Day 5 -- at least the game engine works...

oresmus on 2009/05/02 05:47 of Outlawn

The good news -- I finally got the ball rolling on top of the lawn (on top of hills, into holes, up and down slopes), working well enough to use. (And tweaked enough other things to make it worth uploading a "work in progress" demo. (Which is marked Final in case of a disaster tomorrow.))

The bad news -- it took all day -- still no gameplay, so now I only have 0.5 days to do that in! (Contest ends Saturday 5pm for me.)

Essentially, I spent this PyWeek prototyping a "ball & lawn game engine" and would need another week to make a real game out of it. (And having an artist would help a lot too.)

(So it's occurred to me to release this as an open source pure-python game engine, and document it, so that I or anyone else can do that, next PyWeek. I hope I do -- not sure I can quite keep up the motivation between-PyWeeks though. Especially to document it. Anyway, worry about that later.)

I am happy though. For one thing, I still have hope to find a simple enough gameplay idea to code tomorrow. (I have a few half-developed ideas, of course...) And for another thing, even the current form was enough to keep my 6-year-old son entertained this time for maybe half an hour... it was he who made the terrain in the latest screenshot, btw. He likes climbing up the invisible walls (perhaps along with a "buddy ball"), then zooming down fast and leaving long tracks along the landscape; or making a "cave" (depression) and coloring it all brown....

So, now to get some rest, or perhaps unwisely to try to prototype some new feature before tomorrow. (Never wise when I'm tired, but sometimes irresistable.)