Day 1 ideas and progress report

europafish on 2026/03/22 07:46 of europafish

Right before the theme was revealed, I wrote up the following vague ideas on what I was planning for each of the themes:

Ever faster - something Osmos-esque involving inelastic collisions and propelling yourself around (adding energy to the system, making things faster and harder to avoid)?

Finding peace - a Celeste-like platfomer where you're trying to escape the noise of modern life, by going out into nature. at the end you throw your phone off a cliff. parody LLMs as well

Nightfall - some sort of horror game, maybe 2D side view, with a day and night cycle. forests and werewolves? undead? solar powered killer robots that only activate at night after charging all day? (that's more original)

Clock strikes - an RTS game, perhaps, where certain units' abilities come into play over a 12-hour (12-turn?) period, i.e. giant house cats could be more effective at twilight, numerologist mages could be effective at 7:00-8:00, etc. maybe you're a fairy godmother leading an army to stop a princess's curse from becoming permanent at the stroke of midnight? (you have a kissing prince available as well)

Ketchup - something very silly where ketchup kills you. maybe you're a disgruntled employee of a ketchup company that got a monopoly and lowered the quality of its products, and you're out to get the CEO. -> super soldiers with ketchup for blood <-

Actually, I was personally excited for "Ever faster" after I came up with that idea, but the masses have spoken. And so it begins...

DAY 1

I immediately started fleshing out my idea for the "Nightfall" theme.

I think a 2D platformer view would work because, although a top down view would make fighting/avoiding the robots more tactical, it would be really hard to convey the day/night cycle without color grading and dynamic shadows, neither of which is very easy in Pygame. Also, you can create immersive pixel art environments in a side view much more easily than you can in a top down view.

The graphics really have to convey the transition from day to night. I'm going to hack together some sort of 2D lighting system with blendmodes for nighttime to make it look convincingly different; lasers and glowing killer robot eyes should cast some sort of glow over the environment.

Emotionally, sunset has to feel threatening/ominous and sunrise has to feel tranquil/relieving, especially as all the robots power down. I guess you spend daytime looking for resources / setting traps or building structures??? and nighttime avoiding and trying to kill robots. Music will help with the mood setting.

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It's now over 7 hours in, but I have gotten a lot of basic functionality working:

* entities, groups, screens, and "screenstacks." That's basically just a state machine managing the top-level flow of the game.
* tilemap rendering with multiple layers, and loading tilemaps from a simple custom format
* a TimeManager that handles the days and the stages and some basic UI to display the day and time.
* a basic day/night background cycle, sun, and moon.

There's still a lot to do with the parallax layers and I haven't even touched the lighting system yet, or even done night variants of tiles, but... progress!