Got the game finished, complete with enemies that actually shoot. Check it out. I didn’t have quite as much time as I would’ve liked to tune the difficulty curve, but it seems to be close enough to what it ought to be.

Scoring and difficulty progression done. Almost there…

Two hours to go, and I have added background music and eye candy. Still no scoring or enemy bullets.

I really need to work on setting priorities.

Improved grabbing, added sounds, enemies turn red when they’re damaged. All in all some decent progress.

All right, 7 hours left. Finally, this is the kind of pressure that I can work under.

5 hours remaining. Need to implement scoring, write music, and add more enemy types.

Implemented enemy grabbing, flinging, and damaging. Now we’re actually getting somewhere. Still debating how exactly bullets are going to work.

Starting to implement enemy behavior. Not a lot of progress, but it’s something.

This is actually going to be an actual game with actual gameplay, I promise.

So I’ve been slacking off brainstorming design ideas for a while now, and have settled on something like a fast-paced arena shooter. And a title. Right now I have tentative player movement implemented, and… that’s about it.

I’ve got some ideas coming together of specific mechanics I want to play with. My inclination is to wrap those in an action/platformer game, but platformer engines with good solid physics are kind of a pain to write. Maybe it’ll turn into more of a beat-em-up.

Sweet. This is one of my favorite themes in games, so I’m pretty excited about what I could do with this. Time for a bit of brainstorming, then some feasibility assessment to narrow down designs.

Inspiration on the topic of Enemies as Weapons: TUMIKI Fighters (adding on), Pokemon (capturing), Kirby (absorbing abilities – or more pertinently, wielding directly in Kirby 64), Rayhound (redirecting attacks), Mischief Makers (enemies as projectiles).

I’ll be using this Processing project skeleton – the same one that I use for my weekly games – as a basis for my LD #18 compo entry. Mostly, it’s just so I don’t need to reimplement things like a main loop and particle effects for every game I make.

Other tools that are likely to feature prominently include sfxr, PXTone, Audacity, and possibly The GIMP if I bother making a game with graphics this time.