Well, this is disappointing… I suppose I should have guessed that I really wouldn’t get very far with the extra day. Even though I originally was going to submit this game for the compo, almost nothing visible has changed with it in the last day; it’s been mostly code cleanup, a few new features (not readily visible), and a bit of story. Oh, and I now have install instructions that should work on Windows and Mac OS X as well, since I had a couple of other people try it out, and spent some time fixing the issues they were having. Other than that, most of the day was spent at work (you know, actual work I get paid for) so I sadly haven’t had much time to devote to the game.

Well, what I currently have is going to be my Jam entry. Congratulations to all compo contestants for getting your games in on time, and cheers to my fellow Jam participants… I look forward to playing all the games! Now, I only wish these things were held more often.

I’ll be posting my game on the site in a few minutes.

Wow… I thought I’d be able to finish this faster. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m falling asleep at the keyboard… had I known that LD was running this weekend before Friday night, I would have made an effort to not get ridiculously exhausted this past week.

All in all, even if I don’t get anything submitted, I’d say this LD went pretty well… this is the first one I’ve ever participated in, this is the first game I’ve ever written using PyGame (aside from a tiny bit of joystick work in my main project a couple of years ago) and I just taught myself how to work with PyGame on Friday night, and this is the first 2D game I’ve worked on since high school. Not to mention that I wrote my own parallax-capable system for the game using PyGame’s sprite support – the first time I’ve ever even messed with code that does something like that.half hour,

Still, even though there’s no way I’ll be able to submit anything in in the next 10 minutes I’ll still try and submit this for the jam… it’s already a pretty cool game, just missing some important pieces, so it feels pretty incomplete at the moment. I’d probably be able to finish it all in like 6 hours if I slept first… but if I had slept earlier today, I would have slept through the deadline, easily.

Wow… 11 hours without a post. Well, in a way that’s good… I haven’t really lost steam working on the actual game yet, so I’m still devoting energy to that. I didn’t sleep last night. The plan is to stay up until LD compo is over, and then crash until work Monday morning. (and of course, as I started to write this post, I fell asleep in my chair)

In the meantime I’ve gotten enemies implemented, and you can shoot at each other and make each other disappear… there’s explosion noises (all sfx are created with sfxr) but no explosion animation yet. (I’ll probably end up using one of the explosion generators i found, if i can get one of them working )

Obligatory screenshot! Now with most stuff except explosions and bugfixes.

If anyone wants to try it out, all you should need is PyGame and Python, (which means theoretically it should work on Linux, Windows, and Mac as-is) and you can grab the source using Bazaar:

bzr branch http://dev.skewedaspect.com/bzr/whitelynx/ld20x6/trunk/

The code is released under the MIT license, and the content is under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Finally, something that actually feels like it could be a game! Now to give it an actual point.

In-game screenshot with weapons and shields!

Oh, yeah… screenshots.

Sleeping takes way too much time. I think I lost like 6 hours there!

My idea for this LD was pretty simple: Since it’s dangerous to go alone, bring weapons! Absurd weapons! LOTS of absurd weapons!

Basically, the concept is that you have a friend (call him Q, Lucius Fox, Isaak, whatever) who likes making weapons. Every time you go on a mission, he gives you something new, shiny, and destructive. And you always come back thanking him.

So… now that I have a full parallax-based sprite engine (hooray for PyGame!) I’m starting on actual game mechanics. I’ve had 3 slightly different concepts for how to execute this concept:

• side-scrolling space shooter (similar to Raptor)
• vertically-scrolling space shooter (similar to Tyrian, Galaxians, etc.)
• top-down, free movement hover shooter (similar to Zone 66)

I’m still not entirely sure which to choose, though I’m leaning toward the Zone 66 style, only with better controls.