Development update

I did find a few hours to quickly whip up the first prototype of Tomix (which is the codename of the game I'm working on) and it's ready for me to play with :) Fortunately pygame is really very easy to use for what I'm planning to do and I'm also slowly getting used to vim and Python. But I'm still not very good with either of them.

Back to the prototype - now I can move the player around on the screen and push things (nothing groundbreaking yet, but what would you want for a few hours worth of programming).

I plan now try to design one level to see if my idea of combining Atomix and Sokoban is at least partially viable. Afterward I'd like to start work on the prototype of level editor which will probably take me more time - I need to learn how to work with mouse in pygame and think about reasonable way to save the edited levels (not sure how to serialize things in Python). Hopefully I can find at least one free weekend to actually implement something (all the codes till now were written on train and that is unfortunately not the ideal development environment).

Also, Mitsuki volunteered to help me with the graphics (so the size of development team has doubled :)). This means that if we eventually manage to have some game ready it will look a lot nicer than if I did it on my own. On the other hand, this also reduced number of readers of this blog that are not working on the game from 1 to 0. Maybe I should start looking for some interesting topics to write about :) (Well, I have a few, I just need to find time and mood to try something new)

Slowing down quickly

It seems that with the spring beginning, I will have less time than I originally expected. Nevertheless, I thought about the story of the puzzle game, which is planned to be roughly based on Atomix and Sokoban.

The story is not very important for this kind of game but it gave me important ideas on which to base the following puzzle. I'm not planning it to have some big impact like in PuzzleQuest (how could I compete with that?) so I will be creating (almost) pure puzzle game.

With the story boiling in my mind, I can now start looking for some free resources to use in the game (mainly music, sounds and probably some textures) and sketch the basic look & feel of the game.

I will also start working on some early prototypes with pygame because I'm still not very good with it (or Python to be honest). I hope to get good insights to the techniques I should use in the final game.

But, as I said, I expect the work to go kinda slowly for now, mainly because I won't have time during this and next weekend. On weekdays I tend to be a little too tired from regular work, but I'll try to do something when on train to work, so maybe I will move forward at least a little.

Well, it seems that this blog didn't go very well. Or, it went exactly as expected - abandoned after first post. But after a time I have decided to try to write something again, maybe this time it will be better than on the first try.

I began to be quite excited of game programming after my girlfriend and her team finished visual novel Heartbeat for a ren'ai visual novel competition (warning: unless you speak Czech, you probably won't enjoy this game very much). As a little bonus, I programmed very simple DDR simulator for the game in pygame.

Because the team plans to create sequel to Heartbeat (where I should provide some simple puzzles), I decided to improve my Python and pygame programming skills and write some simple game on my own.

I'm still not 100% sure but I will probably be going for some Atomix inspired puzzle game or simple implementation of Alquerque with AI opponent. I hope to write something more after I decide and actually begin implementing something.

So, if anyone is actually reading this, wish me luck and determination to keep at least one of these new projects :)