My first Ludum Dare. I may not have time to finish a game, but I had an idea earlier this week and this seems like a good excuse to prototype it. Between juggling some hiking to keep the wife happy, some baby playtime, and a birthday dinner, I estimate I’ll have ~20-30 hours total to tinker on this.

Tools: Flash Builder, Drop Box
(might use Flash & Photoshop if I get past the prototype stage and need some UI)

The concept is a pixel-bot arena. Working title: Mesh

Retro-pixellated arcade robot brawling growth simulation.

You start as a lowly Mesh (pixel-bot) with only 3 pixels–your “brain” pixel and two spares. When entering an arena, your goal is to gather as many pixels as possible without dying. Any two pixels of any two bots that overlap become dislodged, floating free in space. If anything collides with your brain pixel, you’re toast. If you cross over a Free Pixel, you collect it. Collected pixels first go towards reparing your bot, then into a point bank.

At the end of each mission you can buy new “permanent” pixels which you can place on your bot adjacent to any current pixel (evolution, heh). That’s probably as far as I’ll make it this weekend, but eventually the goal would be:

1. Sub-Meshes: mount a new mesh onto your base mesh to create crazy complicated compound shapes.
2. Pixel-Motors: define simple pixel paths and attach these behaviors to your sub-meshes to create wacky animated bots.
3. Evolution replay — starting with the base bot, replay the construction all the way through to the current bot.
4. Giant bossfights built with the above.
5. Populate the world with other player’s Meshes (a la first level in Spore).
6. Multi-player battle arenas built with the above.

First stop: pixel grid with bouncing free pixels. Next stop: adding the Mesh class and a simple input class