Due to heavy work load we're dropping out of this pyweek. :(

Maybe next time.

Every Pyweek I say to myself "This time I'm going to make a real effort to write regular diary entries, with screenshots and lots of lovely stuff about how the game is working out." Every Pyweek I fail miserably.

This time, I'm going to try something different. Instead of failing to post long in-depth pieces about how things are going, I'm just going to occasionally vent on Twitter. I'd like to invite anyone else interested in doing the same to follow me (@mewo2), and to post their Twitter IDs in this thread so that I can do likewise. I'd also suggest using the rather original #pyweek tag.

Appears our team captain (RB[0]) won't be able to contribute very much, so I'll be more or less leading things this time around. Since none of us have any experience with pyggel or 3D, we'll either be using retrogamelib, pyglet + squirtle, or straight pygame, depending on what theme's selected.

P.S. vote Sleeping Bears and receive a free picture of honey! ;)

You can temporarily download it here.

I decided to focus on my weaknesses for this game, so it kind of sucks. During the competition, I'll focus on my strengths. The style's all inconsistent, and there's no innovation at all. Still, I accomplished my goals, which were:

1. Refamiliarize myself with python/pygame. Check.
2. Practice some pixel art. Still needs work.
3. Try out my new Wacom tablet. I drew the fish with it, so check.
4. Find online and use at least one free image, sound effect, song, and font. Check with some reservations. aenigmafonts.com seems to be great for novelty fonts, but I mostly want a good selection of normal fonts. And I couldn't find a sound effect anywhere of a game show buzzer (for a wrong answer).
5. Add in-game documentation. This seriously hurt my PyWeek 6 entry. Ideally the Readme will be completely superfluous.
6. Modularize my code. Better than last time, but still needs improvement. I'm still not sure what's the best way to handle the game data that needs to be accessed by several different modules. Should it be global? Stick it all in a huge struct that gets passed around? Also the cutscene dialogue, even though there's very little in this game, always takes up way more code than it seems like it should. I put it into a separate file rather than dropping it in the main loop. That's something, anyway.
7. Try out pygame's Sprite and Group classes instead of rolling my own. I'm glad I did: it took a little getting used to, but the Sprite.kill() method alone makes it worthwhile.
8. Use the Skellington and the creation script. Check.
9. Pay attention to what takes the most and least time. No huge surprises, but I realized that there's a point - about 2/3 of the way through this time - when everything comes together. The code goes from being a bunch of tests into being an actual game. When I hit this point, I get so enthralled with what I've done that I spend a lot of time just playing around.

The one goal I didn't accomplish was including the pygame library with my distribution. Still working on how to do that.

Well, let me know if you've got any feedback, especially DNWs!

I was snooping around the pyweek world last night and finally got around to checking out Cocos2d. Wow, great job guys, it looks really nice, and I think I am going to dump my web app plans in favor of some 2d fun! Who knows, of course, as this all depends on which way the wind is blowing when i sit down at my computer on start day.

again, hats off to the pyglet and cocos2d developers!

I've been fiddling with Retrogamelib a bit, and have found it to be pretty nice, but it's also a tad high-level for my tastes, so I may or may not use it. It's a very nice engine, but I think I'd be happier with just pygame. :/

Scuppers:
Probably something involving a cute little character named Scuppers. He would be the cutest little whatever-he-wound-up-being that I'd ever sprited.

Tatlin's Tower
Here, I'd avoid the historical failed project, and do something fictional. It would be about a young hero trying to climb the tower fortress of the evil (And completely made-up) God Tatlin, so he could rescue the soul of his older brother, which Tatlin stole for the fun of it.

Half-Sovereign
Picture this:A warrior whose kingdom had been taken over by an evil wizard. The warrior is the illegitimate son of the king, who had an affair with a maidservant (Hence, he is half-sovereign). The warrior must defeat the wizard's army, and restore his father to the throne!

Get off my lawn!
You are Rudolph Kruntzerpants, an old man with a problem. A group of little kids keeps intruding on peoples' lawns. Being an inventor, you have built a kid-capturing weapon which places the little rats into cages, so their parents can ground them. Only you, a crotchety old engineer, stand between your neighborhood and total chaos!

