Hi all! If you're having trouble with theme ideas, here's the brainstorming our team went through last week looking at each theme. A lot of them could apply to multiple themes...
12 Monkeys

• Insanity

• Time travel

• Freeing animals from zoo

• controlling 12 "monkeys"

• identify shakespeare play from twelve words

• you have only twelve monkeys, write shakespeare

• Sputnik era spacecraft with monkeys crashing on the moon they need to build a colony

• Programming Windows Vista with monkeys

• Dance Dance revolution

• how many monkeys fit in the fridge

The Fifth Element

• over the top, visual

• "gimme the cash!" (photos as pretend prop hats)

• rock paper scissors lizard + trump

• four elements + a trump

• level selection for different parts of the movie

• fridge tetris

The Guild

• assassins guild

• progress through guild

• manage the guild

• fantasy adventure

• fighters

• clerics

• not an MMO

• Discworld guilds (assassins, thieves)

• milk the parts of the city - balance crime  / prosperity

• Having to provide protection to an area of the city (hire spotters and enforcers). struggle with other thief families for control of the guild (they try and steal from your protected areas, you from theirs). Build the city and get support from the citizens, build business, pull off crimes. I don’t know you you'd blame that on other families though but that would be a good mechanic.

• alamaze like (turn based) thief family simulator

Moon

• Moon Nazis

• Clones

• Sneaky about helping future clones

• Time dependant clones

• A location

• Alien vs humans

• Cheese (cannons, jules verne style)

• Moon Cheese Nazis

• Rockets

• Climate change through terra forming

• gravitational / celestial stuff (Planetary creation code: http://znark.com/create/accrete.html)

• city building

• Martians on the moon send lone Invader Zim to prepare for invasion of Earth

• or the above as a farming game (farming humans)

Castle In The Sky

• Moon

• fighting

• defence

• floating castle, magic pendant - glowing mcguffin

• chase scenes

• air battles

• air pirates

• 3D tower defense

• manage an isolated (self-contained?) city

• villain building ‘science!!!’ has to defend from peasants with torches

We've had a great first day with Caligari collecting our thoughts and expanding them into a sixteen page document which we're now using as the design for our game. The game model code has been mocked out, and the first couple of unit tests written. Don't get too excited, none of this does very much at all, but it does mean we've got a pretty good framework to start writing the game in now.

Of course, who knows how we'll feel about it in the morning :)

10:30PM and signing off for Sunday.

It is daunting to embark on creating a game in a short time. There are so many details which need to be settled on, even before you worry about all the bugs you might have introduced during coding.

We started brainstorming as soon as the themes were announced, so I had a bit of a leg up on what we were going to do when the final one was announced.

Most of Sunday was spent refining the ambitious design back towards something we can make in a week. I think I've managed that fairly well, but there are still some areas which need finalizing (like details of the core mechanics). Hopefully I can get through the rest of that today - I'd hoped to be done this morning.

This is my first time, and I'm finding that it is hard to stay focused and fresh. At work we wouldn't have such a fixed deadline hovering over everything.


It is fascinating to see what others have achieved already. I can't wait to see what everyone creates!

I ran off to give a repeat performance of my talk Don't Do This at the local Python Users Group tonight which kinda threw my night out of whack. I still managed to find some time to throw together some basic graphics ideas and wrestle with squirtle (the SVG library for pyglet) before throwing in the towel there and just rasterising the damn graphics in Inkscape, resulting in this amazing first gameplay screenshot:

I didn't manage to get back into the game as I wanted yesterday, perhaps the initial enthusiasm ran its course and exhaustion set it, or perhaps I knew I was wrangling with important and hard decisions about the task resolution mechanics which will underpin the gameplay and was trying to avoid them.

I spent lots of time kicking mechanics back and forth during the day, but wasn't willing to commit anything to the design document. By the end of the day the rest of the team needed something tangible from me, so I turned to some ui sketches.

Boy am I not an artist. I can visualize things, but I'm pretty much unable to reflect those images on paper. I tried using some iPad drawing software, but I think you probably have to be me in order to make real sense of it all. :)

Having broken my reticence to add to the design by putting in the ui sketches and describing them, I was able to turn my attention to the task resolution mechanics and put down a starting point. As we don't have much time, I think we'll have to end up staying with these unless they really don't work (which I'm fairly certain isn't the case).

Working through the mechanics further broke up the logjam in my mind and I found a definite in-game condition we will need for the the 'endgame'; I've been trusting that I can find these triggers as we need them, but getting this one in place really helps to understand what the player is going to be doing throughout the game (what the end goal is, specifically, and why).

So, today I want to test the task resolution mechanics, clearly define the needed ui screens for the whole game, and resolve some of the final parts of the mechanics (really just reflections of the game state).

