We made progress!
Pygame has a mask collision detection possibility so I add the mask to my sprite class and only half-transparent pixels of the waterfalls are recognized to color the block.
Now I took a reference image as a pygame pixelarray to change the color of the block more than once. When changing color I use the reference pixelarray to create a new surface, replace the white color and set it as the new image.
In this context I realized that I had a bug when resizing sprites because the positioning and the control over the rect was wrong. So I rethinked it all and made a more pygame-like method for repositioning the sprite without needing the sprite update function.
Earl Grey created some very nice playfield backgrounds where our waterfalls fit as separate objects so I can still check the collisons.
Then I was curious about the framerate. Sure there is not much going on and I have a decent CPU and GPU but it's always nice to see performance problems in early stages if they are huge. I limited the game framerate at 60 but to see some changes I set it up to 600 fps. Now I saw that it was something between 200-300 frames per second.
I stumbled over the clear function of the group objects and now I clear the background with the background image every frame more efficiently. The fps climbed up to 400-600.
I began to investigate how these layered group works to have control over the z-positioning of my sprites but that needs to wait because it was already too late and time for sleep.
After checking-in the recent code on GitHub EarlGrey started working on visual things and myself on the necessary background code.
The title on the intro screen “Farbenfall” got a new nice font and now we use a 16:9 screen standard resolution (1280x720). Later I need to think about this resizing part but after the jam because I want one playable level as minimum condition and that could be hard to get because only a few timeframes are left.
I restructure the code (again...other parts) to have scenes and for playing the game the playfield scene. Every scene has its own event loop, so when the scene is switched I don’t have to care about different scenes in my main event loop. I only set the event loop of the active scene and go for it.
Meanwhile Eary Grey finished our intro buttons and they look really nice and give the impression how our game world will look like (at least in our first level).
Then I implemented that you can grab the block with the mouse and when you touch the waterfall it gets the color of it, only one-time because I had a fallacy when I colorized the white block I can’t replace the color white again. I need to investigate if I can do something with pygame masks or if I need to save the reference image so I can use white replacing every time.
Today was a lazy day in terms of the GameJam.
EarlGrey and I searched for the reason why PNG transparency didn’t work. After some research I found that the loading of my PNG was with the colorkey functionality and I learned that there is the per-pixel alpha variant. After understanding the different modes of transparency I changed my code and it worked as intended.
Then I tried to change the color of the waterfalls and the new made sponge on the fly. The sponge worked as intended because I only needed to replace the white parts with a new color. The waterfalls are indifferent shades of color so it didn’t work out of the box but it wasn’t really necessary because EarlGrey painted me three separate waterfalls in different colors.
After color changing I implemented resizing of the sprites. And it looked like it’s fine.
Next step was moving the sponge around with the mouse cursor. I discovered that the cursor image format is a little bit special but for now I use the system hand cursor.
After that I looked into mouse movement and now when the game window has the focus, mouse cursor and center of the sponge should move together. The relative movement fits and was synchron but not the absolute position on the screen. I realized that by resizing the image I never updated the internal rectangle and that is where the positioning is oriented. Some try and errors and docu reading later I use now an x and y position variable in my sprite object and refresh the rectangle position in the update function that is called every frame. Because the waterfalls and potential other items (the sponge too when it is not grabbed) don’t move all the time I used a flag if the position should be updated. Now it’s working fine and I made a gif with medium quality I have to say but I think you see what is accomplished today.
Today we made a sketch. Ok, EarlGrey had done the real work and I threw ideas on him (and he used his ideas too ;) ) but he managed to make a conceptual drawing and with the following little explanation I hope that our game idea is understandable.
This could be a level (a fairly easy one) of our puzzle game. There are three waterfalls (later levels may be different colored ones and/or more). You need to unlock the portal in the front right. There are white (unpainted) blocks in it and you drag it with your mouse cursor out, see the needed color and you have to colorize this block so it has the color that is shown.
You can manage this by holding the block in/under the colored waterfalls and you need to mix the colors to get the fitting color for this block. You get more of the particular color you dip your block in when holding it longer at/in the waterfall. There are 10 (?) color steps.
e.g. when you need to make the block orange you hold it for 5 steps in the red and for 5 steps in the yellow waterfall so you get orange. But with these 10 steps each, you have 1000 different possible colors. These blocks could have different forms like rectangles or perhaps triangles etc. It would be annoying when you need to colorize 4 blocks with the same color but we will figure out those gameplay mechanics later.
When you have the correct color you can put the block back into the portal. After coloring all blocks you will see a little (blocky) picture in the portal and it unlocks and lets you pass or sucks you in. What exactly happens will depend on our story we need to think of in the future. I hope you get the base gameplay idea out of this description.
While EaryGrey draws the sketch I tried to load an example waterfall PNG because I wanted to know if I could change the color of the waterfalls easily with pygames power so we only need one waterfall image to potential get unlimited possible ones.
But I had trouble loading the Photoshop exported PNG and remembered that there was an issue or limitation that pygame can't load the image when using PNGs and it doesn’t have some PNG-format fitting. I loaded the PNG into GIMP and exported it. Then it worked but had no graded transparency. So it was not the desired result.
But that problem I will try to figure out tomorrow.
Today I talked to EarlGrey explicitly about our gameplay idea and we found a very satisfying one. Perhaps he can sketch something up tomorrow.
Independently I can make the first steps with pygame because now we know what we want to do. And there will be colorful waterfalls, something that is locked and puzzling. I’m very excited.
I committed the first basic things into the GitHub repository and will do that in an ongoing manner. This is not only for backup reasons or collaborating reasons but additional for documentations and history reasons how the things go through the development process.
Setting up the Trello board is the last thing of organisation for today and I don’t want to overload the organisation part. So from now on we can throw our work pieces into Trello and get an overview of what we want and have to do.
I implemented the basics for the pygame display and show a background by using the tutorial explanations (https://www.pygame.org/docs/tut/ChimpLineByLine.html).
And Exe-Generation is still working :)
My final mission for today is setting up a provisional intro text with the default font of pygame. It should be central and has each character in a different rainbow color.
Of course this doesn’t represent the real intro screen but it was my first test of pygames handling fonts and still a test for PyInstallers work.
