my late start. No one really needs one, and I figure I've restated my alarm clock troubles enough.

That said, things are looking up for the project. I'm breaking my skeletal animation into multiple classes to simplify it. I'm thinking that I'll make weapons a specialized animation bone, so that I can simplify handling them in animations. ^o^

I'm going to need a mechanism to provide for removing animation bones, though, but that should be fairly easy to do.

I have a generic object factory, but will probably re-do it to use a system of templates. I used a template-using factory in a previous project, and it worked phenomenally well. It greatly simplified my code. In fact, it vastly simplified it.

All things considered, it was a late start, but I can make it up!

----

My friends, here's to ingenuity, to efficiency, and to the determination that builds cities and empires!

Here's to the passion of a person who has found their calling, and to the determination of a dreamer who follows the call to make their dreams come true!

And here's to the friendship that brings us together from all corners of the world!

Excelsior and I/O! And now I retire to my craft!

--Akake

Here are my accomplishments for day one:

• Came up with a concept involving cats who roam the backyards of their neighborhood in search of adventure. Along the way they meet up with a series of challenges requiring them to defend their territory or to find a way to escape an enemy's territory.


• Wrote up a mini game design doc to help clarify the game's goals, mechanics, and flow to myself. The game (as currently envisioned) has many features of a tactical RPG: combat is turn-based, and each cat has a special battle skill. However, there are also some real-time action/arcade type activities, such as chasing mice in a maze-like garden or escaping a yard full of kids with BB guns.


• Wrote code to create the main window, handle keyboard events, and implement a simple camera system. Got started on code for rendering 3D backyard levels.

No screenshots yet, but here's something to tide you over:

I've added clouds and layered backgrounds. It all looks pretty sweet in motion.

So far, we have a half-fleshed out idea and some code that works.

Screenshot time:


Unfortunately I have exams very soon and have agreed to revise during the day over this week so I wont have much time to work with my team-mate :(