Music and sound are done! Both are working pretty well together, although I think I went overboard. I certainly wasted a lot of time today on them… I tried to make my own music but failed horribly, so everything in the game is either directly or made from free loops online. Special thanks to the sites organizing/hosting them ( Freesound, Soundsnap, and Partners in Rhyme) and the authors who put them up there (all are listed in the readme.txt files inside the sound and music folders).

With sound and music done, the game is essentially finished. In fact, I’d be satisfied with using this iteration as the final product. But with 16 and a half hours remaining, you know I won’t. My biggest problem with it all is the 18-ish MB of music and sound files I’ll have to package with it. Oopsie…

Tonight I’m going to see what I can do on the storyboard, then catch a few hours of sleep. The GF is getting up at 7:00 am, so I’ll rise and shine with her. As I joked with #pyweek, she is getting up to go do a lingerie shoot with her hot friend, and I will be jumping up and running to my computer as I wave goodbye to them. Where are my priorities?

Fixed a lot of bugs that sprouted up when the game states are looped through the multiple levels. Having a working game is definitely a load off — even if everything else goes to shit, we have a functional, if silent and buggy, entry.

I added mouse support to the main menu, which I think adds a nice touch. It also leads the user to use the mouse on the weapon select screen. It also made me think about adding keyboard selection to the weapon screen, but that is definitely at the bottom of the (very long) list.

I ended up writing essentially some shitty sprite/gui tools to do all my text and icons without resorting to a gui lib. See the previous entries for why I don’t want to go down that road again.

To gameplay, I’ve added a bonus for completing the whole thing, and now it stops the level immediately when you do so you don’t have to wait for time to expire while you have nothing to destroy.

The two biggest lag producers in the game are explosions and liquids. On the railgun1 level, there are rows and rows of barrels and boxes in line but behind walls, so you have to line up and blast them with a railgun. This destroys them all and results in a massive fireball of awesomeness (+2 cool). Unfortunately, on my crippled machine this means the FPS drops down below 10, making the game completely unplayable.

In an effort to combat this, I’ve changed the collision code to only process explosions and liquids every other few frames. It has helped the lag a little, and I think I’ve got it tweaked so everything still works like it should. I’ll probably come back to this area later, especially if some of the testers experience a lot of lag as well.

Next up: music! Wish me luck!

Playability has arrived! It is still not nearly finished, but the game is officially playable. You load up, have a menu, play the levels in order, and have a win screen. Hooray! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Started and finished the level editor, which great results. I’ve had a surprising amount of fun just goofing off creating levels (it’s like pixel art, only… not). Here are a few examples.

Made some changes to the wall code – walls are now rendered separately and are added to the pymunk space as static objects. This brought my fps on the maze level (HEAVY on the walls) from 4 back up to the cap of 30.

Here is a screenshot of the maze level. Imagine doing this without the level editor… **shudder**

The bot builder is now finished. I’ve gone totally overboard on using basic sprites instead of a GUI, but I think it turned out. It looks a little corny, but maybe that gives it flavor (if you like corn, I guess). The bot builder will only allow you to pick the weapons available for the level you are on, so we can customize the challenges using the levels. I decided against letting people bind their own keys. It would have been nifty, but it just isn’t worth the amount of time I’d have to spend at this point.

Behold the bot builder! (Should really be called the weapon selection screen or something).

Office Space 5000 – Weapon Selection Screen