It's 9am here in Pennsylvania and I've managed to make a decent foray into a Robot-themed game (I forgot to sleep last night). I've decided to go with a side-scrolling shooter, a la Duke Nukem. The game will have a Cyberpunk/Noir feel to it, with heavy narration to make up for my complete inability to draw.

I've written up an introduction for the game, so for anyone who's interested:

What defines humanity? My mantra, my curse, my salvation. I ask myself this question every minute of every hour of every day, ever since...

It was raining, that first day. The sky was rent asunder, icy droplets cascaded down like blood from an open wound, freezing the once bustling metropolis in it's corpse-like grasp. To think, none of this would have happened had it not been for the rain on that god-forsaken day.

I was on my way to the Lab that morning, when Heaven ripped open and tried to flood the world again. In a way, it did. That torrential downpour sent tendrils of ice through my veins, and froze my very soul. I ducked into a Café, as much to escape the deluge as in the hopes of a hot cup of coffee to restore the warmth of my soul. I waited patiently in line for my turn to order. I was in no rush that day, it would be weeks before the specimen was ready for Phase II. When I finally got my hands on some coffee, I basked in it's warm radiance filling my core as I drank, slowing undoing the damage incurred by the storm. I sat down at a table facing the storefront, and watched as the wind and water vainly attempted to reach me, to strangle the warmth from my soul. The storm battled ineffectually with the window, as I sat back with my coffee enjoying the duel.

How could I have known it was at that moment that Hell would choose to break loose?

A pillar of flame erupted from the direction I knew the Lab to be in, flashing the water to steam. The shockwave hit moments after, shattering the window the storm had tried so futilely to defeat, hurling the shards at me like so many knives from the mouth of hell. My body was perforated by the flying glass, and I blacked out as one particularly large shard embedded itself in my eye...

Hooray, I've finished the basic platformer elements of my game. There's jumping, and gravity, and collisions, and all that good stuff. Here's a screenshot of an early test level:

The somewhat flimsy plot device that is meant to excuse my horrible coder art is that the protagonist, after suffering a near fatal injury, has had certain parts of himself replaced by adaptive cybernetics, including his eyes, which causes him to see the world, um, squareish.

With still 111 hours left in pyweek, I've managed to get rudimentary firing/enemies implemented. I might actually finish this game. There's even destructible walls!

Here's a random screenshot of an enemy:

(And, yes, I know my "art" sucks, but I completely lack any artistic talent whatsoever.)

Nope, it's not. I haven't found more than an hour of coding time spread over the last 3 days. So, I'm afraid this game will not be done on time.

Sure, I could spend the next 12 hours coding my ass off, and I might even be able to finish some semblance of a game in that time. But, no, that's not happening either. I'm just gonna have to bow out of this one, unfortunately.

I won't just abandon this game, I do have some good ideas for it, but it'll proceed at a much slower development pace, as I shift my focus from project to project. If something ever comes of it, I'll throw it up on pygame.org.

Good luck to all the other entrants, a number of these games look really nice. Hopefully I'll be back next pyweek with more time to code. Until then, I suppose.