I have never participated before, but last LD48 I was watching Notch’s livestream while programming a little game over the course of 8 hours. This time I’m in it for real.

I really like building the engine from scratch, so I’m going to do it Notch style, and use only a basic Java canvas and manipulate pixels manually.

• Java
• Eclipse
• cfxr
• Pixelmator (I know, definitely not ideal for pixel graphics. Any suggestion for a Mac user?)

I was considering HTML5/JS too. I have tried several ways of creating a fast low-res canvas (but scaled up), but I’m not pleased with the results. Resizing each pixel manually did not yield the frame rate I was hoping for. Ideally, I’d like to scale up the canvas using nearest-neighbor interpolation, but I have yet to get this to work across all browsers (Safari doesn’t seem to respond as it should to -webkit-optimize-contrast).

Anyway, something tells me I need to go and learn how to draw kittens now.