Alright! That's it, no more lurking ... I'm going to participate in this! I love the idea of this challenge, and a month-long time period seems great to me.
I haven't finished a game in eons, so finishing will be the real challenge.
My thought for these is "Head-to-Head Fruit Popper." Though, in this case "fruit" is limited to grapes and tomatoes, but meh, I think it still works.
My initial thinking for the game is a single-screen arena type of thing where the fruit (grapes and tomatoes) randomly spawn, and you need to pop them with your trusty thumbtack. Limited time and/or fruit goal or something similar. Need to mull over that part more in my head. For the "head-to-head" part, I'm thinking obviously two-player support, but substitute in a computer-controlled player to allow single-player games to be played still.
Anyway, as noted, still need to mull over some aspects of this more, but I think that is the gist of it.
I'm going to be developing this on my 486 MS-DOS PC with Turbo Pascal 7. Because why not. I'd been developing a home-grown mode 13h library slowly in my free time over the past couple years already, and it's mostly ready to go for this. I'm lacking sound support though, so I think what I'll end up doing for sound is utilizing Angelo Mottola's old "SoundLab" utility for QBasic, since it's super simple to code up a player in my game for the sound effects you can generate with that tool. And of course that tool works really nicely as a DOS "sfxr"-equivalent.
I also think I'm going to challenge myself to create all my own artwork instead of using stuff from e.g. OpenGameArt or whatever else. I'll do my artwork with Deluxe Paint II. I am really
not an artist so this will be interesting for sure, haha.
But yeah! Perhaps a little bit of a simplistic idea? I dunno, but as I said already, for me the real challenge will be for me to actually finish something at all!
