Dear Diary,

Sadly we did not spend much time with you until now.
I just uploaded our ritualistic fake screen shot [2 days late, but still... we adhere to well established rituals). As you might have already seen from the (fake-)screenshot, we were crazy enough to try a RPG... No fear, string is included and does indeed play a main role in our upcoming (and not finishable) Role-Playing-Game.

So this time, our - also ritualistic famous "last sentence" - probably will hold true:
We won't finish ;)

So I've spend most of the day trying to implement the battle system. Then it worked ok at some point but still had a few bugs. Then I kind of broke it and realised that it's just horrible.. I'll do it tomorrow. Properly.

At least I coded some other (vital) parts of the game. You can now travel between maps and encounter monsters (although the battle system doesn't work well ;)). And characters can now suffer from conditions - such as poisoned, dazed or dead. The funniest part was testing them because I just let the characters use harmful items on themselves, like Vials of Poison or a very deadly Loaf of Bread. ^^

Here's our latest non-fake screenshot (without the ugly UI):

Zahme has just finished the three main characters and a tileset. Wohooo!!

This is what we found after about 20 minutes of play-testing:

• After loading a savegame the first partymember will have a wrong name. Stupid little bug..
• The bossmonsters' positions on the battlescreen are a bit off. This is what you get when you never test bossfights.. ;)
• You cannot revive dead characters. The Divine Charms don't work because.. uh.. the Shadow Legion has grown stronger and the goddess' powers are weakened. Kind of..
• General balancing problems. Bossmonsters are probably too hard, even if you can kill the normal critters with one hit after some levels.
• Typos. Oh, well..
• There is a stupid "~"-sign on every item in the buy-list.
• Something is odd about our damage calculation.
• Some dungeon maps have weird tiles placed where "blackness" should be. That's because we've had several black tiles and one was changed later. Oops.
• If you start a new game, then go back and start another new game, some names and character values may not be properly re-initialized including the inventory. Some mapevents may be missing, too. Better close and re-open the game for a fresh start.
• [ADDED] Experience points are not added properly. If you level-up the additional EXP you made are lost. I.e. if you have 90 EXP and need 100 for a level, then gain 40 EXP - then your EXP are set to 0 and not 30.
• [ADDED] After a level-up you become a 1-hit killer until you enter a new map.
• [ADDED] Loading games doesn't work. It only loads the first character. Great...
  Please change line 332 in entity.py to

  set_chardata(self.party[x], d)

  .. if you want to load your savegame.. ;)
• [Added2] The 3 Pieces of Magical String do not transform into the Magical String, thus you'll never be able to enter the temple for the final battle.
• [Added3] Game crashes when an "invalid" base damage is given. Which should be impossible, so it's probably related to 1-hit killer issue.

If you'd prefer to have easier monsters, feel free to replace the file monsters.py in the gamelib-folder with this one.

At least we have a cool intro. :)

Phew.. Our final submission was rather unfinished and buggy (sorry), so I'm glad that some people enjoyed it, anyway. Many annoyances could have been fixed within the extra-hour after the deadline but we decided to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion instead. ;)

Day 0
We wanted to do an RPG this Pyweek, although not all themes were suitable for that. Now, we had a very nice idea for Dust Bunnies and decend ones for Punk, Morning Fog and Frosts and Flat-Packed. The String-theme was our (my) least favourite because our initial idea was a platformer with a rope-throwing-and-swinging character. I had no clue where to start with the physics. In retrospect I guess it would have worked out somehow - just like so many things tend to work out somehow during Pyweek.

Day 1
We fell asleep while waiting for the theme announcement. Luckily, I woke up just in time to read... "Length.. of.. a.. piece.. of.. string.." (I could barely keep my eyes open)

Oh, great. Zahmekoses was just as happy as me.

However, after some more sleep and a rather disturbing dream (a rottweiler mauled one or two poodles) I came up with a story-fragment that Zahme could turn into a little story. The "collect all pieces of string"-part was not too original, but acceptable. The map-editor was basically finished that day.

Day 2 to 5
We made.. stuff. I wasted some time on features that were never used later (character conditions) or tried to fix things repeatedly (inventory, battlescreen). Although the map-editor and the first tileset were done we didn't create any maps. By the end of day 5 we had some disconnected parts of a game. We were rather unproductive..

Day 5 to 7
Zahme finally finished the character images so he was free to create some content. So we added items, monsters, worldmaps, dungeonmaps and towns. The intro, start-, and gameover-screens and save/loadgame functions were all squeezed in two hours before deadline. So I never got to use the sounds included in the game.

So in the end..
We never got around to do some testing. Or I didn't manage to write error-free code. Yeah, that's the problem - just don't put any bugs into your games! ^^

We could claim that we've bitten off more than we could chew, but that wouldn't be true. The game content was created too late so we didn't have enough time to test and balance everything. The final submission was almost finished... it just didn't work properly.

Well, I've fixed most issues, so all that is left to do is add sounds and create 2 tunes. Zahme should do some sort of outro. So, this time we'll really upload a post-pyweek final. Really. Soon.

Next Pyweek I'll be a lot meaner, ruthlessly cut features (instead of worrying about something that won't be used, anyway) and poke Zahmekoses to do more content early on.

See you next time! :)