It is past the comp submission date, so all changes from here on are post-challenge polish. Hey, even chickens need lipstick...

Notably:

+ prettified colorization. your visible fov looks more solid, less crufty and more tasty.
+ colorized cutesy animal icons. it was bound to happen.
+ player can lose: if your health drops, you have to redo the level.
+ the Puppy now says his thanks.
+ end game stats screen that saves as a screenshot for printing your own x-mas cards this year!
* 10 cutesy animal icons for your eyeball pleasure ^_^

There is under 10 hours left, the core mechanics of the quest engine and game interactions is as much done as I have time for. All that remains is fleshing out the story line, and coding it in.

Been going for 14 hours now, taking a breaker to be fresh-brained to write creative story lines.

What the playing screen looks like now:



Dialogue screens have matching pictures of the animals you talk to:



They can chirp you before a fight:



The stats screen shows your progress, and any quests you are busy with:



I won't bore you with any commit logs this time, you can read them online at your leisure.

WOOF!

Day 4 was in the zone, like being with Mercer, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Sit down, have a doggy biscuit...

Changes

glossary: NPC is a Non Player Character. All the other animals in game, whether they are friend or foe.

Simplified the UI, a lot! No more superfluous details on screen, those will go into their own screen.
You only see what is necessary to win:



We have interactive NPC's. Some are friendly, others hostile.
They can have arbitrary amount of dialogue, run away from you,
hunt you down, follow you around and give you quests.



We have NPC's that have various behavior models: skittish, neutral, friendly, hunting.
They also have interaction models, hostile NPC's can take initiative and
attack you first, while friendly's start a conversation or give you quests.

The Hunting movement AI is pretty crafty: It uses A* path finding to follow you.
If it loses sight of you, it remembers where it saw you last, and heads there to
search you out. This could be improved on by implementing scent trails (for real hunters).

Python is amazing for dynamic code structures.
Up to now it was a lot of class models for Inheritance and Polymorphism.
Functional languages give us Composition, something I can see will work well in
business rule engines.

Enough rambling, we need a working quest engine, hint and scent trails,
and like-to-have mouse support.

6 hours ago: friendly npc's follow a distance.
7 hours ago: scared ai fixes
7 hours ago: Fix bug when they lose sight of you.
7 hours ago: hunters use A* to track you down. they even remember your last known position.
8 hours ago: Attacking works now, with victim also getting a turn.
8 hours ago: more MoveAI code.
9 hours ago: flying npc's can move through blocking tiles
9 hours ago: Include ActionManual for the Player. this allows both NPC's to initiate conversation with the Player, and vice versa.
11 hours ago: start of passing NPC player dialogues
11 hours ago: only move NPC's if our player moved. ie hitting a wall doesnt count.
11 hours ago: action_ai logic passes dialogue, quests or hostility.
12 hours ago: AnimalBase has take_turn implemented. NPC's can move around, and recognize when they hit another. The have move_ai and action_ai attributes which get called on interaction.
13 hours ago: refactored Object() into ItemBase() and AnimalBase()
16 hours ago: replaced "you see' list with cleverness: show in message list only once.
17 hours ago: changed UI, shuffled message positions, removed detailed info (to have its own screen)

This update is brought to you by Dynamically loaded maps, FOV (Field Of Vision), colorful flowers, and inventory.

Working backwards, you pick up doggy toys by moving over them. Since you carry in your mouth, you drop whatever you were carrying before each time. You can carry items across levels. Dogs really do this... no really.

I added a page to explain how to play the game.

More tweaking to colors, for flowers bushes and trees. The heart item here is a doggy toy. All toys show as different colored hearts.



FOV determines what you can see via line-of-sight. Here you see where I highlighted (in pink) where the tree blocks our sight, the tiles beyond it are greyed out.



Maps can now load from text files. I found an awesome ASCII Paint app to draw maps with. They are essentially text files, 36x36 characters in size. B's get converted to bricks, b's to bushes, f's to flowers, t's to trees, ~'s to water, and #'s to fences.



And here is editing the map:

We can now load map templates from ASCII :-)
See my latest code commits on GitHub!



Python rocks for dynamic code calling, it's the the Dog's Bark ;D

We can make a dictionary of map characters, and perform a lookup against it. Matching entries are function references (get_tar, get_puddle):

    tile_lookup = {
                    CHAR_TAR: get_tar
                    ,CHAR_WATER: get_puddle
                }

We can easily call these functions, inline and without much flak:

    if ascii_map_char in tile_lookup:
        gamemap[x][y] = tile_lookup[ ascii_map_char ]()