Well, it has been an exceedingly active off-season for us, but we are back now.

But, all of our artists are gone this time, so if there is anyone who would like to join a team, let me know ;)
Good luck all!

So far we are making excellent progress.
We're planning a pretty original tbs game, and already have most of the major mechanics done.
Now we need to piece them together and add the gui and art :)

We did have a couple problems today.
I spent about 6 hours trying to figure out how to merge two polygons into one. About got there, but missing the final couple of pieces - so we are laying the stuff we planned with that aside for now - probably will make everything easier later on anyways :S

Besides that, no serious problems as of yet, though a few minor ones. The big tests will be ai, and possibly multiplayer (we're trying to decide if we even want to pursue that...)

Should see something playable in 2 or 3 days I hope, then we're splitting up tasks:
Me - AI
Markus - art, networkings (maybe)
Pymike - art, feature addition
Keeyai - bugs, features, anything we missed

Along with the rest of the team filling in when they get a chance.


Overall, I think this is the best, most unique, and most "get it done in a week"-able idea we have ever had :D
So I am very pleased.

Cheers all - lots of good entries so far XD

Well, a bit late - 8 hours late actually but w/e.

Been an interesting day.
Pymike and Ieuan made some images for the game now,
Markus continued work on the battle engine,
I refactored code, added a state engine, added some units and got them moving.
Along with numerous other small additions from everyone I can't even remember right now it is so late.

We wasted a few hours trying to decide how to go about moving units and whatnot. Finally came up with a good idea we should have had 3 hours sooner LOL.

All-in-all - this is almost a game already - with almost all the mechanics in place.

My tasks for tomorrow will be to refactor code, add some UI so you don't have to hotkey everything, add the rest of the movement code for the units, and then start on some resource gathering/using.
Markus is going to finish the battle engine code, and then starting on some ships in blender.
Pymike will be doing some more 2d art, working out bugs, and other misc stuff.

Along with tons of other stuff we need to do tomorrow that most of the other members will be picking up XD

Good night all :)

... Well, this has been an incredible day. Everything now is starting to pull together game-play wise, and we have our first screenie. The only thing that we hoped to start today that we did not was the UI - but we'll have to see about that tomorrow ;)



In this image you can see hotseat play already working, between player green and red. You can also see player red has a unit selected that has the area it can move to highlighted, and the ranges for attacking circled around - with three bands, one for each range.
Also, player red has a unit docked at an island.
Oh, and most importantly you can see the territory borders as well ;)

Not shown rally well are the moving water in the background, and scrolling the map. Or the first resource implemented in-game (no hints as to what it is yet ;) ).

All-in-all - I think we are still pretty close to on schedule.
Tomorrow will hopefully see some new art creation, as well as the resource management fully in place, the gui up and running, and the battle engine in place.

Still lots to do, but it is only Tuesday O.o so we are good XD

Well, it was an uber busy day for me, and then I haven't been feeling well this past little bit it has been quiet :S
So a bit behind schedule, but not bad. Markus is still working on lots of the things planned, so maybe those will come through - but the GUI *MUST* get done tomorrow now...

G'night all ;)

Well, Markus and I are still going at it, and we hope ot have the rest of the UI done before we go to bed in about 2 hours or so, but I thought we would give you a bit of an update:



As you can see, you can build three kinds of ships, you can move them, you can fight, you can draw territories - almost everything really necessary is DONE!

We are actually a little freaking out, as we are starting to test and polish now - and it is only Thursday (erm, ok, Early Friday) - and we never usually even get much to those, but neve before the last day!
Woot!

Well, so now we get to look back on the first part of the week and see what has happened.
Currently Markus and I are running on very little sleep - I have been averaging about 5-6 hours each night now, staying up 'til 5 am this morning - so today started out a little anti-productive, but we have managed to turn that around finally.

Today so far we have some sounds, code and art from Ieuan (Unnheulu), some art and code from Pymike, a lot of code form Markus and myself.

The battle gui is now done, as well as automated resource gathering - though the gui is not yet in place to actually stop this LOL.

SO now, about 6 hours behind schedule I am starting to hit the ai - and Markus is working on finishing up the UI.

After that, we have a few bugs, but then we are pretty much golden and just need some playtesting and balancing.

Woot, we may finish yet! :D

This has been both an incredibly awesome, and a really upsetting Pyweek.
We came up with an incredible idea the first day - and it sounded like it was doable.

The first few days it was just Markus and me doing anything, and it was pretty slow for some reason, but we usually start that way.

Late Tuesday and Wednesday we finally got a move on - you could draw new territories around islands, build units, and move them around the territory they were made in.
Pymike also contributed some code that day, and a bit of art.

Wednesday night/Thursday was *massive*. The UI was started and got almost to the finished state, battling was completed, different ship types were introduced.

On Friday the ai was started, the ui finished to the state of the current functionality, automated raiding by your ships enabled, battle engine was tweaked, and more gfx were done.

And now, what we did today.
I finished up the ai, and that took most of the day (and it is still rather buggy and slow - and you can see the printouts if you want to understand it's inner workings :P), and finished the hud, as well as other misc things.
Pymike added the territory names, which Ieuan made, into the main view, along with a lot of art and various other coding.
Markus patched up a number of serious bugs in the battle code/gui - and that took mos tof the day, he also added capitol attacking (though atm you will have to keep attacking forever!)
And Ieaun made some more art and did various coding.