Sleeping Bears
Bears have taken over the nation's capitol! The military has been decimated, and the UN isn't sending help because of threats of protest from PETA! It is up to Stephen Colbert to save the Greatest Most Best Country God Ever Gave Us On The Face Of This Earth from the bears!

I like that last one the best :-)

It's not my intention to influence the theme voting, but since some people threw around some impressions on the themes, I'd like to throw my first impressions too.

Scuppers: Given the wikipedia definition, I would have no idea what to do with this theme. But according to this, it can also mean ambush or endanger. That does sound interesting, a game where you have to make or avoid ambushes. Still, it's not my favorite.

Tatlin's Tower: I like the concept, but it sounds somewhat closed to interpretation. On the other thread, saluk put some other interpretations of it, but I still can't think of anything that doesn't involve an actual tower. We've already had towers in Pyweek 4 ("The only way is up"), and we've already had twisted things in Pyweek 5, not to mention LD12 was about towers too. Therefore, I'd rather have another theme.

Half sovereign: First thing I thought wasn't the coin, but a king with half the power he's supposed to have. I like this one; sounds like it can lead to some nice ideas if people don't focus so much on the coin itself. On another thread, pymike was worried there would be too many stock exchange games, but I don't think that would happen, most of us know what's boring and what's not. Fighting dragons like saluk suggested is a nice interpretation, too. Or you could simply connect it to a Civilization-style game as j-1 suggested on another thread (I didn't think of it before j-1 mentioned it).

Get off my lawn: I like this one very much if you don't need to interpret a lawn as an actual lawn, but as a (home-like) territory like saluk said on another thread. In that case, it can be a lot of things: a war between countries, street turf wars, tower defense, a puzzle game about eliminating pieces, etc. Pretty much anything with a territory you can call your own where you have to kick the enemy out of it (or try not to be kicked out of an enemy territory). Even the intended idea of kicking the enemy out of a lawn sounds like fun. This one is the one most open to interpretation, in my opinion.

Sleeping bears: At first, I didn't have any ideas for this one, but then I googled it and found a link with the title, "Sleeping bears aren't meant to be poked". The link doesn't talk about actual bears, but I could imagine some funny games involving poking bears. :P Or maybe games where you have to sneak around sleeping bears, that sounds fun. Also, maybe you could interpret bears as powerful things instead of actual bears. I like this one.

So far, I have no good specific ideas for any of them. I'm considering my first impressions based on their potential for interesting ideas. Overall, I like the themes. I'll be thinking of ideas throughout the week. I've already voted and it wasn't a hard choice for me, but I might change it according to whatever ideas I have.

Remember that most likely other people have different opinions, so there's not much point in voting based on what I or others like or dislike. Vote on what you like or dislike.

These themes are great! At first I was like WTF as probably most people initially reacted. But overnight I warmed up to most of them. The only one I don't really like is sleeping bears, although I have ideas for it as well. Each one almost has several meanings built in. For instance, tatlin's tower could be about the tower, or it could be bout tatlin and his failed attempts to get the tower built, or it could be about abandoned production projects in general, or it could be about tatlin's other ideas which were even more insane...

Half sovereign could be about sorting money, fighting dragons (it's on the coin), something to do with kings/rulers, or some kind of economic battle (as long as it's not a boring spreadsheet app, it could be cool too).

The first thing I think of with scupper is "scupper sweeper", a frantic casual game involving unclogging the drains :) But there is also the verb "to scupper", which is about destruction. Well, that is about as open ended a theme as you can get, since most games are about destruction anyway. Heh, maybe a game where you have to destroy houses by clogging the roof drains during a heavy rain for the double whammy.

Get off my lawn could be about chasing kids off the lawn, of course, but the lawn in question could be expanded to any kind of territory that needs protecting. But Get off my Lawn and Sleeping Bears are a little more limiting than the others, I will be voting them down.

Because I'm interested, as well are a number of other people reading the messages, I threw together a quick survey for the system capabilities of PyWeek participants. The PyWeek site has hosted similar things before but not having access to that I used Google Docs. :-)

So anyone who wants to can fill out the survey and/or view the results.

I don't know whether i can use my game lib i just released:

http://code.google.com/p/jabersgamelib/

EDIT: OK looks like i missed the deadline (1 month). Oh well.