Hi Everyone,

Big, productive day today. I did the graphical effects for the weather, which was no easy task, and the sound. I also fixed some more balance issues, but a few more exist.

To do the weather effects, I had to make rain, flood, tornado, solar flare, and tsunami effects. To do the rain, I worked off of this article: http://bulletproofoutlaws.com/elusive-ninja-the-shadowy-thief/game1-day-19-makin-it-rain-unfortunately-not-with-dollar-bills/ and the effect is quite nice. To do the flood, I used 2 water textures at different alpha values moving at different speeds, which creates a pretty good swirling water effect. Tornados are just particle effects, and solar flares are just a big white box laying on top of the screen at different alpha values; a poor mans bloom effect.

Overall the goal was to get the best ratio of good looking to good performance. Using the rle acceleration, the alpha blending is really fast, so that lets me experiment a lot there.

I also did sound today, which isn’t super interesting, just a lot of browsing freesound.org and opengameart.org. The only out of the ordinary thing I did was use a python dictionary as a set for the sounds; for every iteration, it only plays each damage/money sound once, not as many times as there are blocks on the field.

I thought in this post I would also share some of the tools I’m using. Here is a list:

Programming: Python, Pygame, Notepad++

Graphics: GIMP, Inkscape

Sound: Audacity, freesound.org, opengameart.org

Tomorrow I have a pretty busy day, but I all I have left to do is the main menu and testing, so I should have a submittal ready Saturday. I really want to finish ahead of schedule, kick back, and look in depth at some of the other submissions. Also, expect a gameplay video soon.

Thanks for reading!