Today I tricked two more friends into joining us. This makes us a crew of six programmers!

We started yesterday with a meeting over Team-Speak. I had an idea in my head, that I had written down on our wiki, which we decided to go for. The design changed quite a bit during the discussion though, which is cool. :)

The concept is, and I quote: "The concept in Steam Empire is to build a network of railroads between industries in order to make a lot of money."

In other words, Railroad Tycoon Light. :)

We started coding yesterday. Decided to use PGU because it had a hex rendering engine, which is just awesome for games like our game. Although I was afraid we would have to use something else last night, cause I couldn't get it working properly. I solved that this morning though, so now (we just managed to add GUI widgets too) there should be no more technical problems left, I hope.

Today I've mainly been working on the rendering of the railroad tracks. I had to draw hex tiles for a lot of different situations (where a rail comes from the top left and goes to the bottom, for example). I finally got it working a couple of hours ago, and you can see the screenshot in our entry home. It's pretty cool, clicking out rails and watching them connect automatically. :)

Now comes the tricky part I guess (even though it hasn't been all easy getting here): implementing the game logic.

I've been working with Jonex and Viblo during the last days (the others have taken a break/given up :) ).

Jonex thought we needed a new tile set, so he wrote a pretty interesting script that, using PIL, could generate all the different kinds of rails we would need. The result looked like this:

It also made the code for determining which tile that should be used a lot easier. However, after analyzing exactly how the player would play the game, we today decided to scrap most of the tiles. Well - we decided that we weren't gonna use them. So, most of that work was for nothing. :/

Also, there seems to be something wrong with the rendering. Every other "column" has a "pixel error". Very weird.

Anyways, I've been spending a lot of time rewriting the code that determines what a tile with rails shuold look like. It mostly looks like it did before, but there are a couple of improvements (and one small thing I'm not too fond of).

The game looks like this using the new tiles:

So, we have unfortunately made very little progress since the previous screenshot was taken, even though we've worked quite a bit. The damn rail code, I tell you!

I hope that we can fix some actual game-play code tomorrow, because I can't participate very much on friday and saturday, so I wanna make sure that the project is on the right track (haha, track.. railtrack.. *tired*). A lot of the underlying data structures should be set up at least, so with a bit of luck it's just a matter of connecting them to the GUI. :)

Also, viblo has fixed mouse scrolling, some background code and some beginning GUI stuff.

I finally came up with a simple way to make a game out of our rails and industries.

Implementing it was rather easy (which was the whole point), and the gameplay is rather simplistic, but at least its an f-ing game! Well, when we get the highscore function in I guess.

Basically, the player sets up "routes" between industries. The steel mill needs coal and iron, so the player must build rails between, for example, a coal mine and the steel mill to start making some money. However, the longer the rail, the less it is worth.


Future work include:
- Inpassible (?) Mountains so it isn't just a matter of building a straight rail road
- Better GUI (and sound) feedback
- More industries
- balancing
- and more
It's almost 4 AM now, and won't be able to work that much tomorrow. So I think I'll try and wake up in time before I have to leave, so that I can update my fellow team members on the status of the project, which is now a game! :)

Btw, the game is now quite similiar, in a way, to our previous entry, SwecPower. Although, lets hope we can turn in something a bit more easy this time around.

Due to an unfortunate last-minute implementation of the highscore, a killer "bug" is in the final entry.
Rate us any way you please having this in mind (you'll only be able to play the game for ten seconds), but our game is worth trying just for the fun of it. :)
To quick-fix it, open up main.py, find row 138, and edit this line:
endTime = startTime + 10 * 1000 #(s * 1000 = ms)
to this:
endTime = startTime + 90 * 1000 #(s * 1000 = ms)


If you want to try the latest version, with a functional highscore (fully implemented three minutes past deadline!!), get it from here:
http://srekel.net/files/files/Steam%20Empire.zip

On the behalf of my team, I'm really sorry for these issues. As I said, try the full game, but rate us as if you had only played the first version if you want to.