Pressure applied

So, here's what you get for finding and telling your "friends" about this cool NaNoWriMo offshoot - same thing but for games, called NaGaDeMon, or National Game Design Month for long.

See the link for more details, but the idea is to create, complete and play a game, any kind of game within one month, starting in 1 hour 14 minutes Swedish time. There are no judges but yourself - and anyone you're telling about this, which will mock you relentlessly for being a lazy ass if you are (and you are).

What you get, as I said, is one of said "friends" actually deciding to do this very cool thing, and setting up a blog to document the whole process - all totally great, and I am also doing a project in November, promise, it's the best idea in a long time. Same as the novel I'm been meaning to write each year.

Then the bastard adds me to this development blog. No pressure.

The problem with pixels...

"Pixels" made up of 3*3 "real" pixels with some color bevel.

...is that you don't really see them anymore. In the age of real 8-BIT graphics, even the pixels were crappy and not even really that square.
Today we can make pretty good pixels, but they are so small you never see them anymore(stupid high-res screens). So if I want some retro looking pixels, I will have to build them from a bunch of lesser "modern" pixels. 2*2, 3*3, 4*4 and so on. But using a homogeneous color looks flat and boring so to emphasize the "pixlieness" it seems to look a lot better/older if you create a kind of "bevel" effect pixel(like the second row of gray 3*3 pixels in the image above). This gives the eye the possibility of seeing individual pixels to get the retro-effect.
Another implication of this is that using such a system would allow me to generate a game that is reeeeeally tiny to begin with and scale it up dynamically by simply scaling the pixels and thus getting a similar experience on any device from a entry level "Hardly smart enough to tie my own shoes"-phone with a 640*480 pixels resolution to the one I ordered a few days ago with 1280*800 pixels.
An old device could maybe use 2*2 sized pixels and a new high-res device 4*4 or higher...

My initial plan

My friends cats name is Pixel.

For this challenge I plan to do 3 things that I've wanted to do for a long time.

1. Create a game at all.
2. Create a game for a Smartphone/Tablet/Mobile unit.
3. Create kind of a system to create games. That is: an engine of sorts.

As I'm kind of fond of pixels as well, I will attempt to create a retro style RPG-engine to in turn be able to create a simple RPG. An obvious inspiration is a type of game like GURK. This should be fairly simple. I hope. *holds thumbs* :)

The Game...

You just lost! =((

First!

So today starts the glorious journey. Make a game in a month... Any game...

Just start it.
Complete it.
And play it.

A casual Flash game about romance? A table game about Gremlins secretly taking over Wall Street? A game with balls? We are not sure yet... let's see how it evolves...

(Yes, I love the Ellipsis...)