So after about 5 hours of work, we settled on an idea for the theme.
We originally had about 3 different ideas we were kicking around, but we really wanted to do something unique with the theme.

Our first idea was a cabin defense thing vs hordes of zombies, where you can hire new people, that upgrade, and position them around the house. You could also purchase weapons/ammo for your guys, and items to use to barricade (like tables, couches, refrigerators, etc.) - and fought different sorts of enemies, requiring different strategies for each wave.
As we got going we started to feel that this had been done too much and wasn't really a fun way to think about the theme.


Our second idea was basically to have a player in their house/kitchen (whatever) and monsters are attacking, and you had to use whatever was in the kitchen as weapons, to either chuck, or set traps or barricades. The idea behind it was the saying "throw everything including the kitchen sink" - so we envisioned a character furiously trying to rip down the sink to throw as a weapon.
Sadly this seemed to require a large amount of art (which I am still not very fast/good at) - and would really work well in 3d, not so much 2d, so we scrapped it.

We we settled on was using the room as a concept for your starting point. The idea going back to zombies, you wake up, and it is announced that the zombie apocalypse has started, you have two minutes, and various items in your room (based on which class you start as) - you can only take a few items, so choose wisely, and quickly. Once you select your items you emerge into the world, and must fight off the waves of zombies and locate the other survivors (the other playable classes) - as each provides a skill crucial to survival. Resources are very limited outside of your room, so the tools you select, and proper use of the skills provided by each character are necessary to survive.
The goal is to reach the evac point, where you throw a flare and trigger a zombie hoard you must survive until the helipcopter arrives, and then fight through to reach the helicopter. Points are awarded based on how quickly you finish, how many characters are left in your party at the end, and also how many of each characters sub-quests you complete. For instance, the medic gets points for each type of zombie she collects a specimen from. The soldier from each type of zombie killed, etc.



After we settled on the idea I spent the next 4-ish hours getting the basics down, such as relearning Pygame as I haven't used it since last Pyweek I participated in ^_^ - we absolutely knew we were going to go 2d, and non-networked, as those have been royal pains in the past. So we created a basic half-tile map engine (kind of like isometric, with 64x32 tiles, but they are rectangles not diamonds) - we got the GIF loader working, and created basic tile, character and zombie images (the stick figures lol - zombies are animated gifs as well). We also set up the camera following the player, and the zombie spawner to purge zombies that fell too far behind and to respawn zombies in the direction the player is heading.

I ran into a lot of initial bugs setting things up, due to the rustiness with Pygame, but overall we have a decent base. I hope that this time I haven't been too ambitious, but we'll see.


Hope everyone else is doing well!

So today got to a slow start, but we spent it refactoring code and getting the map engine more robust. Once that was done we started adding pieces, like buildings and objects that eventually we would interact with. Then a wave of collision bugs hit so we spent about 4 hours just fixing all of those... lol Luckily I don't think I have to work in the morning so maybe I can get a jump on fixing this stuff up! The idea has coalesced really well, and the biggest question left is actually whether to allow going inside buildings on the map, or popping in as a special screen, though the latter seems simple to code, possibly. Anyway, seeing some other awesome projects, can't wait to try them all out!!!

We implemented a day/night cycle to things, and some of my viewers are going to create some art so i can focus on coding!

It's been a busy morning, so thought I'd add a mid-day update.
We updated our controllers to be in a group so we can easily offload the logic into it's own specific area, and let things interact, so zombies can check what time it is from our timecontroller and decided how to handle the zombies (aggressive, line of sight, etc.)
With the time of day you can now see day creeping in and dawn and away at dusk, and then getting pretty dark the rest of the night. I kind of need to set it to be darker longer instead of a smooth increment from 2:00am back or forward.
We implemented ghosting so our party will be visible while behind other objects, updated buildings so you can go inside and out (revealing/hiding the roof), and updated object generation to stop objects from going inside other objects (as much as possible).


There has also been a lot of work on the world to update the engine to work better and be cleaner, and we are now ready to start adding some functionality. I've tried to make this style of game many times before (map engine style) - but we always seemed to have more issues than we could handle, and never got to the actual gameplay until the last day or two. It looks like this time we've solved that issue and are able to start working on the core controls and such much sooner, which is exciting!

I've also been checking out the other entry, and did a run down of them for my viewers - some impressive stuff happening guys - we can't wait to try them!

So only a bit more progress from earlier.
Fixed a bug with GIFImage where it was handling some GIFs poorly and causing them to be all stacked and yucky - probably due to being additive gifs.
Got an updated Zombie - though it still needs work.
Fixed the day/night cycle to be nice and smooth.
Added Map Labels and Icons, you can see the HPBarIcon.

I am happy with how easy it was to add the icons (basically exact same code for zombies and survivalist) - but not so happy with how closely I have "stacked" my logical objects on top of the map entities representing them, seems like I am asking for trouble, but short on time so no fixing for now.
Finally, we have the start to our map spawning, with just the house, some trees and some initial zombies around.

Still left to do are adding a lot more buildings, characters and zombie types, and getting the generation all correct on those. Once that is in getting inventory/skills in, along with interacting with objects, to round out the core features.
Lastly will be adding actual combat and the zombie logic, which will likely be the last two days, we'll see.

So... I am having this feeling of deja vu.
Normally on my entries we start out working from Saturday night til Thursday, everyone crash and then we restart completely and finish the last two days.
This year we seem to have better luck where we have really stable, flexible code that seems to be fairly robust - which is awesome.

The problem, however, is that we need a ton of art assets to make the game work - basically isometric images for each character, object and building in the world (completely animated and facing each of 8 directions), we need tiles for the map, we need inventory items, and, if possible, representations of those items on characters, we need projectiles, we need sounds and music.

Basically, we need a ton of images - far too many to ever complete on time, unless we had a few dedicated artists, which we don't.
So now I have to come up with a different way of handling things, either by going sort of like a Zombie version of "Stay Alive" that is turn based (which seems slow and weird), or just say screw it to the directions of characters, and just to one image, animated if possible, that moves where we go, and remove any notion of direction facing - which sort of sucks as I built an awesome system for that today...

Either way, it appears I need to find a way to remove a lot of the art assets we need ro be able to focus more on the gameplay - and then possibly add those assets back in later... hmm...

After concerns we needed too much art we scaled back on the artistic goals of the game... and then work and life happened.
Basically spent more time at work than I wanted and just didn't have it in me to code anymore.
Even though I know I could get the code part of it done, I would have had to pull a couple overnighters and with work requiring that already, that was not to be.

Some entries look amazing though - so definitely looking forward to trying them!