I decided to attempt to make a game for this event, and even though I'll probably not be able to finish it, I still think it's worth sharing the idea.

I'm making a game that twists the theme. Instead of the game mechanics being bound to the theme, the development of the game is. I'm eschewing any and all modern game development tools and abstractions: engines, graphics API's, high level languages, and even operating systems, in favour of starting with absolutely nothing.

Starting with a cold bare metal machine, my game code (written in assembly), loads itself into memory, takes control of the computer, and runs until the computer is rebooted.

In the spirit of starting from nothing, I'm using no previous code. Everything is written from scratch for this game.

Here's the first "progress" shot. A hello world shot, booting up and painting the screen red (here running on an emulator):

I hope I find the time to have something playable at the end, but even if not, I still liked the idea enough to post this :) Let me know what you think.

edit: if you wish to follow along, clone this git repo, and try to pull from time to time: http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/git/ld45startnothing