Initially planing a 2d version of 3d monster maze, to see if it is possible to demake a ZX81 game.
Instead we ended up settling on something like pengo, because plans never work, ever.
Decided not to stress the time too much this time, just keep going until it was playable and I think that makes it the most gamelike of the games so far. I'm still not smart enough to have prepared some kind of gameplayengine in advance so this took just over four hours to get it all together. At least this time I fiddled with the gameplay side until I was happy with it though.
If you notice lots of pauses near the start it is because I didin't even have a cup of coffee ready. Had to go back and forth to the kitchen and boil the kettle 2 or 3 times before I even had a hot drink to keep me going. This is probably the biggest failing of the jam so far, we really need some sort of maid to provide tea and biscuits and maybe a ham sandwich on demand. Or at least order pizza next time.
I really want this to run well on the raspberry PI and currently this is not the case, mostly it just needs the code to do less generic bumf. Which although acceptable on a PC is a tad too verbose for the PIs poor little ARM chip. To this end the day after the jam I finally switched the ARM build from vanilla Lua to the wonderful LuaJIT which gives a nice average 4x speedup of everything. This act alone makes the game playable on the PI for now.
Still plenty of room to speed things up, for instance drawing text on the screen is incredibly expensive compared to what it should be. As you can see by pressing ~ to bring down the console and seeing the whole thing crawl to its knees just from rendering a few characters.
Silly me.
This is all the drawing side of the game BTW so the game logic runs in less than a millisecond then the drawing chugs away for literally fractions of a second. Terrible I know, but there is no shortage of things I can do to make it faster and they will all happen given enough time. It is just really nice to have some things running already so that when the engine does go faster the games instantly improve :)