Actually, no, I stole it from Samsung's prototype designs.

So guys, any pictures of progress that are worth seeing?
I'm really liking the visual style of some of these games! (:

This should be the last color change for me. I don't have much more to add internally. It's about time to work on content, sound and polish.

Looks great! (:

Thanks for the encouraging comments, I'm off to bed get some more work done tomorrow.

@Enigmatic: If you stole my palette, it's fair play. I only mixed two of the colors myself. The others were stolen from a rather attractive retro concept art I found in the interbutts.

Being terribly color blind myself, makes mixing palettes a google search rather than doing it by hand for me.

Just a quick update: Spent the last six hours working on code for the project itself. Wrote a proper UI scenegraph to simplify a lot of my interface code, and polished off the equipment system. Gameplay UI is close to 100%, and I'm putting off saving/loading, title screen, options menu, and character creation until the main gameplay features are done.

At this pace, I ought to be on track to have the game feature complete by Saturday or Sunday with an exception of my "extra time expansion" features. I'm planning to implement three dungeons each with one final boss, and one miniboss. One of my possible expansions are two separate "class wings" to each dungeon, which each end in another miniboss. These are meant to encourage multiplayer if I have time to implement the class system.

Another one of my extra features is the overworld. If I have time, I'll implement it. If I don't, I'll draw a level map real fast, and throw the game together that way until after the contest.

I'm cramming really, really hard in between work and real life responsibilities, so as it stands, I'm five days deep in the competition with only 12 or so hours of work thrown together. Gonna make a big push this weekend to catch up. Despite the little time I've put in, I'm feeling good about my progress so far, and my chances of finishing even my expanded features.

Teaser screenshot of the game Zane and I are working on:



Still have a long way to go, but I'm hopeful.
Should be clear from the screenshot that the only restriction we're following is the 5 color limit. I don't want to disclose too much information, but you can probably figure out a lot about the game from that shot.

Still a big work in progress.

Gameboy style games. Gameboy style games everywhere!

Looks like the retro fad is going to overtake BYOND this month. Solid work, guys. I think we'll be inspiring some people to beat this particular horse to death after this contest.

Also: Update:

Haven't added any new art, but I pounded out some stuff for the first boss fight. I have no idea how I'm going to be handling damage detection for boss attacks, and how I'm going to plug them into the animation handler. My bosses are a little bit huge and have a lot of moving parts, so it's going to be a nightmare to get it all working, but it will be rewarding when I get it moving.

I'm spending this weekend fleshing out the minecart puzzles for the first dungeon, fixing jumping, and the ice puzzles for the second dungeon. The third dungeon's puzzles are all fire based, so it should be pretty trivial to add those, actually. Animating the fire, though, will be annoying as hell.

I'm not an artist, and it's kind of depressing because I'd really like to see this art'd properly, but I think it's starting to turn out okay.

Screenshot of the last major update:



EDIT:

I just finished the rewrite of my levers/buttons system. It's now a full on dungeon event system. Thought I'd share how it works, because I think it's really cool, and I'm going to be putting it up as a library after the contest.

It works through tags. Basically, you tag a button or a lever with a unique name. Then, you can drop some logical objects around the world from the logical_obj classpath. You can actually place them with the map editor, and edit their properties, so all dungeon event scripting is done directly in DM's default tools.

The objects all have invisibility set to 101, so they are only visible in the map editor.

The types of logic objects are:

and (Value is true if a list of triggers are all true.)
nand (True if a list of triggers are all false.)
notand (True if a list of triggers is both not all true and not all false)
or (True if any value is true)
nor (True if any value is false)
timer (Returns true after a set period of time.)
player death (Returns true after a player death, resets when player respawns)
enemies dead (Returns true if there are no enemies alive in the current room)
sequence (Returns true if a set of triggers has been pulled in the correct order)
binary (returns a binary value for a list of inputs)
router (On a single input, triggers a list of outputs simultaneously.)
add (returns the sum of a list of inputs)
mul (returns the product of a list of inputs)
div (returns the quotient of a list of inputs)
mod (returns the remainder of a list of inputs)
sub (subtracts a list of inputs)
eqls (returns true if a list of inputs are all equal)
grtr (returns true if a list of inputs are all in ascending value)
less (returns true if the list of inputs are all in descending value)
grtr_eq (same as grtr but also equal to.)
less_eq (duh)
not (returns true if all values aren't equal)

Enemies all have their own unique onHurt onKilled onFell and onSpawn events, which can be set to a tag of any logical object to be triggered as well.

For instance, I can create a mob spawner, which will trigger an router, which triggers an addition function and a timed delay, which will trigger a less function against the addition function. If the less function is true, it will spawn another enemy. This way, I can create unique game behavior on the fly without having to preprogram it, and puzzles can be truly dynamic.

This changes the entire way I handle dungeon building, that way once I'm done, I don't have to write code to create new puzzles and traps.

Overall, it's pretty fun to work with, and is really making puzzle creation a snap compared to what I was doing before.



This is basically how I worked it out. That way, I can create and call logical functions from anywhere, and not have to worry about what kind of object it is. Of course, each different type of logical object has overrides on the parent type's functions in accordance with how it works.

The best part about the system, is that it literally shrank the amount of code I was writing to do puzzles and the like to almost nothing. My minecart puzzle code just got deleted. The code for resetting the puzzle whenever the player fell off the track became unmanageable, so I wound up writing this to help solve that problem. Now I use about a dozen objects on the map to solve those problems instead of a couple hundred lines of code that still didn't quite do the job. It's pretty slick.

If I have time later, I'm going to expand all of my event scripting to this system, and actually hook in some more event triggers for moving the camera, playing sounds, displaying dialogue, etc.

It's just too bad I can't do the boss battles with a system like this... I need all the speed I can get, because the bosses have a lot of moving parts, and just plain can't be faked liked that.

His game is so awesome, even the mountains have hit points.