Only just got back now, and have about an hours worth of stuff to do before I can settle down to get any coding done. I’m still hopeful that something playable will get finished and submitted before the deadline.

Anyone who fancies listening to something different and new during the last sprint to the finish might like to check out one of our local bands here on the Isle of Man who have just released a self recorded E.P. via MySpace.

They’re called The Learning Curve, and I have to say I found their stuff quite motivating during last night’s art/coding session. The last track on their MySpace isn’t great (although the Middle 8 is pretty good) but I really like the other four.

http://www.myspace.com/thelearningcurveiom

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.

I’m based in the UK, and decided I’d just go to bed and set an alarm to wake me up at 3am to find out what the theme was and get an idea fully worked out before possibly heading back to bed for a couple of hours.

Forgot to actually set my alarm, and had a load of things to do when I got up, so didn’t get onto here until around 11.30am - 8.5 hours already gone.

I was only going to be able to find around 15 hours this weekend anway, so any entry is going to be *very* minimalistic. Going to put together a vector font and see if anything springs to mind whilst I’m doing that.

Good luck everyone!

Oh, and jovoc’s motivation poster is absolute genius.

Checked the winning theme this morning (around 7 hours after the start of the competition) and my mind was just blank. I opened up GraphicsGale, drew a bomb which I was quite pleased with, and that was it. No ideas popped into my head, and aside from deciding I wanted to use the bomb I’d drawn, I had nothing to work on or with. I then went out for the afternoon.

I got home 3 hours ago and started doodling around, until about an hour ago I finally have an idea.

It involves trying to detonate all of the bombs on a level by sliding them around so that when one explodes, it ignites the fuses on any unlit bombs next to it. At the start of the level one or more of the bombs will already be lit, and to make things more interesting, the bombs can have different length fuses.

I’m hoping to be able to come up with a range of levels of varying difficulty, but there’s only just over a day left, I want to get at least some some sleep tonight, need to get to bed early tomorrow, and I’m in the mood for coding rather than working out level designs, so I’ll just have to hope I can get the bulk of this written tonight and in the morning, to leave me a couple of hours early evening tomorrow to put together some levels.

I’ll be coding this in FreeBASIC and just using the standard graphics library, so it’ll be cross platform and work without any dependencies, unless I also find the time to add sounds effects and music of course,  in which case it’ll need FMOD.

Got to pop out for an hour now, but when I get back I’ll put together a quick mock-up screen.