Well, Tim and I got on irc and pieced together a really cool (I think) idea/story for our FPS.
 And the good thing is that once the core is done (which should be like tomorrow or Tuesday) it just a matter of content.

So, I grabbed pyggel and set to work, we already have our level file parser done, and the first level made (mostly)
The floor, ceiling, walls and doors are all rendered as well.
The hud is started, so if your mouse goes over anything you can interact with the hud text changes.
Currently that is only implemented for doors though.

Doors open and a light above them turns on if you get close enough and are facing them.


Tomorrow will work on collisions (let's not keeping walking through walls XD), binding the mouse to the center and using it for camera movements, finishing hud, first weapons, and buffs.

After that will be the last really difficult part, which will be the baddies and the AI.

If we do it right though, we'll have half the week for play-testing and features, and everything else will be done soon XD

So, today I want to get most of the core gameplay done, features for me today are:

1. collisions with level geometry -- Done
2. event handling for movement -- Done
3. Hud -- partly done, need controls for other stats as we need them
4. first weapon and bullets along with firing and ammo
5. ammo pack for first weapon and health pack
6. feathers and level changing

And then, if I really have a lot of time left, start work on the first baddie, and some more gui controls...

Well, good progress I think.

I only have a couple things I didn't get done:
The buffs, which will be like a 30 minute thing, so I'll just implement those ASAP tomorrow when I get the chance (in between work, hopefully).
And actually firing bullets out of your gun.

At the moment, I'm having a difficult time making the weapon buck back when you shoot.
Basically, I need to rotate the gun on the X axis, but when you rotate the view that axis changes - but the way rotations are in pyggel it doesn't automagically morph, so I need to figure out some way to handle it...

Oh well, pyweek is for challenges, right? :)

No screenie yet - will add one once we get place holder content removed ;)

Well, I have to stop working now, as I have to go back to work, but I'm gonna probably pull a late-nighter later tonight - this work week is actually gonna help me I think, since i work Mon/Wed/Fri/Sat - I can kill myself the days I don't have to work, but then make sure I get plenty of reset the ones I do - so far it seems to be working :)

Today (during the day anyways) was kind of my "get nothing done" day - since I work early and late.
Having said that, during my break I've gotten a tremendous amount done:

1. Integrated hp, ammo and weapon selection into Hud
2. Created gui icons for hp and ammo
3. Implemented hp and ammo boosts
4. Added shooting shots from shotgun and nice plume of smoke
5. strafing
6. and made weapon bob as you move it (this also affects where bullet goes, so it will throw your aim off to move+shoot at same time...)

And I am like completely on schedule surprisingly O.o
Tonight I will create a basic place holder badguy and implement him, and him shooting and his animations (phew, hopefully XD) and then if I can implement collision checking/killing.

Wowsa, lots to do - good news is that once that is done it will be really easy to implement new badguys as we get them...

OK, after figuring out where we are going with the baguys, I am reasonably certain we can have something playable before the end of the day :)

Basically, our badguys are aliens from another dimension - and how they appear in this one are as energetic geometric shapes.

So, the shape of alien determines it's strength (hp) and the color the speed/damage of attack.

badguys shapes:
quad - 4 hp
pyramid - 5 hp
cube - 8 hp
icosahedron - 14 hp

bosses shapes:
sphere - 30 hp
ellipsoid - 40 hp

Colors:
green - 1 speed/4 damage
blue - 2 speed/2 damage
red - 4 speed/1 damage


Basically, the more sides you have the more hp.
I thought about combining colors as well, ie:
red + green = yellow = 2s/2.5d
But I think that will overly complicate things...


Will hopefully have a screenshot+demo later today... :)

Well, now I'm behind schedule...
This was gonna be a big push day since I didn't have to work.
Instead I got working early and got nothing done, and by 10:30 I got busy away from teh computer, and then got some news and everything got nuts.
Finally got back to work probably at 3:30 or so, but only worked for maybe an hour or two, because one of teh cross beams in our garage shattered, so that was fun cleaning up.
Got the most done from 8-9:00 - in which I implemented all the shapes for the badguys and the colors.

