I've roped in a friend (Mix Tape) to do art, which is a huge load off my mind. I had a maybe on sound (effects and music), but he backed out, so I'm still trying to fill that hole. I'd really like to get another coder on the team, but I've pretty much exhausted my friend base and nobody is interested. More than experience I'm hoping the compo nets me some new friends and contacts.

Theme is robots, game idea is set, tasks are assigned. We are go! Happily had another member join the team at the last minute. I agree with eugman's assessment of the theme; I will see where I can add his challenge ideas to our design. Unfortunately the screen restrictions are out for the idea we've settled on, but I can probably get pause in there! Finally, good luck everybody!

First real code check in. Solved the bottleneck problem - was a series of mistakes that led to me refreshing the entire lamina surface every frame. Solved the chain of problems and am now updating just the dirty rects. What was running at 4 fps before is now running at 60. Huzzah. Had our first art check in, so I can now start working on the game stuff. Hoping to get the robot moving and fighting tonight.

New check in. Robot moves. Game can randomly create basic level content for testing. The art is currently in weird sizes, so I scaled all the things I need down to 20×20. Will work this out with the crew later. Still haven’t solved the lamina.clear problem for the timer — what the hell. It seems like it just isn’t fast enough to be used in a realtime app. Sigh - now I have to find an openGL gui solution. Maybe there is something I can do to finagle the openGL and sprites and get a hacked out solution. Another option might be to somehow make rabbyt do the clearing for me, as it’s clears are absolutely fine. Anyway, here is the first screenshot. The robot looks just like a drum, so you probably can’t tell where it is, but trust me, it’s there. This is a randomly generated level, and the bot can’t actually interact with it yet, so it just drives around. Also, you can see that something is ‘off’ since only the top wall is there. I suspect I’ve calculated something wrong and the other walls are off screen.

101 hours 50 minutes remaining

Mix Tape has updated some of the art with a little color, so things are starting to look a lot nicer now. Also, collisions are in and working better than before (although not perfectly). Everything has friction now so it doesn’t just sail off or spin forever. The beginnings of the melee code are in — contact with the bot does damage to objects, which will explode when destroyed. The explosions don’t do anything yet, but that is next.

Did something wrong with explosion scaling and ended up with this. A major bug, but funny none-the-less.

Video on Youtube

Added a bunch of weapon code and put rockets in the game. No firing delays yet, so you can get them to spew out pretty fast. Need to add explosion knockback and we should be good for things blowing up correctly. Here is a new vid with pushing, melee damage, and mostly rockets.

The pressure is really on now. Mix Tape (art) is out of town for the duration, but he is supposedly going to be sending in work from the road. I finished fluids and the menus last night. I’m behind schedule, but if no real work comes up today I think I can make it. Still have a few weapons to create, then the entire bot builder, the debrief screen, and the high score system. I’ve been judiciously stripping away features as time goes by, so we will see which of these actually make it to the final version.

I haven’t even started on sound and music yet, which is weighing heavily on my soul. I started to look around a bit for some free music to use, and I might go that route if I can confirm it is within the rules. Otherwise I have to hash out a BUNCH of sound in SFXR or with my mic, then figure out Musagi and quickly develop some musical talent. Sigh.

Anyway, there is a new video up on youtube with the fluids in. When you bash in a drum without blowing it up, the fluid inside will leak out onto the ground. Acid will eat through drums and boxes, gas will explode, water dilutes the others and washes them away. Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNvHymEIXds

50 hours 11 minutes remaining

The bot builder is now finished. I've gone totally overboard on using basic sprites instead of a GUI, but I think it turned out. It looks a little corny, but maybe that gives it flavor (if you like corn, I guess). The bot builder will only allow you to pick the weapons available for the level you are on, so we can customize the challenges using the levels. I decided against letting people bind their own keys. It would have been nifty, but it just isn't worth the amount of time I'd have to spend at this point.

Behold the bot builder! (Should really be called the weapon selection screen or something).

Started and finished the level editor, which great results. I've had a surprising amount of fun just goofing off creating levels (it's like pixel art, only... not). Here are a few examples.

Made some changes to the wall code - walls are now rendered separately and are added to the pymunk space as static objects. This brought my fps on the maze level (HEAVY on the walls) from 4 back up to the cap of 30.

Here is a screenshot of the maze level. Imagine doing this without the level editor… **shudder**

30 hours 53 minutes remaining Playability has arrived! It is still not nearly finished, but the game is officially playable. You load up, have a menu, play the levels in order, and have a win screen. Hooray! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

27 hours 43 minutes remaining

Fixed a lot of bugs that sprouted up when the game states are looped through the multiple levels. Having a working game is definitely a load off -- even if everything else goes to shit, we have a functional, if silent and buggy, entry.

