None of us were that enthusastic about the 8-bit theme, so it took some time for us to settle on a game idea, but we've eventually decided on some sort of boardgame inspired concept, with the protangonist as a robot with 8 flags which can be toggled, and various puzzles that require having the flags set to the correct state.

Having settled on a concept, the rest of the day was spent trying to add enough scaffolding that we could actually start looking at implementing gameplay. Progress was somewhat delayed by detours into making things look more 8-bit'ish and repeated discussions about the gameplay, but it showing signs of progress.

We have art for the protangist and some of the items in the game, and a fair amount of work on the general game state and board, and a bunch of work on rendering ugly text, and grand plans for the rest of the week (which will meet with rude reality tomorrow morning).

Well, quiet on the pyweek front. Work was pretty busy today, with intern candidates to be interviewed on top of the usual Monday madness. The dearth of commits to our repo indicates that the rest of the team was equally occupied by employers and regularly scheduled tabletop roleplaying.

Nevertheless, some small amount of progress was made. Our location cards are now loaded from a file instead of being a very short hardcoded list and the player can move around on the board if the correct bits are set. No screenshot today because the visuals haven't really changed and I don't much feel like trying to construct the necessary markup to display it.

I predict that tomorrow will commence with a flurry of activity and that by the end of the day we'll have something that looks more like a game than an 8-bit art project.

More interns were interviewed during the workday, today. A talk was given by a team member, in the evening, and a bunch of us had dinner afterwards. But most importantly, things moved forward in the game.

The basic gameplay has been implemented - the robot can move, and perform actions. The mechanics of this aren't quite right, yet, but it's a start. The art got a repaint, using an historically accurate Apple II palette (thanks Wikipedia), and real bitmap fonts.

Next on the plate are a few missing bits, some beeps, and generally trying to make the game more fun.

Today we decided that an effective resolution of 200x150 was not enough pixels for a game with lots of text in it. So we increased it to a luxurious 400x300. We kept the same palette -- let's not get carried away.

You can now preview squares as well as moving the robot. Legal moves are highlighted. There are more actions. If you lose, the game makes you feel bad. I don't know what happens if you win, because the game is hard.

I need to make this entry longer so that the screenshots don't run into each other.

The striped pattern on the robot is a homage to the markings of the only naja species endemic to southern Africa.

Now that we have all this space, we will soon be adding more information about actions to the squares on the board.

Today saw a lot of fleshing out of the game board interface. Highlights include:

• We have sounds! And they're 8-bit! Zoop!
• We have a sound generating tool -- for generating even more 8-bit sounds over the last two days!
• Select tile and valid move highlights became overlays and look much nicer
• Winning is easier (and doesn't require the MSB)
• The players current square is now always a valid move (also helps with winning)
• The game was completed for the first time (by confluence)
• Numerous reworks of the game board controls -- arrow keys now change the selected tile, tab moves to the next valid move and enter performs a move
• Similar reworking of the information area -- arrow keys now change the selected action, tab moves to the next valid action and enter performs an action
• We noticed we were using some colours from outside our chosen 16-colour palette, so we made an official list of colours and have started applying those through-out (I'm sure we've missed some)
• Usuable actions are now greyed out
• Action text acquired funky symbols (and now those are greyed out too)
• We acquired a new image transformation for blending images with colours (in order to grey out the glyphs)

I think we're entering the last two days in good shape. Tomorrow we'll hopefully clean up the win and lose screens and the splash screen and credits, leaving Saturday for polishing the game play, add cool new features and packaging.

Today's stats:

• 44 commits
• 1 branch
• 88 files changed
  • 56 images
  • 5 sounds
  • 15 source files (including 3 test files)
• 463 insertions(+)
• 201 deletions

Currently under development:

• Chess moves

• Music
• Loading, saving and resuming games
• Chess moves
• Glyphs and action symbols in text
• Splash screen
• MSB flag on robot working
• Tile juggling actions
• Building JSON from YAML to avoid an extra dependency
• Centered text
• Windows packaging
• Python source distribution packaging
• More sounds
• Various difficulty levels
• Start of puzzle mode
• In game instructions on how to play
• Cheat codes
• Less whimsical credits
• Fixed long-standing box_width bug

Stuff that happened today:

• Animations -- tile spinning and flashing borders
• Fine tuning tile selection
• Music added everywhere
• Decaying blocks
• New icons
• Puzzles
• Double arrow selectors
• REALLY fancy tutorial
• No, seriously, it's fancy
• GenericBits
• It has super cow powers.
• Generate JSON at build time
• Autoscrolling
• Bikeshedding (luckily there are only 15 options)
• NINTENDO Hard!
• Game balance -- everyone has an equal chance of dying
• Packaged all the things! For Windows, OS X, Debian and other Unixes
• Portability of .dmg is uncertain.

• pedantic correntions
• Mor deth wit speling
• F**king megres
• de-heath the tests
• robots repel locks
• Good point, neil, KP_ENTER should count too
• Don't scrible on the original image
• Squawk a bit
• Fix cheat detection.
• Hack hack hack hack
• PHYRRIC Victory\!
• *REAL* Python has no dict comprehensions.
• corrected horse metaphor
• Flashing your mom. Maturity level rising.
• You can deal with comlications in untroduction.
• To boldly unsplit [infinitives]

Download it from the official website!

I've finally managed to construct a Mac OS X package that works on machines that aren't mine: robolock-II-0.1.dmg

This is identical code to our final entries. Only the packaging has changed.

For the curious (especially me-in-the-future), I ended up with the following process after much trial and error:

1. Install a 32-bit (not 64-bit) Python from python.org -- I used this one.
2. Install a suitable pre-built pygame package from pygame.org -- I used this one.
3. Create a virtualenv using the aforementioned Python and pass --system-site-packages so that the aforementioned pygame is available.
4. Install game depencies in this virtualenv, install py2app, run python setup.py py2app or whatever.