Tomorrow I'll just have to get all the logic in for the badguys, and go from there.

Let's hope we make it :)

*yawn*
Well, after getting almost no where yesterday, I called it a night rather early and hit the ground running this morning.
So far I've implemented hitting the badguys with your shots and them dying.
And I found an interesting bug that I'm gonna turn into a feature.
Basically, when shoot badguys they scale out/in on the x/z axes, and when you kill them they collapse.
Well, the boss shapes (sphere and ellipsoid) really mess up their textures when you do this.
But it kind of looks like they are getting knocked out of whack and have to re-focus, so they won't be able to hit you while like this...

LOL

TODO for today:

1. badguy logic (including shooting at you, moving, LOS)
2. model and implement the command console
3. integrate our new weapons from nicolas

Ciao for now, hopefully I have a good day :)

Assuming I've tallied all the features up correctly.
Now we have in essence 1.5 days left (for me anyways) which is about 20% of the time.

remaining 30% of the game (mostly just content now) in remaining 20% of time? Cake XD
Especially since i am finally in the zone... and actually feeling like coding.
Unfortunately it is 3 in the morning and I need some sleep or I won't make it the rest of the way at all :S

So, what did we get done today:

1. Refactored code into modules (so other programmers can help, doh :S )
2. about 50 optimizations (seriously)
3. in-game gui
4. main/sub menu's
5. win/loss screens
6. boss
7. game name (Chickenstein!) and logo and icon
8. 2 gui themes
9. story
10. main mission

Tomorrow will see music and sfx (including 3d sound XD ), enemy logic (instead of just blasting you, which is already danged hard to beat), remaining weapons, tilesets, Chicken (and feather), final mission (against boss), and a few more levels.

If all goes according to plan we should have all the "features" in by tomorrow night, and Saturday can be completely bug testing, play-testing, tweaking, packaging and anything/everything else...

Oh, yeah, and finally, we present our first screenshot. A long time coming (longer than normal) but hopefully worth the wait :)




Cheers all!

Ok, massively productive day today, from everyone on the team.
Except for two models needed yet from our artist, all game content is done!
I might make another tileset or two, some more alien faces, but otherwise, tomorrow is entirely for level design and play testing and bug finding (surprisingly, we don't have any bugs we've found yet!)

So, rundown of what we got done today:

1. new tileset (to replace the one from robocalypto)
2. sfx module to control playing
3. all our in-game sfx and music (still need one more track) #wow Tim!
4. implemented said sfx
5. added pausing and running
6. two new weapons
7. weapon swapping
8. several bug-fixes, tweaks and speed boosts (need more though...)

Really feeling like a nice, fun little game now XD

Gotta work tomorrow, but we'll definitely be finishing, unless osmething really bad happens (like a tornado or something XD )

Well, I am extremely pleased with this entry - it is honestly the best we've ever done, I believe.
Had a couple people I haven't worked with before on the team this time, and they were awesome.

Everything just seemed to go right for this project.
In the end we didn't drop a single major feature, I didn't stress over the entry, we were always ahead of schedule, and we did some things we haven't before.

The entry itself has no known bugs, but I'll be interested to see if we maintain our 100% worked ratio from past entries...


Oh, and from the title:
Seems like this is our lucky Pyweek...

• 7th on the entries list (before drop-outs)
• 7 levels
• 7th time I've lead a team in pyweek

I'm also quite pleased with how well PYGGEL held together, in total.
It is quite slow (as we knew, being immediate mode OpenGL in pure Python) but it is smooth enough.
I fixed a ton of bugs and will probably be spending a month merging my changes from Pyweek into PYGGEL's svn XD


For me as well, I picked up far more of the project than I have in the past (though certainly less than if I went solo XD )...
I even did a few sfx - which I haven't done before, so that was fun (though I was slightly disappointed to note that I've lost my Elmer Fudd "aww cwud" voice :S )

Gonna spend tomorrow probably testing the game to see if there are any devastating bugs we haven't caught yet, and building an exe, but probably will end up not changing a single thing :)


Cheers all, and congrats on a great competition and a ton of great entries!

