I've decided on a concept. It will be a peaceful RTS-style game based around building a lunar colony.

Resources: water, silica, metal ore, sunlight (for solar power)

Fixed units: habitat, smelter (turns ore into metal and silica into glass), factory, farm, solar panel, hydrolysis plant (to produce oxygen from water), transport tube

Mobile units: worker, rover

I started on the coding last night, and I made a bit of artwork today:


A loon (any resemblance to a Kerbal is entirely coincidental).

Got a walking animation working for Loon movement. I probably spent longer on it than I should have, but it looks at least 3126.48% better than my last RTS effort, where the units moved around like cheesy cardboard cutouts.

Also found a really big picture of a piece of lunar surface to use as a background. It's starting to look like the moon, if nothing else.

Last night I figured out how to render oblique views of 3D objects by bodgying together a tool chain involving Sketchup, Preview, Seashore and Intaglio. I know, smart people use Blender for that sort of thing, but it doesn't fit my brain well enough for use under pressure.

Used it to create a nice-looking lunar lander unit. Also put together the beginnings of a resource system.

Woke up this morning thinking that I need to have a separate Mission object for handling the various actions that a unit can perform. That may have to wait a bit, though, as non-Pyweek duties are calling. :-(


Lander, and some ore and water deposits.

Loons can now construct buildings and carry resources from one place to another. One building type is implemented so far, the Smelter. (Mostly implemented -- it doesn't actually smelt anything yet...)

I spent several precious minutes trying to figure out why "Factory.try_to_start_building" wasn't getting printed by this method.

  def try_to_start_building(self, cls):
    "Factory.try_to_start_building" ###
    missing = self.resources.use(**cls.construction_resources)
    if missing:
      self.missing_resources = missing
    ...

Made very good progress today. Added a bunch of units and got it into a minimally playable state. Time for a release in case I don't get another chance.

Things remaining to be done, roughly in order of priority:

• Start with more than one loon
• A unit for training more worker loons
• Finish the help file
• Solar panels, power system
• Time limit
• Title screen
• Sounds and music

Did quite a lot of last-minute polishing this morning, and even managed to find some appropriate music. As always, I didn't have time to implement everything I had in mind, but it's good enough to call it done. I can get back to playing Kerbal Space Program now!

To prevent occasional crash when a resource finishes getting mined, apply this change to Game/Code/missions.py:

--- missions.py.orig    2013-09-07 17:51:27.000000000 +1200
+++ missions.py    2013-09-14 09:41:07.000000000 +1200
@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@
             return target.resources
    
     def units_removed(self, unit, units):
-        if self.target in units:
+        if self.get_target_unit() in units:
             self.target = None
             if self.next_mission:
                 self.next_mission.units_removed(unit, units)