Cell Growth's Time log

My first challange... and one with a bad start at that :/

Timelog:

LD48 - 5h: I'm sleepy. Wanna go to bed. Stumble across Ludumdare, see that LD48 contest is about to start in... what, 5 hours? Need to get sleep, now!

LD48 + 5h: Had some (heh) sleep. Was hoping for farming, but nooo, it's growth. Well. Gotta clean up the place, girlfriend is coming soon.

LD48 + 8h: Place is reasonably clean, will have to do. An idea with cells starts forming in my head: The player will control a cell in the body. His goal will be to grow as large as possible. For that, he'll have to take care of such things as always having enough ATP (energy, produced by mitochondria from sugar), getting the metabolits out of the cell (via waste pumps) and the sugar in (via sugar pumps), having anough lipides and ATP to extend the cell membrane (which is a double layer of phospholipides) and so on. He'll also have to produce lysosomes to destroy neighbouring cells if there's not enough room for everybody.

That's the idea so far, let's see how far I actually manage to get.

LD48 + 12h: W00t, first screenshot! Unfortunately, this looks more like an accident after a night with too much beer than like a cell in the bloodstream.

LD48 + 16h: Girlfriend is back. She should be going to sleep soon. I must code.

LD48 + 17h: We have metabolits! And mitochondria! And membrane-bound sugar pumps! And other funny stuff that you'd find in a cell!

LD48 + 18h: Expanding the cell works... Sometimes. In most cases, it's just walls in funny places doing even funnier things. At this point, a wise man would be wise enough not to dwell back into the dark code that does this stuff, but I venture into these hellish depths...

LD48 + 19.30h: ...and emerge, bruised, but victorious! Must resist urge to sacrifice my memory stick to the dark lord of memory management. On second thought, I must rather go to sleep to regain at least a scrap of sanity.

Body cells and AI for them is for tomorrow.

LD48 + 29h:

I got up. That was a bit too much sleep. And the walls are doing funny things again.

LD48 + 30h:

The walls are ok. I'll add a fwe more things to build, make organels die...

LD48 + 33h:

Metabolit levels now affect lifetime of organels, there's stats, there's onmouseover information about organels... cute ;) Now for the splash screen...

LD48 + 34h:

Finally, I have a splash screen and some how-to-play infos!

LD48 + 36h:

Wee, there's a windows version! Had to use an ages-old version of py2exe because of pygame2exe, but that's a minor annoyance, so I'll take care of it if I have more time.

Now, will I be able to make decent AI opponents in just under 12 hours?

LD48 + 38h:

Food. Food is welcome. Will maybe be able to think afterwards.

LD48 + 43h:

It's running late, but I managed to make opponents (even though they are more primitive than I had hoped), different "you've pissed off humanity"-levels, a menu, a way to win, wee...

LD48 + 46h:

Some tweaking was done for balance. Thanks to OrangyTangy's testing, a serious bug was removed. The final version has been uploaded (WojtekDabrowskiFinal), after some more py2exe fun.

Here's the final screenie, I'm going to bed (how I have been looking forward to this moment for the last hours... it's 4 am here...).