I was going to create a dual-stick shooter in a dark cave where the only light is the light from projectiles. I got a functionally working prototype [youtube link] wrt lighting effects. Unfortunately, despite the smooth appearance, it's actually dropping FPS and there's only a few bullets on the screen and so it's not particularly viable. It seems the pygame blend modes are great for either one-time-then-cached image modifications or blitting small areas. But having a "shadow layer" that you blit light away from with gradient images...well...I'm not sure what I expected, performance-wise.

I'm going to go down to the next item on my ideas list and start over today.

Given that I had a false start on the first weekend (where I get most coding done), PyWeek coinciding with PAX, having a cold the entire time up through yesterday, a few other commitments I made, and, most importantly, limited evening coding hours due to unforeseen fires that manifested at work, I'm going to have to declare DNF for this PyWeek. I do plan on finishing my game at my own pace, but at the moment, I'm not on any sort of trajectory to finish what I've started in the remaining 45 hours. I'll polish up what I have (it's just a generic platformer engine at this point) and upload it, but it won't really be a game. But don't worry, I'll still push all the necessary buttons for the site to function for everyone else!