There appears to be a phantom bug in level 6 using the chicken gun - where if you shoot the game crashes.
This has only happened on one test computer and we didn't get a stacktrace - so if anyone has this happen, please post a traceback so we can fix it...
And then just try again, it is rather rare and you can definitely play through the entire game without seeing it...

Thx :)

Well, we've elected to continue working on Chickenstein, since we all love the idea.
Personally I am finding a lot of the bugs in PYGGEL simply by using it, so that is great as well.

Today I sat down and fixed the last remaining outstanding bug (lose chicken gun if you swap weapons) and worked on optimizations.
With just 30-45 minutes of work we've doubled the FPS of the game O.o

So you can expect more interesting and intense levels in the future XD

Well, first off, congrats to everyone - seems like there was a really good crop of games this time around :)
Secondly, I'm rather pleased that this is our highest rated game to date (if barely :P)

Now for the comments:

"Great job! You obviously put a lot of work into this, and it seems like you accomplished exactly what you set out to do. The gameplay is a lot of fun, even if the Faceball 2000 enemies are considered old school nowadays. The voice work is funny. Bonus points for the music! Original music is always welcome."

Thanks! Yeah, the sfx and music were a big thing we wanted to do this time, and I think they turned out fantastically, thx to Tim :)
Yes, the enemies are a little lame, originally they were placeholders but I ended up preferring them in the end.


"Nice work. Obviously not a comparably good FPS, but nicely done for Pyweek :)"

Thx, was a lot of fun to write :)
Not many games made in a week are comparable to ones made over months...


"Maybe not very innovative, but felt very polished and complete. Good work!"

It seems rather hard to be extremely innovative with an FPS anymore, especially with the limited time :(



"Didn't work on my computer. Needed to find a windows computer and install loads of library. Crashed when firing the chicken gun. Significant slowdown when some enemies got shot. Some floors didn't render. Very functional game. Hilarious speech and story. A bit monotone for now (everyone shoots straight, only at different speed)."

There are only four libs you need (and we recommend psyco, might not have made it to readme though) - which should all work cross-platform (possibly with some difficulty on mac, but I think we fixed that)...
That slowdown is rather odd, will have to look into it.
Shots are more/less powerful as well, but yeah, a bit "meh"
Some floors didn't render? Which ones? :S
Do you have the latest drivers, etc.?


"I had a few enemies come at me through walls, but other than that I can find nothing about the game to complain about except its brevity. I particularly like the humour in the protagonist's quips."

The aliens coming through the walls is not a bug, I thought we pointed that out somewhere but it may have been missed when I was cleaning up the dialog :S
Yeah, the duration was exactly what we planned, as most people don't really play longer than about 10-15 minutes on most entries, so I figured requiring more time than that to see the whole game would be problematic...


"Fun game - very Duke Nukem feel to the humour. I found dogding too slow, which was a bit annoying."

Yeah, strafing and backing up are slowed than forward movement, and aren't affected by running - probably a poor design choice on my part :S
Yeah, we specifically wanted the humor to be a large part (along with the sfx), glad you liked it :)


"I don't know... it just didn't have ... something..."

Not sure what to say, except that that is probably one of the 5 least helpful comments I have ever seen.


"Needing tons of libraries, and not explaining how to install them is not the best idea for making lazy people testing them... :("

As pointed out above, the game requires four "mainstream" libraries, and recommends a fifth. Almost anyone developing games in Python should probably have them anyways, and they certainly aren't difficult to install.
Either way though, being unable/unwilling to try and get libraries is not a good reason to "DNW" the entry, that is for critical bugs or when you have the libraries needed and it just won't run.


"Think the team was interested in the technical aspects of growing a 3D engine, and congrats for that."

Outside of Pyweek, yes we are interested in that, but this was not just a tech-demo to test out the engine (though it did help with that)...


"Pretty good effort for one week :) Story was suitably bizarre."

