Well, "Feather" was the last thing either of us expected to see, so we were at quite a loss for ideas this morning, but, well, Angel-G be shootin' oil, yo. This has to be one of the wackiest project premises I've ever gone through with, and the same likely goes for Arashi, too.

And that's all we're ready to say. The game's minimally playable, so we're taking a break 'til tomorrow.

Screenshots Wednesday-ish, once we've got enough fancy stuff to show off.

So, tomorrow, I'll just have to write a lot of zombie-logic scripts and get a demo level working so we can start balancing speeds and angles and stuff, but aside from that, everything that matters is essentially complete.

The scripting system is done, the artwork is done aside from a bit of last-minute polish work, all gameplay elements work, and there don't appear to be any bugs.

Oh. I might also get around to writing a main menu and intro sequence tomorrow. Voice work will probably wait 'til Thursday or Friday, though.

First screenshots will be available tomorrow, once we have a practical level in progress, rather than a stream of elements for debugging.

So, like, day 4's done, and aside from level-scripting, so are we. Yay.

We've added a screenshot that's filled with feather-y, and zombie-y, and a mostly obscured Angel-G-y-y. Unfortunately, given the way we're rendering everything, no screenshot can possibly capture the look and feel of this game. When we've got a full level scripted, we'll add a video or something so you can see why.

For now, though, we're pretty pleased with what we have, and we hope that, come PyWeek judgment day, you will be, too. Pleased with our project, I mean. And yours, too, I suppose.

At last, everything essential is done.

We still need to calculate scores for each level and balance difficulty/locations of power-ups, but everything is playable, and there's a consistent amount of action throughout every level.

Well, it's been a rather long week into highly uncharted territory, but I'm reasonably proud of what we've completed.

This is our second actual game (and our first done entirely with PyGame; the first game was Ultra Tank-chan!). We are not, either of us, game developers by any stretch of the imagination, and to further complicate things, Arashi had to leave unexpectedly on Friday morning for the entire weekend, depriving us of our full power during the critical period. (So, like, if you're playing this game and find that even Casual's a bit tough, despite my efforts at balancing, you know why. Ditto for the uneven point distribution through the levels)

As you'll find when you play, where we wanted a deceptively bright and cheery, quasi-retro-tech look for UTc!, we decided to go for another unique, and totally different, look with Angel-G. We hope you'll like it, even though it consumes a ton of RAM and bullies my Eee's CPU.

Also, though this game does have a number of rather tough spots (hint: use the left arrow key), it is, on normal, at least, possible to get through the whole thing without losing a life -- this was the key metric of our design philosophy: if we can get through it without dying, then it's beatable by non-us people with a reasonable stock of lives. And, for reference, neither Arashi nor I have touched a game in this genre since the 16-bit days, so we kinda suck at these games to begin with.


Lastly, and something we probably should have posted on day one: the origins of this idea.

We really, really wanted Scissors. We had a totally awesome idea picked out for that. We both voted against Feather. When Feather was picked, we were stunned.

We started brainstorming things that were related to feathers. At one point, as I often do, I made a typo and 'anelg' was produced. Immediately, we siezed upon this slip: "Angelg*" "Angel-g" "Angel-G!" "Gangster angel!" was pretty much the way it went.

I then polled people in another channel for ideas related to feathers while Arashi tried to think of a genre. He ended up chosing something with side-scrolling flight and I returned with the concept of tar-and-feathering stuff. We married the ideas and Angel-G as a side-scrolling shooter was conceived.

From there, we just kinda did whatever and randomly picked lines from out conversations that we felt hilarious enough to randomly thrust into the narrative and premise, and now we have the culmination of a week's worth of such done whatever.

Enjoy. Or hate. Just do something.


-Neil