Didn't spend much time on the game today but I have an idea and have toyed around with a vague plan. It is going to be a 'turn-based puzzle game' hopefully. You play as 8-bit (aka byte), a deformable robot consisting of 8 parts (bits). On each turn you can deform byte in some way. At the moment everything is a bunch of squares but I will make proper artwork at some point. My main concern at the moment is that this won't be much 'fun'. So the plan for tomorrow is to get a prototype working and see if it can be made 'fun'.

"8-bit" theme won. Not sure If I like it or not.

Today, I only thought about game idea/gameplay and did no actual work. So, the idea itself:

My game will use 8-bit graphics (I've never draw 8-bit stuff -- so it is going to be interesting), but this is not the main place where I am planning to use 8-bit theme. I am planing to create game where You control robot by turning on/off 1 bit flags. There will be 8 flags total (naturally):

1000 0000 Moving forward
0100 0000 Rotating left (I am not planning to allow players to rotate right)
0010 0000 Visibility sensors on/off
0001 0000 Red visibility sensor
0000 1000 Green visibility sensor
0000 0100 Blue visibility sensor
0000 0010 Shooting if visibility sensor "sees" same color as RGB flags
0000 0001 Shield against enemies

My biggest fear -- it is going to be too much to swallow in one week.

I've done some 8-bit painting using GIMP:

- 0 flag
- 1 flag
- Non-functional flags
- Player
- Colored gates

(Sorry, for broken English).

None of us were that enthusastic about the 8-bit theme, so it took some time for us to settle on a game idea, but we've eventually decided on some sort of boardgame inspired concept, with the protangonist as a robot with 8 flags which can be toggled, and various puzzles that require having the flags set to the correct state.

Having settled on a concept, the rest of the day was spent trying to add enough scaffolding that we could actually start looking at implementing gameplay. Progress was somewhat delayed by detours into making things look more 8-bit'ish and repeated discussions about the gameplay, but it showing signs of progress.

We have art for the protangist and some of the items in the game, and a fair amount of work on the general game state and board, and a bunch of work on rendering ugly text, and grand plans for the rest of the week (which will meet with rude reality tomorrow morning).

I didn't have high hopes for today as I knew I would spend most of it out and about. It has thankfully turned out to be productive and a solid basis for moving on. Oh and quite fun too.

I got up early and discovered the theme choice. 8 bit will suit my RPG - not just in look and game type. Hoping to work in various 8 bit era references - I grew up with a Dragon 32. Currently playing Pokemon on the GBA so this will be another influence.

Codewise, first thing I wrote was a dungeon or cave generator - lots of scope to improve that. Tweaks to come. Some scaffolding, some utility stuff and most fun was creating my own 8 by 8 pixel font. Time for some sleep now!

So finally the "8-bit" theme won! Despite not being the most intriguing theme ever, I must confess I find it appealing. It's true it's been somewhat abused lately by indie games, but there's still something I find attractive in pixel-art graphics and chiptunes (I started in computing with a ZX Spectrum, soooo I'm biased).

Today I got some ideas in paper, and basically I started doing all the scaffolding of the project (plain pyglet, borrowing some pieces from cocos2d; today I wasted way too much time fighting a shader, but at the end I won!).

So I have a good foundation to start working on the gameplay, controls, a menu, some graphics and a song for the title screen (I tried a NES style, but failed... and it reminds me of some of the Bitmap Brothers' productions, which is not too bad!).

It's too soon to say how all this will end, but I like the game idea and it's not too ambitious for a week.

I think I can get a good 8-bit look/feel/mood. I know I'm not aiming for a too innovative interpretation of the theme but I hope that, if I can deliver a game that is fun to play, the judges might be forgiving on that regard ;).

EDIT: just found out that there are a couple of games out there with a similar name: Gridrunner or Grid Runner. That was coincidental and it's unrelated to my idea ;).

Off to a good start. Have the basic gameplay ready. Have to figure out the transitions and levels. So here are the details about the gameplay. Bitris (almost like tetris but with bits) Story: You are a program assigned the task of returning the binary representation of the number given. You have limited time to do this. If you make too many errors creating the binary representation program will be terminated. GamePlay: 8-bits are falling from the top of the screen. You are supposed to toggle the bits to create a binary representation (2'complement) of the number. If you successfully do it before the bits fall all the way down you gain points. If you don't it settles at the bottom of the screen. If you have missed too many numbers you loose. What i have so far: 1) 8 bits falling down 2) new bits fall on Success/Failure of a round. 3) Game Over is printed. Git hub link: https://github.com/vkbsb/bitris

Our team, Team 101 Factorial Dev team was extremely excited after hearing that this year's theme was 8-bit! All of our members are working diligently on several classes. Everything is coming along quite well. We can't wait to see the end product and to share it with the world! Wonder how much the other teams have progressed......

I've got an idea for a game. So far I've drawn some graphics, written a level editor and got the basic came mechanics going. Now for the hard part of turning it into a playable game.

Using Panda3d for my entry. So far have written some boilerplate code, and mocked up an example title screen

Aim for tommorow is to get some basic selection of one of the ships in your fleet, and being able to move it around.

Not sure how well I'll get 3D to work with the 8-bit theme, but a top down view and use of billboards for most assets with low res textures if probably the way to go.