Right, missed the start by a couple of hours as I got some needed rest. Turns out, the theme is the one I really didn’t want, on account of me fooling around with genetic algorithms earlier. <strong>Evolution.</strong> Genetic algorithms, unless done better than I can probably manage, are bad for gameplay. Not really intuitive, very limited, and not exactly robust.

I’ll be using Python, with Pygame. Paint.NET for graphics. Possibly sfxr for sound, and my guitar + Audacity (hopefully).

To that end, I looked into implementing the theme into the story/progression, rather than the actual gameplay. That just made me want to cringe on account of knowing the really basic biology needed to understand the huge period of time over which evolution occurs, and how Spore-like cell evolution is horrible. So, obviously, a mix of the two.

Hopefully, I can pull it off. We’ll see whether it actually works out. The biggest problem is likely to be the art, really. To lessen the impact, I’ll try and go for a minimalistic abstract style, with few colours. Have a dev picture, that looks horrible and will in no way reflect the final product.

At this point, I have finished 4 of my 10 steps to success (to be posted later): display framework without animation code, input framework, map loading/rendering, simple plaftormer physics/gameplay. Next up, adding some sort of UI that will mostly consist of start/end menus, and some sort of in-game dialogue boxes.