Well after a pretty shaky start this morning (blanking on the theme + loss of source code from before lunch) things are better that might be expected!

After much racking of brains, I kept coming back to the idea of a game focused on just 1 dimension. Of course, the first dimension on its own it just a continuous line so what I’ve gone with is a game where you can only see a 1px band of the screen at any one time. The actually objective is very straightforward; collect the shiny particle whilst avoiding being obliterated by the big scary particles floating around. This is made substantially more difficult by the limited field of view though.

What can you see floating past in front of you here? You’ll have to look closely!

In case your worried, there are ways of widening the view (slightly) to make thing (slightly) easier.

Well barring catastrophic data loss, I should have something done in time, but there is still a lot to be done. The levels haven’t been properly implemented yet, still no sound and a major hostile particle remains unimplemented! Regardless it’s getting late and I’ll probably be off to bed soon so that I can return to the code invigorated for another day of LD! Night everyone!

Hi everyone. Hope your entries are going well! I’m pleased with the progress of mine. Since my last post, I’ve added sound, levels, unstable/radioactive particles and, most importantly, first person perspective. That is, first person perspective from the point of view of a 2D sprite, which is essentially 1D. The game is nearly done but I need to play it all through again to check I’ve not introduced any crashes or anything with first person view. Then I’m going to need to do a pretty good write up so people can understand what’s actually going on! Here is a screeny of the game so far.

Let me explain what you are seeing here (I’ll do a better job with diagrams for the release version). In the top box, you are seeing a TOP DOWN perspective of a 2D map in 1D. You, the player, are the tiny blue box. The big orange thing drifting across your view is your target. The reason your view is so wide is because when I took this screeny, I had merged with a number of other particles so that my character was much wider than when it starts. The bottom box is the FIRST PERSON view, again in 1D. You can now see what the big orange thing looks like from the side, as well as some other stuff that you can’t see in top down mode. Got it?

Oh and by the way, this is minimalist because it has the minimum number of dimensions (1) – does that count?