Well I'm about to call it for dinner. I might get some more work done later tonight but officially I'm 2 days in to 1 Week = 1 Game.

So far so good. I had a bit of inertia today with physics and then with refactoring some code. Originally I'd planned to do simple collision detection but pretty early this morning decided that wasn't going to fly and I went for a proper physics engine (chipmunk which is packaged with cocos2d) to do my collisions (just detection, not response).

Then I had a bit of a struggle with a mild refactor. I was being a bit TOO blaze with some sections of similar code and decided to refactor out a 'spawnGroup' object which manages things that appear and scroll down (like the stars, debris, pickups and more to come). 

So with those 2 'un-fun' jobs done I'm starting to get to the more rewarding stuff... :)

You can now pick up thrusters which increase your speed. Also it makes your flame get bigger and bigger which is fun. If you hit a piece of debris you slow back down to base speed. 

The game is pretty enjoyable already, enough that I find myself playing it much more than necessary for testing which is a good sign. :) Rob'd enjoy it a lot I think, it's right up his alley, on a similar vein to Doodle Jump. (Check it out from SVN Rob!)

Next up is of course some end conditions and goals. The deal is you want to get as far as possible (measured in kilometres). You will have a limited number of crashes (hitpoints) which you can negate via repair pickups. Picking up thrusters will make you go faster, but of course will make you crash more. At this point the winning strategy would be to go as slowly as possible. To balance this out I'm planning on having oxygen as a constantly draining resource which you replenish via oxygen pickups. This means you need to speed up to find oxygen faster, to live longer and get further. If necessary the rate at which oxygen spawns can change over time to ensure a non-infinite game. Alternatively I could make your base speed gradually increase.

I'm going to give myself the weekend, as I did say I'd have a week, not 5 days :) This leaves around 5 days (depending on what things conspire to pull me away from gamedev) to do the following broad tasks: Gameplay, Menus, Highscores (would like to hook into a free leaderboard solution like open feint), Sound and Music, Polish (need to add some juice!), Packaging and Submission, Gameplay Video/Trailer.

I think things are on track!