I would just like the world to know that Caligari did not mention that the design document has ballooned out to 37 pages -- it has also spawned offspring/variation/alternate versions (which have been told firmly that they're not going to get any love until next week).

There is so much detail and opportunity! This game is definitely bigger than the week but hopefully at least a simplified version will get out!

Don't let him tell you his graphics aren't amazing. I wonder if dispensation can't be sought to add a sampling as a screenshot? Amazing I tell you :)

In other news we think we may have picked a name. Maybe. Watch this space.

Caligari has been beavering away adding more and more to the spec document for this game - a ridiculous number of pages have been written, but they now include actual user interface specs. All we have to do is implement them all :) korg has been helping out with the spec work - even producing graphs analysing the model behind the game!

I've started putting Caligari's UI ideas into code, including the overview screen which has this ("placeholder" in his view, hah!) art. It represents one of the "zones" in the game. No more will be said for now about that :)

I feel like we almost have all the bits in the design, but there are niggling details that people keep pointing out, and of course balancing a design is a different beast from creating it.

A soul-less chunk of today was breaking down the ui and trying to detail each screen. Luckily there's not a huge number (of interesting ones - I haven't done most of the dull parts completely), as it was tough going.

I also spent some time messing with the basic mechanic, thanks to some graphing from a team-member. It was good to do some coding again after all of the writing.

I'm going to have to start adding actual data to the game pretty soon, as that is going to be a long process, I fear.

But others are implementing things and the game is more and more real as we go.

Will we have something playable this week? Will I even finish the design this week? No idea! But I'm proud of what we're working on, and at the moment I reckon I'll want to getting working after the week is over. For me, that is "mission accomplished"! :)

It seems that quitting mercurials attempt to do a diff3 merge in vimdiff tags your code as 'add your changes and undo the last external addition'. *sigh*

code repositories hate me.

I got a whole lot of our user interface in place today. It's all using placeholder artwork, but the important bits around user interaction and display of information is there. I'm a bit pooped, so I'm gonna grab a book and go get some sleep :)

We've made some huge progress today, but the most exciting stuff was visual.

We got an excellent title screen image from a good friend, which has really inspired us.

One of our number (I'm looking at bob) has taken our sketches and used art-magic to make awesome images that are much more evocative! I'm sure we'll get one up here to show off.


At the same time we've been working away at the backend economy, which has been fascinating. We need to have a functional system before we introduce the player's actions and getting something that behaves the way we need is quite involved.

We've also added some actual player actions. You can't do much at the moment, and the actions we have in place are more for debugging than anything else, but you CAN have a profound effect on the aforementioned economy, and you can kick in heads... who needs more, right?

The more we do, the more I'm psyched by all that we can achieve together. And the more I think it is fanciful dreaming that we could possibly finish this in a week! What was I thinking! :) Away with the fairies, I say! Fairies or Lunes!


Best to the others who are working away out there!

I must say our games looks excellent.

Its just a pity that the engine part isnt that nice ;). We got killed by complexity under the hood and the difficulty of balancing the damn thing. With so much going on balance was a nightmare, especially when it could be impacted by the player, the defence AI, the rebel AI... just too crazy.

Oh well. I learnt some stuff about using unit tests and i got a bit over my fear of decorators.

Another pyweek down.

We have 3 factions, each of which produces goods (turn N) which are transported (turn N+1) to other factions who then produce things (turn N+2) with them.  Goods (food) are a special case and are produced (turn N) and then consumed by everyone (turn N+1) and if short, they impact worker happiness.

Included is a graph of what happens if we hit goods production on turns 5,6,7 (a triple smack to food).... it looks pretty stable until about turn 30 when it suddenly nosedives. Now remember we hit it at turn 5,6,7 and nothing after that. :-)

We have some fudge factors in to give us a bit more 'overhead' in production and some other tweaks, but I just love the bang bang bang! and then 25 turns later the economy falls over and dies. :)

What actually seems to happen is that the worker happiness factors are in an wave but each low point is actually a little lower (thus less production, meaning the next low point is a little lower again) and eventually it crashes.

Yay!

I knew for a fact that we couldn't get anything even vaguely playable, a day and a half ago.

I love being wrong. :)

Our game does not have all the moving parts that it should, and it is probably hard for an outsider to see how close it is to what we were aiming for, with all that is missing. But frankly I'm amazed that we were able to get it to this state.

While credit has to go to the fantastic team, I also credit python itself for being quick to use. I rarely use the language for anything this large, but all of the things which make it well-suited to small work also make superb for rapid prototyping of larger projects (and implementation of larger projects, ultimately - I'm loving Django).

Our game was so far out of scope we couldn't have seen it from the moon. But it looks tremendous, and it was a blast to work on (and educational too!).

I can't wait to sample the waters and see what others have done!

Now if only we can push one final version of our project with a few more last minute fixes...