I've got a very basic concept.

It's a revival of Rabbit Hunt.

Instead of rabbits, though, you are hunting ducks.

Ducks are different than rabbits, by virtue of the fact that they can fly.

There are still dogs, and there are still bushes.

I will be using retrogamelib's collision detection again, but I'll be optimizing it heavily.

(Bounding boxes, spatial hash, maybe even slightly nested bounding boxes!)

I liked Rabbit Hunt alot, so I really wanted to revive it. And I don't have any better ideas, frankly!

Here's hoping...

---Akake

I'm going for random content generation this time. So far I can generate a floor with rooms and doorways (although no doors to go in them yet), place items, move a player around and pick them up.

I also have code working for picking random excerpts from Shakespeare's plays, for later use in the cunning plan that I don't have time to write about because I'm too busy implementing it.

Optimistically, I think I'm about half way to having a game.

Our gameplay leans heavily on 'Joust', except instead of one-hit kills, the losing party loses a feather. Both player and enemies can collect the shed feathers. The idea is number of feathers gives you more ability (eg. stronger flap). If uncollected, feathers fall off the bottom of the screen.

We had been scoring 10 points per collected feather. A friend wandered by and pointed out that if we made the scoring dependent on the number of consecutively collected feathers (without hitting any enemies) then it gives the player incentive to rush around attacking as many enemies as possible BEFORE then rushing to collect all the resulting feathers before they fall off the bottom of the screen.

The code change is tiny, and the movement of all the entities is unchanged, yet the difference on gameplay is incredible. A palpable urgency is injected, a modicum of tactics, geometric scoring rewards for playing well, and a risk-reward dynamic, since waiting before collecting feathers risks losing them off the bottom of the screen.

Coolio!

First of all, thanks @Cosmologicon a lot, at http://pyweek.org/d/2708/#6071 , on asking me on posting a diary thread about my game entry, and telling me so many important issues to be fixed. Thanks again! :)
Everyone else, be welcome on trying and commenting it as well! Thanks!
(After starting, i only did just some few code cleaning, but after @Cosmologicon tips, i really need to fix it a lot on some key parts of the code, for making it a true playable game, with enough addictivity...)

I spent most of today at the science museum with my family; my daughter absolutely loved the planetarium show and thought some of the Star Wars exhibit and regular exhibits were cool too. Science!

On the game front though, I managed to get some new code in:

1. proper sprites for effects
2. using Inkscape's rasterisation for some smaller in-game graphics now
3. first tree & house
4. added ledges - can move through sides & bottom but not fall through top
5. baddies follow complex paths including loops and open paths
6. fleshed out the structure of level 1 more

The ledges were added as a direct result of game testing by Abbey - she kept wanting to jump up to tree branches from the ground only to bump her head into the branch. Obligatory screenshot from the very start of level 1:


The baddies follow paths properly now (yesterday they just when from point A to point B and back again). The really neat bit is that the code to handle the pathing is:

def cycle_path(path):
    path = itertools.cycle(path)
    last = euclid.Point2(*path.next())
    while 1:
        next = euclid.Point2(*path.next())
        last = yield euclid.LineSegment2(last, next)

Given a path consisting of (x, y) points. If the path is a loop (path[0] == path[-1]) then I create the path cycler with cycle_path(path[:-1]). If the path is open then I create the cycler with cycle_path(path[:-1] + list(reversed(path))[:-1]) (so bounce from end to end).

I pass in the current position when I ask for the next line segment so that there's no unsightly jump to move the baddie from its current position to the "proper" start position for the next segment. The baddies wobble along their path, you see :)

So not a huge amount of progress today but I'm very happy with how it's progressing regardless.

I can't draw birds, if you watch my twitter you would have seen two very ugly drawings of birds I did on day 1. I've had to draw birds in past PyWeeks and they end up as one of the things I spend the most time on. The bird from Make Me took me about two hours to do and then you don't see half the detail due to resizing it. The birds I did for Kite Story are just plain ugly and makes me sad.  

So when Alex told me his idea for Feather...I kind-a hit a wall... The game idea involved birds.  
Day one was a bummer, I couldn't make up my mind what I art style I wanted to go with pretty much wasted a whole day. 

Yesterday was much better, I spent some time and gave myself a crash course in drawing birds. I have to say things came out pretty well and I ended up with about 2 and a half pages of birds. 
 
Once getting the art of drawing birds down I went back to see what art style I wanted.     


After going back and forth with a number of different programs, my weapon of choice for this pyweek is photoshop. I ended up with a water-colour look, which sadly didn't seem to transfer when I resized the image. :( 

To save time I'm colouring the birds with shades of grey and then are tinted with code. So our little grey bird became colourful:      
 

 And I was like "Wow that's cool!  But Alex was like "it'd be _really_ cool if we did two-tone" 
 
 And so we did:  
 
A little worried about having to clean up the pencil line art I took the image file into openCanvas and traced the outline. Which lead to a much nicer two-tone-ness.  
 

And then it was bed time. 

Today I did some work on animation. 

Whee it flys. 

Todays progress:





First Playable


Everyone can hurt everyone else

get humans going to a point and aiming at birds
birds die, plane crash, Bird/plane bird/bullet bird/human
still need to add state info into birds/planes but everyone else gets mad! :P

Happy coding!

A.

Not a whole lot done tonight other than playing for an hour with a camera for some scrolling. I'm a little unsure of a good way to go about it actually, since the x and y properties of pyglet sprites are expressed in window coordinates. When the player presses a key they change the sprite's world coordinates in absolute terms, but to make the camera work then the world coordinates of all the sprites need to be translated to the window coordinates. However, without keeping track of world and window coordinates separately, it seems I need to reverse translate the sprite's x and y at the beginning of the next update back to world coordinates, before applying another transformation to window coordintes. If that makes any sense. It seems like adding a new pair of properties for world xy could be a good choice.

Working concept name for my entry: 
Chick Icarus
Because flying, chicks, and 8 bit game references are rad :)

Again, I'm not going to have much time, so I am going to keep the ambitions properly scaled and focus on the feel of the game play and keep the objectives simple. I remember loving the feel of gravity and wing flapping in Joust on my atari 800 as a larval nerd, so I'll call this a success if I can re-capture and riff on that feeling of speed and wing-flapping flight.

I want to make an exploration game, but I have no intention of making a huge level all on my own
I'VE ENLISTED THE HELP OF ROBOTS also a random map generator