12 hours into PyWeek, and I wake to find my laptop won't boot in Ubuntu (black screen, no console) and my desktop won't boot *at all* (GRUB error 21). I know I'm awesome and all, but I wasn't expecting to be quite so flagrantly sabotaged, guys. I guess I'm coding on XP for the forseeable. Sigh.

If anyone is having trouble coming up with a theme, do a search for feathers in mythology. There are tons of myths etc that involve feathers that are ready to be plundered.

Or you can go a bit more literal, and make it a game about actual feathers. There are some nice ideas I can think of for that as well.

Our idea involves feathers and a pesky bird who owns the feathers - more detailed info yet to come. Here is an early concept art, by me, a self-proclaimed artist of no renown:


If it makes no sense to you, then I have done my job well.

I feel though that we have a very solid design. It requires only a small amount of balancing toward the beginning of the game, and since there is no way to win (it's "endless" mode - at some point you lose), bad balancing toward the middle and end of the game will not have a huge impact on first impressions.

And we all know first impressions are what matter here (not that I care too much about the scoring, but it's still what I aim for in these contests. (Or at least it's what I strive to aim for. I usually aim a bit too much toward the end of the game and making the game work as a whole than the first impression, which results in most people not really getting into the meat of my games, and basing the whole game on maybe lackluster presentation or confusing early sections))

The other thing that is nice about this idea, is it is tailored to really WORK as a game with a very small amount of content, yet it is not difficult to continually add content and polish content to make it better. With so little time, it will be great to get something playable, and even submittable, as soon as humanly possible. There wont be much time during the week for this, at any point I may have to just stop working, so it needs to be something that people can play and enjoy for a minute or two in the next few days. This also means that if, shock of shocks, there is time later, the game will be that much better for having been in playtesting for that much longer.

It's been interesting to see the progression of Century of the Fruitbat over the last 8 (eight?????) pyweek's. As far as what we have tried to accomplish, each pyweek we have tried to accomplish a little less. As for what we actually accomplish, it has felt like we have accomplished a bit more each time. Specialization I think is important.

In contests, as in life, it is better to be great in some small thing, then to be mediocre in many.

I don't know if I believe that, but it sounded good :P

Well, Tim and I got on irc and pieced together a really cool (I think) idea/story for our FPS.
 And the good thing is that once the core is done (which should be like tomorrow or Tuesday) it just a matter of content.

So, I grabbed pyggel and set to work, we already have our level file parser done, and the first level made (mostly)
The floor, ceiling, walls and doors are all rendered as well.
The hud is started, so if your mouse goes over anything you can interact with the hud text changes.
Currently that is only implemented for doors though.

Doors open and a light above them turns on if you get close enough and are facing them.


Tomorrow will work on collisions (let's not keeping walking through walls XD), binding the mouse to the center and using it for camera movements, finishing hud, first weapons, and buffs.

After that will be the last really difficult part, which will be the baddies and the AI.

If we do it right though, we'll have half the week for play-testing and features, and everything else will be done soon XD

Today my time discussed several ideas, but has not yet come to a cconsensus, but once we define the basic idea will make a good job I have sure.  Maybe we use camera of pygame, or mic,still do not know,

luck for all.

We're off to see Ponyo now. I've managed to wrangle Squirtle so it'll load both plain SVG and layered SVG now, and have an initial level loading with the player being placed in the correct position. A good start, I think.

Well, actually, I can't start now, unfortunately. I have some important things I can't postpone until Monday, so I'll have to start Tuesday. This time I need to keep it simple to avoid what happened in my last two Pyweek entries. Don't expect much from me, but I'll finish.

I have no ideas yet, but I have two days to catch random thoughts from my head and turn them into game ideas involving feathers. Tuesday I'll put whatever I got on paper and start coding (hopefully).

Good luck, everyone. Looking forward to another great Pyweek. :)

I'll hop on IRC whenever I find the time.

• I hope this will work.

Found this neat animation program Pencil 5 minutes before the competition started.  It does layers, frame-based animation (no interpolation) and -- most importantly -- saves in a simple XML dialect.

Spent about an hour writing a loader, and now I can load animations with associated collision boxes (via creative overloading of the term "camera layer") into the game.  Easiest thing I ever did.

Here's the game so far.  Still waiting on the first asset drop from the artist :-)

 

So here is the story / game im' going to be working on. I kinda tried incorporating all the themes in here :)   

Abbey and I have had a brainstorming session and decided that the game will be:

1. about a young witch (think Kiki from Kiki's Delivery Service),
2. who leaves home and ventures to a distant land to discover herself,
3. who finds the land in trouble - someone's turning the friendly forest creatures into baddies, and
4. uses the power of magic found in feathers to help save the land.

First things first, to see whether I can get something basic going with the technology I've decided to use:

1. Inkscape for artwork and level design,
2. squirtle for rendering the artwork (though modified to handle layers),
3. lepton for pretty,
4. coroutines for managing everything, and
5. pyglet for doing all the messy grunt work.

Well here goes :)