Just rented the movie from iTunes and watching it again now. I watched it a while ago but wanted to watch it again to get some more ideas on how to apply the theme. I'm taking notes about the details, main thematic elements etc.

I watched the movie, set up the git repository (on google code https://code.google.com/p/aranara/) and have my game outline (mining simulation) so now I am ready to start.

Today's schedule is,

- throw some placeholder graphics in place
- game engine basics
- base level logic

Hopefully by the end of the day I have a playable test level so that tomorrow I can start refining the main game loop. 

I'll post updates as comments to this entry.

Day two begins with mowing the lawn. OK, so I probably should have planned that better. Still it gave me some ideas about games involving harvesters moving back and forward across the landscape! It is just a pity those don't appear in my game (yet!).

My goals for today are,

1. implement all the core game mechanics
2. get a few levels sketched out
3. first implementation of Gerty

Today was a work day so there isn't too much time. I have the theme for about eight levels worked out and I hope to have them implemented tonight. I also hope to replace some of the placeholder graphics with improved ones.

So the main goals are,

- get improved graphics
- implement score HUD and toolbar HUD
- implement first version of 8 levels

Today I realised that PyWeek is 40% design, 40% coding, 40% project management and -20% sleep.

I did my project management bit today by listing all the remaining tasks and categorizing them as must-have (1), nice-to-have (2) and yeah-if-I-had-another-week (3). Then estimating those tasks and calculating the amount of time I have left I think I can get all my 1 and 2's done.

Today I focus on a bunch of relatively easy #1's - a) to get things done and b) to recover some energy. I noticed that yesterday I was flagging a bit and the code was suffering!

Goals for today,

Start screen

Level select screen

Harvester polygon physics

Drag-drop bug on palette

Logo

Upload to site test

 

It is a bit disconcerting that day 5 starts with "1 day and 21 hours and 9 minutes to go". 

Today (tonight!) my plan is to work on some dialog for Gerty. He is pretty important to the overall feel of my game and so I need to get some writing done. This makes a change from the coding and graphical work. 

Good luck to all the other participants. We are in the home stretch now!

I have some extra time today as don't need to work, although the evening is already accounted for with a family commitment. I'm still irritated by the music bug. I'll maybe give it a go on Linux to see if it is a pyglet issue.

Lot's to do today,

Animated sprites

Sandbox level

Gerty colour commentary

Attraction hoover physics

Attraction visual effect

Plus level polishing. 

The final day - lots of little things to get completed today.

One of my posts from yesterday seems to have disappeared. I started having a performance issue late yesterday and that took a while to locate. I had created way too many forces with my "attractor" unit. I managed to solve it for now.

I plan to polish graphics, levels and get Gerty really working today.

Ok, I submitted my final version.

I ended up with 12 levels. I was able to incorporate all of the gameplay elements that I developed all week and overall I am very happy with the game. I think there is plenty of polishing that can be done and lots of the ideas in the levels can be expanded upon. I will do that later after a bit of recuperation!

I never did get to the bottom of the music bug on OSX (I'm pretty sure it is pyglet or avbin) and on my linux box sometimes parts of the batch do not render properly. It looks like this might be a Catalyst driver issue.

Now I am looking forward to trying out the games from everyone else!

Congratulations to the winners and to all who competed. I was blown away by the quality and diversity of the entries.

A big thanks to everyone for the feedback on my game. Everyone was very generous, particularly since it seemed that so many people had issues getting the game to work as intended. It looks like there were some significant physics issues.

I'm interested in hearing from anyone that had physics issues which platform they were on so I can look into it. I'm thinking it may be a framerate issue but it may also be platform related. I didn't see this kind of thing (Helium rocks getting stuck in other objects) at all on my Mac mini so I'd like to investigate further because I'd like to use pymunk in the future.

It is very kind of everyone who still rated the game high despite these issues really making it unplayable.

Some people mentioned the mouse scroll wheel not being a good control scheme - it was slow for some and for those on laptops it was unusable. Yes! I should have tested this better. I'm using a magic mouse which seems to be very unrepresentative in terms of how it generates scroll events. 

Music too large? Yep - I noticed this to my embarrassment when downloading other people's games! Mine was huge but it didn't need to be.

Gerty obscuring the action - aargh. Yes, I thought this too when I was playing through after the submission. This is one of those things where you have a design idea and find it hard to get away from it. I really wanted Gerty to be a big part of the game but I needed to find a better way for him to pop-up without being annoying or hiding the screen.

I'll do a bit more of a detailed post-mortem later but I just wanted to thank everyone again for the great comments. This really helps me a lot.

Paul