I wasn’t really in the mood for Ludum Dare this time, but the theme inspired me to casually work on a small project anyway. The idea was to have green blobs living on your desktop and inside your windows, grouping together and eating the pixels. Eating would make them grow (with purer colors being more nutritious) until they split into two smaller ones, while the color of the pixels eaten influences the color of the blob. All this happens while you keep using the windows as usual. There is no direct interaction with the blobs, apart from shaking them around when moving the window or giving them very colorful windows to feast upon.

Here’s a screenshot:

The whole thing isn’t really meant as a game, but something that you can keep running while working, hence the transparency. I sadly won’t be able to complete it in time to submit it, but i didn’t really expect that anyway.
All work done the first day was getting the Direct3D and GDI interop to work the way i wanted it to, to allow the transparency via Layered Windows. Yet it still has issues when run on Windows XP and performance is awful too (~10 FPS). Todays work went into detecting the different windows and Blob behavior, but they still don’t grow, split, assume colors or actively move towards the purest colors nearby.

It certainly is a fun project and i hope that i’ll be able to complete it some day, and be able to sort these issues out.