On the whole, we are very disappointed not to have finished. But we should have seen that coming when 1 of our primary coders had a solo, another was unavailable for most of the competition due to a hurricane and work, another had two other had no time because of school.

So that left only Markus and I for the serious coding, and the rest mainly popping in for some art and a little code as they were able.


But, on the other hand, we did not torture the code into oblivion trying to finish, and this really is a unique idea on the whole - so we will be continuing it now - so that is the primary point of pyweek eh? And the game looks nice and runs acceptably (except for sometimes with the ai) on my old comp.


So, we also don't have any instructions or explanation of the story - so...
If you are interested in the basics outline see the this page: http://code.google.com/p/hiths-p4-pyweek6/wiki/Idea1
It is a little outdated, but you can get the basic gist of it there.

Now to play it is simple, hit the expand button (or the "r" key) to start drawing a new territory if it is your turn. The number under the mouse is how much it will cost to make - red and it is too much - right click to stop, or left click on the starting point to finish.
You must build territories around at least one island - and they cannot be too close to another, so if you "finish" it, and it disappears, it was not valid.

Once you have a territory, you can left click anywhere inside it to select it. Here you can build units by hitting the build button, or hitting the space bar (I think).
If a unit is too expensive you simply won't make it.
Also, you can only have a certain number of units in a territory - this number is not shown in the ui yet, but just keep trying until you see the console print "too many units" or something close to it.
To select a unit left click on it.
Around it you will see three thin lines, and one green area. The green area represents where you can move this turn - note you must have string on board to pass over territory lines (explained further in).
To add string, simply click the Add 50 string button.
The hud will display the vital stats of the unit as well.
Right click anywhere in the green to move your ship there.
The three other rings are your ranges. Any enemy within these you can attack - with different options at different ranges.
Right click on an enemy vessel within range to attack it.
A dialog will pop up, you choose your attacks, and hit Fire!
Also not the minimap on the bottom left, clicking or click-dragging on it will cause the map to zoom there.
Those are the basics - the rest is a bit iffy.

Now, here are some hints to make the game at least a little fun - and you can try everything.
Change to hotseat play.
In lib/game.py: Line 27 - you will see a line in main() like this:
state.add_player(AIController)
Change that to:
state.add_player()
And C&P for how many players you want.

Listen to the music.
Nihilocrat made some awesome music (yet again) for the game, which you can listen to in the data/music dir.
Also here is a 3 line update that allows you to add one of the tracks into the game:
import os
pygame.mixer.music.load(os.path.join('data', 'music', 'rio_grande.ogg'))
pygame.mixer.music.play(-1)
Add those lines at line 35 of main() in lib/game.py

And that is about it for now - please post here if you have any questions.

Vital stats, insane team members - at least two.
Average amount of sleep for me and Markus ~5-6 hours a night.
Lines of code: 3259
Time for some sleep ;)

Cheers all, and well done to everyone who actually submitted a working game - and I look forward to playing them :)

EDIT: Final Screenshot! All purty... And green is about to be slaughtered...

I actually am quite surprised - we broke a 3.0 rating on this games O.o
I can't for the life of me figure how this game got higher ratings than our previous - but I guess it was that most people liked our idea - just couldn't find the fun.
Which is not very surprising as, well, there wasn't anything. We ran out of time and there were no directions - not even in the readme - at least we maintained our tradition of no DNW's or DQ's - so that is a plus XD

Most of the comment we received concerned the gameplay - or lack thereof - or the UI.
The UI was not explained well - as we figured it would be fairly intuitive to those who had played this type of game before - but a lot fo people are not as big of fans as we are - which we entirely overlooked, as well we did add a lot of oddities for a TBS - so I am not surprised - pleased would be more accurate :)

For the questions on gameplay - we didn't finish it - so it is not just you LOL :)

For the UI - I will try and explain a little...
To start drawing new territories you hit the expand button - then you click around the map to make the territory.
If it was a valid territory then a new border will be drawn in your player color, with boulders at the points and a name by the capitol island.

To build a new ship - click anywhere in one of your territories to select it - then hit the build ship button.
You should then come to a menu where you can select the type of ship - there are four kinds - scrolling over the ships a pop-up with their stats/costs should appear as well.

To control a ship, left click on it and you will some lines. the three non-solid lines show the range of attack of the ship - any enemies inside this can be right clicked and you can fight them - with different attack types and outcomes based on the distance.
There will also be a green shading around the ship indicating where the ship can move to (assuming it has not yet moved and that it has speed - which can be removed in a fight). Right clicking anywhere in the green will move the ship to there.

To gather more resources, when you have a ship selected, you should see a button that says "Trade" or "Raid" or "Gather" or something - forget the exact details - if it is not there then that is a big thing we missed in the end rush O.o


That is about it - hit end turn when you are done - if you can beat the enemies you win - though the game itself won't acknowledge it ;)

Thank you everyone for playing the game rating so highly this demo!
Cheers - and well done to the winners!