We spent the first 2 or 3 hours coming up with a concept. We were somewhat disappointed with the theme that was nominated, though we pushed onward... Since 8-bit seems to us a difficult theme to do correctly, we're keeping the gameplay quite simple, something like a RPG that's heavier on the R. We plan on lampooning the theme a little and the story we have developing is pretty funny IMHO.

While my creative teammates work on the concept and story of the game, I've been doing research into effects we know we want in the game. One of the main concepts is a double entendre on the concept of resolution, as a character trait and as a graphical trait.

A 'mosiac' style of 'degeneration' of sprites was called for, and instead of creating seperate sprites for each stage of degeneration, I managed to get surfarray to handle it for us by getting a sample pixel and tiling blocks of variable size to create the 'deresolution' effect (with test images of course). I'm very pleased with they way it's turned out, and its pretty quick at the moment (only one image 'derezzing' at a time).

I'm off to generalize the sprite drawing and 'derezzing' of animated sprites (basically perform the operation on a spritesheet and modifying the source array values based on an offset). Hopefully I'm not up too late tonight, I do have to take my mother to dinner tomorrow...

Finished the overworld map. Obviously with more time, it would be more feasible to add details or revisit parts I don't like as much as the rest, but it's time to move on to the rest of the game. Just gotta finish up the sprites for the animations of each of the map's regions.

I thought, surely displaying text will be the easy part of this adventure. Surely, there's some quite simple way to draw multiple lines of text on the screen.

Well, as it turns out...

I've spent at least 5 hours on text rendering. I've finally managed to get a general way to write an arbitrary number of characters/lines and even have them printed out character by character. But it wasn't easy.

There's still a lot left to do so I can't relax yet. But I'm still feeling pretty good about the progress we've made before hitting Wednesday. The creative assets are coming along nicely (you can see the overworld map posted in our entry!) and there's still a lot of writing to do, but I am planning on having the data formats all worked out tonight or tomorrow.

Backgrounds are done - time to finish up characters, dialogue, sound effects, and background music. We got this. (Right?)

Example - Dubiety Bay:

Here's one of them:

see title

We got the last few characters and sprites out of the way and started on music. We were also able to finish up the dialogue.

Our music set-up:

Our game has taken up all of our free time on top of our full time jobs, but somehow we made it. It needs a little love, but it's playable and hopefully if you play it you'll get a kick out of at least some parts of it.

The characters and script were pretty fun to work on. Our apologies if anything is too confusing or weird. It was fun to come up with the references we did, and hopefully some of it is fun for you, too.

Here's what we came up with, with this month's 8-bit Pyweek theme and the 168 hour cap. "idle" is a text-based RPG where the player interacts with characters and answers questions to gain items and unlock areas required to win.

The story takes place on "idle ilse." when a food stand guy's ex, "Gurl" shows up to win him back and alter the island to match her personal 8-bit style.

If the player selects an incorrect answer to a characters question, the games resolution is reduced. The lower the resolution, the more difficult the game is to finish.

The object of the game is to visit all 8 areas of the island and convince the characters that 8 bit style isn't right look. Persuading characters around the island to take your side will irritate Gurl into leaving, restoring island the island to it's original resolution.