Unfortunately I’m away from home for this competition, so i’ll be using my tablet pc instead of my proper pc. That’s not a big problem, but Eclipse does feel a little cramped at only 1024×780. The other snag is that it’s got a bare-bones graphics chip so I can’t use fancy shader magic. Although I suspect that’s actually a good thing since otherwise I’d probably waste far too long messing around with some trivial graphics tweeking instead of focusing on the gameplay.

My tools will be:

• Java 1.4 and OpenGL for the game
• Eclipse and Ant for an IDE and build scripts
• ArtRage and Paint Shop Pro for drawing
• Sfxr for sounds (if I get time)

I’m also toying with the idea of using Inkscape as a level design tool. I’ve seen it used to great effect in a couple of other games, but I’ve not used it before myself. I’m going to spend some time today toying with it to see how it is and see what kind of file format it chucks out. I don’t want to spend hours trying to figure out how to parse it’s file format and waste a lot of time. Of course I might want to do something tile-based, in which case it’ll probably be regular ascii maps FTW.