I was originally all for it, as I was working 25 hours a week at the time and needed something to pass the time with. But then my workload rose exponentially, and I ran out of time to do anything. By the time T minus 1 week came about, Tiny Defense Gunner (Defendrex) had no gameplay, only techdemo, and even my backup plan of Tiny Pacman was too complex to bring about in the time I had left.

A shorter timeline would have focused me to make a small design that would definitely work, instead of taking my time finding out that my incomplete design would not work. But hey; "I have not failed. I have discovered a thousand ways that don't work."

With any luck, I will too, but work is killing me, and I'm going out-of-town for a wedding this whole weekend... so I'll probably submit no earlier than a handful of hours before the due date.

Speaking of which; where's the submission thread? Or is it an email address?

I get horrible flickering; are you double-buffering your graphics?

Overall, seems nice, but while I know how to win each level, it doesn't tell me how I lose. The attacking pieces seem to shy away from my castle at the last moment, so I'm not sure if they're trying to move an attacker onto my castle, or what?

Good game, but the sound effects devolve to static when they start to stack up, and the applet doesn't quit properly; the the sound keeps running for a good 15 or so seconds after I close the window or tab containing the game.

My only real complaint is that the responsiveness is pretty poor; I have no on-screen indications of whether a keystroke will be responded to, exacerbated by the fact that it only updates once or twice per second. Even when I establish a key-hitting rhythm that seems to give the game enough time to respond, the moment I touch a bat, I have to wait a couple seconds before any key presses work again.

I assume there's no way yet to go down or up the stairs, but in three plays I have yet to take damage from a fight. I think I once saw the health bar go down one or two pixels while I was walking down an empty hallway, but there wasn't a bat in sight, and I got no text saying I had been in a fight, and nothing indicating I had walked into a trap.

Your life bar is half a pixel tall, compared to the rest of the screen; either your actual resolution is double the permitted, or you're drawing the life bar as an illegal overlay.

Y'know, this game will only be running at a quarter or so the resolution and four times the colour palette of Head Over Heels... make it reminiscent of same, and it will be full of win.

Works perfect for me.

Windows 7, Firefox 3.6, JRE 1.6u11.

No chance you'd be willing to share the source to your framebuffer-to-animated-GIF code? I'm sure we're all competent enough to adapt it to our own various frameworks.

Work's been slogging, so I've no reasonable progress on the actual game, but I did work on the editor a little bit. See first post for the latest egaEditor with new features.

Galaxy613; try java.util.Arrays; it has several handy functions on arrays, in all appropriate type variations.

For one, the cursor would be hidden. And though the game will be keyboard playable at 40x30, x1 scale, mouse control is probably only realistic for playing at x8 scale or so.

Progress to date: screen system finished, UI designed, palette assignments made (7 for UI, 4 of which are palette-animated; 9 remaining for game field and enemies). Starting on subpixel-antialised polygon rasterizer; implementing model/view/projection stack at present.

Though I'll probably be submitting more than one game to the contest, here's the development log for the first.

Defendrex is a first-person "beachhead" style defense game. Enemies will assail your fortified position from all sides, and you must hold them off as long as possible. The player's two weapons (a precision laser and a rapid-spray machinegun) recharge and reload independently, and both will be necessary to succeed.

I'll make optional mouse controls available using a captured cursor technique, but keyboard will be the primary means of control.

Attached is an image editor (runnable JAR with sources included) that I created for sketching and graphics; feel free to use for your own projects. s/l to save/load images, S/L to save/load palettes, and it works on a fixed 40x30 canvas. Pick a palette pen to use from the vertical strip, and change which EGA colour to fill the palette slot with by clicking in the spectrum. Filled with the "default" classic EGA palette by default. Only one palette pot selected at a time, and no fill or line tools right now... I might add separate left/right button pots later.

Edit 2010-04-16 2350h: re-uploaded egaEditor.jar; the previous version didn't include sources as claimed.

Edit 2010-04-22 1940h: re-uploaded egaEditor.jar. Same file formats, with the following feature updates...

• EGA and PAL extensions automatically added now; still no proper file-open dialog because I'm lazy.
• Dual palette pots, left and right button; indicated with circle and square respectively.
• Flood-fill tool; press lowercase "f" to flood with left-button pot, uppercase "F" to flood with right-button pot.
  

Attached is a Photoshop Swatches file for the EGA palette; handy for those of us drawing any of our graphics. It's an .ACO file in a .JAR archive due to the upload restrictions.

I'm definitely interested; as soon as I have a game in mind, I'll get started.

Proposed end date is during July?