My networking tutorial is coming along. If you're interested in making a network-aware game, please read it (and give me feedback)
sjbrown's Guide to Writing Games

Patrick and I spent the first couple hours sweltering and discussing ideas for "Length of a piece of string". We're both big fans of Atari, NES, and arcade games of the 80s, so we took our inspiration from Double Dragon and River City Ransom, and decided to make a Brawler where your weapon is a yo-yo. We loved animating the character in Subterraneman, so we decided to bring him back for this, and make it a bit of a sequel.

This time around, we have arcticclear as a new team member - she is just learning Python, and has animation experience.

Last night, Patrick worked on some initial yo yo attacks (seeking inspiration from youtube) and I learned pyglet well enough to make a scrolling level. Today we integrated our codebases, and I added enemy spawning, trigger zones, and masked off the boundaries of where you can walk on a map.

Screenshot up shortly...

edit: linked in screenshot

Spent tonight getting levels more fleshed out and adding attacks. You can now pick up a yoyo that's on the ground, and a little fade + scale animation gets triggered when that happens. The enemy can now attack you, which stuns you briefly. You can now attack the enemy, which doesn't really do anything except kill them and they pop out of existence.

Frustrated by an inability for pyglet to load images bigger than 2044x2048 on my computer. But still, I'm glad I discovered this rather than having the judges find it.

I feel like it's going really smoothly so far. Has all my experience coding python paid off, or am I just not seeing the difficulties that lie ahead?

blood spatter!

Things seem to be coming along... so far I've put in some yo-yo tricks (albeit with a couple bugs from the scroll manager) and got the first level more or less rendered. I've been using SketchUp! to draw out the levels in 3d and then export a png. Even with SketchUp it takes a while to render everything since I'm just learning it, but the results look really good. The computer crashed a couple times yesterday too, so I lost a bit of level 2. Yay crashy computer.

Last night I also put some particle effects in for blood splatter for when the yo-yo hits something, which I think should definitely add to the gore factor.

Tonight I put the health meter in, fixed up the collision map and started trying to fix up the yo-yo attacks. I think I'll try to get level 2 done and call it a night.

Just a quick note about my progress tonight:

visual effects manager added
talking enemies added
hug hearts added
level transitions added
cutscenes added
rudimentary menu added

All the primary game elements still look like ass, but that should change tomorrow as we get some character animations plugged in. Backgrounds look nice. And I gotta say I like the hug-hearts.

edit: this screenshot shows the "hug-hearts" I speak of

too tired for diary entry. make brain crazy fuzzy no understand pyglet flip_x...

edit: link in screenshot:

Oi vey. I really should never do arithmetic. I have a degree in mathematics, so you'd think I'd be able to get my negative signs in the right place and know how to subtract x from y. I spent far too much time on such concerns tonight, in an effort to get the yo-yo to change its length and actually strike the enemies when it hits them.

One night of coding left. Let's see where this takes us...

Precious few hours remain, and I'm writing a diary entry? what am i, crazy?

Um yeah, so we made some good progress last night. We're polishing it off, getting events to happen when they should, getting rid of the corner cases, and also i think i am hallucinating. there is a headless man in my livingroom selling pails to dozens of Grimaces, and they are scrutinizing the buckets for flaws in workmanship, and also volume. Volume is a very important criterion when buying a pail. mark my words.

Ok, so I've uploaded our final entry to http://ezide.com/pyweek08.tar.gz

I am exhausted. We'll get it uploaded to pyweek.org tonight.

I think I've fixed the memory leak. Uploading new version.

If you have any comments or questions about Yo Yo Brawlah, please post them here. We'll try to answer them as best we can.