I added mouse support to the main menu, which I think adds a nice touch. It also leads the user to use the mouse on the weapon select screen. It also made me think about adding keyboard selection to the weapon screen, but that is definitely at the bottom of the (very long) list.

I ended up writing essentially some shitty sprite/gui tools to do all my text and icons without resorting to a gui lib. See the previous entries for why I don't want to go down that road again.

To gameplay, I've added a bonus for completing the whole thing, and now it stops the level immediately when you do so you don't have to wait for time to expire while you have nothing to destroy.

The two biggest lag producers in the game are explosions and liquids. On the railgun1 level, there are rows and rows of barrels and boxes in line but behind walls, so you have to line up and blast them with a railgun. This destroys them all and results in a massive fireball of awesomeness (+2 cool). Unfortunately, on my crippled machine this means the FPS drops down below 10, making the game completely unplayable.

In an effort to combat this, I've changed the collision code to only process explosions and liquids every other few frames. It has helped the lag a little, and I think I've got it tweaked so everything still works like it should. I'll probably come back to this area later, especially if some of the testers experience a lot of lag as well.

Next up: music! Wish me luck!

16 hours 30 minutes remaining

Music and sound are done! Both are working pretty well together, although I think I went overboard. I certainly wasted a lot of time today on them... I tried to make my own music but failed horribly, so everything in the game is either directly or made from free loops online. Special thanks to the sites organizing/hosting them ( Freesound, Soundsnap, and Partners in Rhyme) and the authors who put them up there (all are listed in the readme.txt files inside the sound and music folders).

With sound and music done, the game is essentially finished. In fact, I'd be satisfied with using this iteration as the final product. But with 16 and a half hours remaining, you know I won't. :) My biggest problem with it all is the 18-ish MB of music and sound files I'll have to package with it. Oopsie...

Tonight I'm going to see what I can do on the storyboard, then catch a few hours of sleep. The GF is getting up at 7:00 am, so I'll rise and shine with her. As I joked with #pyweek, she is getting up to go do a lingerie shoot with her hot friend, and I will be jumping up and running to my computer as I wave goodbye to them. Where are my priorities?

Got up early this morning and over the last 3 hours finished the rest of the gameplay. There are still a few things missing, but I'm packaging it all up and submitting it.

I'm having trouble creating an executable that works with rabbyt. My usual pyinstaller knowledge is proving insufficient, and I don't know how to solve it. Hopefully people will be able to run the source, but it requires pygame, rabbyt, pyopengl, and setuptools (no idea why setuptools).

Well, we're finally finished. Pretty sure the package is right, which was my biggest concern for today. Never did get any executables working with rabbyt -- big letdown there. That will be a MAJOR limiting factor for its use if I can't get that figured out.

Anyway, enjoy! Sorry in advance for making you download rabbyt, pyopengl, and setuptools.

I've simultaneously kept this diary, and a few extra things, on my blog at http://keeyai.com. I'll always check comments there; no guarantees here. You can go to http://keeyai.com/projects-and-releases/mua/office-space-5000/ for the Office Space 5000 page. If you like (or hate) the game, please leave a comment. If people actually care, we will make some more levels and add some extras to the game, like custom level imports, level packs, etc. I hope to see you there.

Wow, after literally 6 hours of hacking and slashing and crying and screaming and searching, I have a working executable. Ran into a laundry list of problems, including Rabbyt upgrades leaving incorrect code and, the doozy, pyOpenGL 3 only being in .eggs and using pkg_resources. This caused me such a giant headache...

I finally did get it, and it was through the help of this mailing list entry: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=473C586D.10805%40gmail.com

So if you are running into similar problems and aren't afraid to REALLY hack your py2exe stuff, check it out and save yourself the headache(s).

Unfortunately, my linux box has been dead for a long time, so I couldn't do any linux testing before submitting. This led to me overlooking the fact that I had a chipmunk DLL, which is windows only, forcing linux users to download and build chipmunk from source. Ieuan tried to get it working for a while today, but with no luck, so apparently we're dead in the water for linux. :'(

If you DO manage to get chipmunk installed correctly in linux, please let me know ASAP (keeyai _at_ gmail) so I can share the info with everyone else and hopefully not get so many does not works.

Ouch, only 9 people judged our game? :(

I didn't know where to post this, so I made it a diary page. Also posted at LudumDare. Over the last few days I've been working on a program to manage the playing and judging of games during the competition. I've reached the beta stage and need your help. Here is the full link - http://keeyai.com/2008/07/16/compo-game-loader/ - please give it a read.