EGP entry for November: SolarCar

Very quick and dirty one, this!

I spent five hours (ish) making a quick interactive concept for the Experimental Gameplay Project theme "Night and Day".

I came up with a little driving game where your solar-powered car slowly runs out of juice unless you drive into the light. The objective is to collect coins that increase in points value if the player combos together a longer string of coins in between charges. This creates a bit of a risk/reward thing as the player who plays it safe doesn't score big points.

It's very rough around the edges, but I think the concept works pretty well. I'd love to turn it into something more substantial at some point, perhaps as a proper racer rather than a mindless collecting exercise. It would be pretty cool to sabotage your opponents light sources to get ahead in the race, or maybe each player could be light or dark, and have to turn light sources on and off to gain an advantage.

Not bad for a few hour's work anyway, here it is: SolarCar.

The 8bitrocket 16k Retro Remake contest

The awesome guys at 8BitRocket are running a really fun sounding game design contest at the moment, to recreate classic Atari games using your tech of choice. The fun part is, the game has to be squeezed into a measly 16k! OK, so it's not as stripped down as the 1K contests, but it'll still be a good challenge (more so considering I'll be using Flash).

I've been kind of struggling with fitting in larger projects recently, so this sounds like a fun little contest that won't eat up too much of my time. I'm also a sucker for retro game design, so it would be rude not to have a go really.

Game-wise, I'm definitely only going to choose from games I've played myself on the actual Atari 7800 I owned: at the moment I'm thinking about perhaps some sort of Pitfall clone, or if that turns out to be over-ambitious then maybe something a bit easier, like a Q*bert clone. I'm not going to lie: the best game I ever played on the Atari (if not EVER) was undoubtedly Ninja Golf. If I feel brave I might have a go at it, the game itself was absolutely rubbish, but it has ninjas and golf in it. Ninjas and golf!

Anyway, sounds like fun, check more details here!