Hehe, thx :)



Gonna take this one in parts O_O
"Tacked on theme, bland, no innovation, uninteresting to play. I see the point of making it as an exercise, but why share it with us? Also PYGGEL has over 9000 dependencies even if they are not used."

And this is probably another of the 5 worst comments I've ever seen.
"Tacked on theme"
How exactly is the theme "tacked" on? It's actually used in-game as a plot/discovery element, instead of just floating there as eye-candy...
"no innovation"
Depends on what you mean, if you mean "oh my gosh that's the next thing in FPS gaming!" - no, of course not, then again, a few of the things we did were rather innovative, even if people didn't notice them, and it wasn't a clone.
"bland, uninteresting to play"
Apologies if you were uninterested in playing the game, apparently the humor didn't work for you.
"I see the point of making it as an exercise, but why share it with us?"
Wow, so what exactly is the point of even doing Pyweek for you? First, every entry is an exercise in some way, either in using specific technologies, trying new things, or just plain old-fashioned making games - that's the point!
Why share it with you? Naturally I wanted to see how it compared to other games made in Pyweek, also, from a purely technical standpoint, I haven't seen a first-person shooter in Pyweek that was actually complete or interesting before.
"Also PYGGEL has over 9000 dependencies even if they are not used."
Hmm, slight exageration? Pointed out in the Readme are exactly which libraries that are needed, and 4 is hardly that much (especially mainstream as they are)...


"Bugs! But very, very nice."

And others like it:
Which bugs? The one with the chicken gun crashing was fixed in the torrent version - perhaps you got a previous "final release"? There was still an issue with losing the chicken gun when you scrolled, but no crashes, or other bugs that I am aware of - so if it was something else please let us know what it was specifically :)


"Although this is a critical bug, I'm not going to report this as a does-not-work issue: When attempting to use the Chicken Gun, on the level immediately after picking it up, an error occurs on weapons.py:290: self.obj.pos = self.pos: - AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'pos' Other than that, it looks like most of the control issues have been smoothed out and the difficulty is much better-balanced, making the experience much more fun. It's still a tiny bit sluggish and lacking the polish a full FPS would require, though, hence the 4 instead of a five (I'd 4.5 fun if I could). Innovation is only really held back by the relatively bland level designs. I know there wasn't much time to do things, and that you wanted to keep stuff on a 2D plane, but traps or pits or teleporters or something would have made things more interesting."

See above for bug.
As far as level design, yeah, not a whole lot to do, locking to the 2d plane made the game possible, but limited where we could take it :S


"Yeeehaw! I like the blocky look. The aliens.... squares would look much cooler if they were kind of glowing and hovering up and down. And you should settle on one kind of tileset. The two just don't fit together and eventually you wonder why the ship is made of (alien) plastic AND (alien) stone at the same time. ;)"

Hehe, thx :)
As far as tilesets, yeah, had a member who didn't really like the stone, so they whipped up the other one(s) at the last minute, and it is kinda weird...


"Ran real smooth. Good work."

Great! Making it run at a constant rate was a real pain O.o


"Nice, tough to do anything in 3d!"

Indeed it is, but very fun :)


"Obviously this is brilliant - you must be well chuffed to get so much done by the deadline. Many congrats, very amusing. "you alien... square." - classic. Thanks! I did experience the crash on shooting the chicken gun on entry to level 6 - that was the first time I'd even fired a shot with the chicken gun. I was on WinXP. I'd run using the pyw, so didn't see a stacktrace, and it didn't happen again for me, sorry! I modified your source to add keyboard commands for the weapon change - since I'm on a lappy, I have no mousewheel. :-)"

Yeah, an alternate control scheme was considered, but I just ran out of time :S
The bug you got was the chicken gun one I noted above, most likely.
And yes, we are indeed well chuffed :)


"Nice, I like the slow bullets, nice graphics, but no sense..."

Eh? Glad you liked the bullet/gfx, but the last part makes no sense (no pun intended) to me :S


I'm not going to list out the remainder of the comments, since they all seemed pretty similar to the previous, but thx again to everyone who tried the game and took the time to rate us :)