Finally!

Have a reasonably playable engine and entities.
The gameplay mechanics are in place.

Still need to implement goals.
Also art. (eek.)

Aaaaaand I'm gonna be gone after Friday camping. So tomorrow is make or break time.

It's certainly been a long day's hacking and I'm feeling rather wasted as I write this diary entry. Operation Fox Assault has made some large strides forward today and has, I think, crossed the threshold from silly toy program into playable game with lots of rough edges. Progress today included:

• Chickens can be armed with weapons.
• Chickens can be placed in buildings.
• Chickens in hen houses lay eggs. Eggs eventually hatch into chickens.
• We have a splash screen and a game over screen.
• Artwork created for weapons and armour.

It hasn't all been plain sailing. We've been coding hard and it's taken its toll somewhat. I know that the building occupancy code took me much longer that it would have last Sunday afternoon and I suspect the other developers are feeling the same.  Some bugs have crept in, mostly as a result of the increasing complexity but also just as a result of the long hours spent at the keyboard.  I'm finding that the PGU library is starting to creek a bit now that our UI is getting more complex, but hopefully it'll seem more sane in the morning after a little sleep.

On the bright side, it seems everyone is still excited about the game we're making and a large portion of the functionality we envisaged at the outset is already in place. A large portion of the work left is tidying up the UI, adding more visual feedback to the user about what's happening behind the scenes, hunting down bugs and, of course, lots and lots of testing.

- H*

What our game is about: a game where you take care of your pet parrot and try to avoid him plucking out all of his feathers. It is like an evil version of nintendogs, as the parrot can inflict much damage to you if you are not careful, and as the game progresses he gets harder to take care of.

Well, we have entered the doldroms of the middle of pyweek.

It always seems to go this way:

Day one: wow, think of all of the great ideas we could do! So much to brainstorm! So much to design and plan! Make sure to keep the game idea simple enough that we can do it.
Day two: Holy shmoley! We are accomplishing so much! Waaaaay ahead of schedule! Best pyweek ever!
Day three: er, do you feel like working on pyweek? Me neither. Nothing gets done
Day four: hmm, still not feeling it. Well, we were ahead of schedule, so we are still OK. Might need to cut back on some things.
Day five: uhhhh, we have all of these tasks to do and only 2 more days? Why did we waste the last few days!
Day six and seven - suicide coding spree, followed by disappointment at everything that had to be cut
Day eight-day fifteen: sleep

By this schedule, as opposed to the schedule made up during planning, we are actually very much on schedule!

Anyway, here are some of the choice things which we worked on in the last few days. Hopefully today is a bit better. There may or may not be a new screenshot to show.

• I reorganized the code so that we can just plop object classes into a folder, and they will be automatically imported into the game. Makes the turnaround for adding a new object very quick.
• Galrin made the other floating hand, your wife who brings in items she buys from the store. To test, we have a hotkey we can press to have her bring a random item so we can get a bunch of stuff to play with really quick
• We got the Parrot's stats working pretty well, with food helping his diet, and poison making him sick
• We started the part of the game where you try to feed him, but have to worry about whether he will bite

All in all, a little light for 2 days of work. Not being able to do anything until 9pm really hurts!

Next on the agenda is to finalize the feeding section, work on the ai of the parrot a bit (as right now he is pretty static), and then enhance the puzzle elements of our simulation a little more. We really want to avoid the problem our "only way is up" entry had. Other than this game, it was our most experimental, and it felt more like just watching stuff happen than actually playing a game.

Some menus, simple dissolve transitions, ambience music and sound effects. Yep, I'm almost there (although there's still too much to do, like creating bunchs of levels for example XD I really should create some quickly =D)
 
Well, I guess it was time to release something already. Although code is _really_ ugly and I don't think many peoples would like to take a look there (there's almost no comments, and usually I'm a comment freak), but well, it's sort of playable right now (though you can't clear levels yet xD)

Anyways, controls and gameplay instructions are on README.txt file. Make sure if you have xdrlib as well, I'm using it to package the map files (I'm lazy to write a xml parser, you know), it can be downloaded from python's SVN if you don't have it, but it's bundled with Python so it shouldn't be a issue (I guess).

Other than this, I hope you can enjoy the game (there's not much of it yet, I know) :D

I tested it only on Windows XP yet, but it should run on other OS as well (hopefully), anyways if you have some bug please report (all the more if it's a Mac one, as I don't have one D:)

Today I have added trading mechanism. You can sell chickens, hans and eggs.
I also improved a lot of graphics and made many bug fixes.

Today i spent my time on trying to make some music for the game - so frustrating... - my idea were try to add some kind of .s3m module (made with ModPlugTracker on Wine) of jazz electric-bass solo (a bit like music from Jaco Pastorius or Victor Wooten), but the result of my tries really sucks... :( (sounding too hard, and lacking subtilities) - it's really hard to add some interesting atmosphere with a music doesn't annoy - i'm almost forgetting the idea on adding music or sound in that... :( - but anyway, my game submition were downloadable here since monday, be welcome commenting! :)

Excellent progress today: I finished laying out the broad geometry of the world, Martin added a fantastic tree. Here's a couple more screenshots:


Lovely tree geometry.


Our wireframe debugging: good stairs.

Expect more soon! I will be incorporating all the scenery objects next. They're looking good I just haven't put them in yet. The story and actual gameplay will be features of the next three days.

I have created a new angel sprite today and decided there'd be only one sprite for an angel - the "evilution" of an angel in previous versions was far too unrecognizable. Another thing changed is the speed of floating feathers - they're going up much slower now. The "zero chimneys" are non-existent now.

No screenshot today, changes are only minor. I'm wondering whether there will be any sounds in-game, regarding my composing speed :)

I added some sounds and background music today. Most of the work involved writing a script to download source media and convert them to the desired format, and looking around the net for decent creative-commons-licensed and GPL-compatible chicken sounds. I like the effect the sounds add to the game... it almost makes it feel playable.

Now it looks like a game. A resume of things I did today:

• Main menu screen
• Implemented the feather attack system
• Tweaked a bit the sprite/collision system (still there's a wierd bug with collisions between feathers and bugs, but I'll look at this later)
• Added some score points and time limit for levels
• Worked on some simple graphics
• Implemented a simple SFont module for numbers

That's about it. Now I'll finally have some lunch and maybe go work in the game again (I'm not sure if I'll have free time in the afternoon yet). For now I plan to finish the menu thingyes (Options/help/credits/etc), add sorta stats for cleared levels (like sonic ones :D) add some sounds and music and work on animations for bug deaths and such.

I want to put some coins in the level too, you collect stars and can gain lifes :D

Btw, this is how the game (and my desktop) is looking rite nao

( click here for a bigger version =D )