Another day, another new project. 🙂

I needed a short break from my Invaders game so I decided to throw myself into GLBasic and remake a game for a compo over at that site, and that’s what I’ve been working on for at last couple of weeks. Info on that compo is here. There’s no prizes in the compo though, but in this case it’ll be my first game 2010 and that’s reward enough for me. :).

Before reading any further, or starting to look for a download link, you should know that at the time of writing, this game is “only” 99% finished and should be done very very soon (depends a little on the music-guy), so there’s actually nothing to download yet. However, the competition ends on October 31st so the game should be out before then.

The theme of the compo is to remake a NES or a SNES game. My choice is Binary Land – a NES game from 1985.

In this game you play a penguin. Actually you play two penguins – at the same time, no less. All the levels are split in two, and at the beginning of a level you start off with a penguin on each side of the screen. They can move freely from one half to the other though. Ultimately the objective is to guide both penguins to the top of the screen and have them meet up at the heart-cage, but the game has a very interresting play-mechanic where only one of the penguins are controlled “directly” – the other penguins left/right movement is reversed, and combined with the mazes not being symetrical, this gives the game a bit of a puzzle twist and of course you also have to deal with enemies and powerups on top of trying to guide your penguins safely to the exit.

I wrote a port mortem on the game here if you’d like to read more about the development of the game.

Here’s a couple of screenshots. First the splashscreen, the one “normal” screenshot and one with scanlines, which is one of the options.

This is the titlescreen/splashscreen.

A screenshot without scanlines.

Out very soon. 🙂