Okay, so I haven't spent much time thinking of writing journal entries. Between working a full time job, getting extremely sick yesterday and trying to squeeze something out for this week's competition...I just haven't had the time or motivation to do one. I figured I would at least do one quick before I continue to hack away at the code.

For this week's entry I decided to do a theme around a sea turtle named "Penelope." My wife helped me come up with the idea, and then I looked up information on sea turtles to make sure it would fit the theme. Sea turtles are quickly being wiped away, and their biggest "nemesis" is actually us. They do have other predators as well, such as tiger sharks. I decided to make a game where you need to avoid sharks and nets, and eat things like jellyfish and sponges(2 different types of sea turtles eat these) for points. The goal for each level is to make it to the end beach to lay your eggs so the sea turtles may continue to live another day. I may change the end goal a bit but the concept remains the same. Oh yeah, and you need to surface every once in a while to regain your breath. :)

And this is what I have so far. All the graphics and programming have been done by me thus far. For not being an artist I am pretty happy with what I have been able to do. Animating my sea turtle was interesting. :) Most all of the framework has been done and the mechanic is almost complete, I just need to add some other interface elements such as points, add some more entities and get each level to end and move on to a harder difficulty appropriately.

Well I'm all in at this point. Need to get to bed for work tomorrow and won't be home to submit a final or do any last minute changes, however I'm really happy with what I was able to do in a short period of time. Everything is pretty much done, I wish I could have done more of a finale at later levels and put some more polish on it (particle emitter) but oh well. :)

I'll be sure to try and write a postmortem when the competition is over. Have fun with the game! My wife sure did. :)

Well the judging has finished and the results have rolled in. I placed right about where I thought I would, smack dab in the middle. Still, I'm pretty happy with that since I had essentially two days to actually work on it (working 12+ hours a day and then duties at home took it's toll). Luckily(maybe?) I caught a terrible bug and had a day off from work. Here is what went right and what went wrong:

As for production, I was fairly happy overall and the results showed. I learned how to use some tools for the first time and was quite pleased with myself since I'm not an artist. This was literally the first time I made any significant graphics in 2d. My tools of choice for this were the GIMP and PyxelEdit. 

The game didn't have any sound or music until then end when I was desperately searching for something on open art sites. I was able to find some decent sound effects however music was another story. It was upsetting to me that the majority of data in my archive was just in music and it showed in one of my responses as well. Perhaps next PyWeek I will invest more time into learning creation tools for that aspect since I focused on making graphics this time around.

So as for fundamental game mechanic, I wanted to focus on simplicity due to A) time constraint and B) not wanting anything overly-complex. I think I both succeeded and failed in this aspect. Some people enjoyed the simple mechanic (avoid the bad things, eat the good things for points, keep your breath meter from running out) and others wanted more. I personally wanted something else at the end however did not have the time to think of and subsequently implement another mechanic. Perhaps you have a human sidekick trying to help you who will shoot what you are pointing at when you click? Who knows, but I had to get something out the door quickly so I didn't get a DNF.

I will do a "compliment sandwich" and end this with another thing that in my opinion went right. I tried to keep the code organized and clean which definitely helped me implement things quickly in the last couple days. I don't think I would have finished anything if I failed to think about my design before starting to code.

Overall I think there is a lot more I could have done with this concept given time however it was still an enjoyable challenge and a good stepping stone towards doing something even better next time. The top entries had well deserved scores and I commend you! :)