Well, I have something started
I’d decided before the competition got under way that I wasn’t going to be have time to actually compete, and that I was going to use the weekend as an opportunity to get back up to speed with C++ after a break of around 10 years, but with the theme being “minimalism” it was just too tempting to give it a go.
I certainly wasn’t going to have enough time to put together a decent original game in the 8 hours or so I could reasonably expect to have, and if I was going to do minimalism properly, the .EXE should be as small as possible and require no external libraries, and ideally no external resources either.
I came up with two ideas which I thought would fit the bill:
- A version of the Atari 2600 classic “Yar’s Revenge”.
- A version of the VIC20/C64 Jeff Minter classic “Gridrunner”.
I opted for the second idea as it was a game I played to death back in the day, and promptly spent 5 hours last night (going to bed at 4.30am) arsing around sketching on graph paper and putting together simple animations using OpenGL primitives. Still, I now have all the graphics I’m going to need generated in code, plus a basic framework handling game state and properly timed animation. All that’s left is writing the actual game, but I’m hoping that I’ll get 5 or 6 hours tonight which should be enough for something this simple.
After feeding it through UPX my current .EXE comes in at 13k (down from around 27k uncompressed) which I’m quite happy with, as it’s just game logic which needs to be added. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to submit something which is playable and finished at a basic level in under 15k.
I’m only just back in now after being out since first thing this morning and have a pile of urgent things to do before I’ll have chance to do any more coding, but will try and get a screenshot or two posted up before I head back out.