I've settled on the idea of making a microgame collection (i.e. Warioware).

My biggest worry is that I don't know exactly how much I can fit in, especially since this is my first time working with the CHIP-8 and its extensions. Guess we'll just see how that goes...

I'm making a minimal RPG, squeezed into VIP memory constraints. Today's progress: working health and energy display, and a rudimentary text system with a 5x3 font. Up to 574 bytes already, which is just a bit worrying. We'll see!

Much progress today. Text systems are *fiddly*. I ended up writing a basic string concatenation routine, as otherwise erasing the full line of text when it's built out of so many small parts was a state tracking nightmare.

I want to generalize the player / enemy structures a bit so that attacks can swing in either direction, and therefore share most of their code. Then enemies can respond with attacks of their own, and that should close the interaction loop for battles. Then onward to magic!

I've been tinkering with a little K/APL interpreter that runs on SCHIP. No practical purpose, but it's kinda a neat tech demo:

Annoyingly, SCHIP doesn't scroll in the direction I'd need for terminal output, so I had to implement my own text-framebuffer and scrolling routine. I have room for 32 characters by 10 lines with this font, but I spaced the lines out to 32x8 so my entire output buffer fits in one 256 byte "page".

I have about 100 bytes left over, so I may try to squeeze in a few more features...

Anyway, with all that out of my system I'm ready to start work on an actual game.

I'm working on a game that's roughly like the old Windows 3.1 game "Jezzball".  

I've never written a game for Chip8 before, despite having implemented an emulator for it a few times. I never tried very hard to find a reasonable assembler, and hand-rolling opcodes got tedious fast. I only discovered Octo a few months ago, and it's been an exciting find. The whole project is so cool and well done, I'm glad I found it! Not sure how I missed it for this long.

I started with a few tech demos to start to get the feel for how to do things: bouncing some balls, writing some fill routines, and animated line drawing. 

I'm making decent progress, but I sometimes get distracted by related projects: I'm assembling my code using a re-implementation of the Octo assembler I have written in Python (not out of any particular need... just as an exercise for myself), and running it on an "Arduboy" with an emulator I wrote for Arduino-based platforms with the ability to target different rendering platforms (it started with just Arduboy support, but now I can also run it on M5Stack). So often I get distracted fixing bugs in those things.

Hopefully, I'll have *something* reasonable to submit before October ends.

Hey there!

I'm pretty new to Chip-8. I only discovered it about a year ago and had a lot of fun last winter writing an interpreter, an assembler and finally a compiled higher level language that I didn't finish. All in Javascript, and running in the browser. At some point I discovered that Octo is a thing that exists, and that Octojam exists, and because implementing the Chip-8 tools gave me so much joy decided to join the jam and see if writing software for the platform is equally enjoyable :)

I've been able to put a couple of evenings' time into my idea, and it's starting to look like something, so I thought I'd share what I'm working on.

The concept is loosely based on the 1981 game "3D Monster Maze". I really enjoy playing with retro 3D and pseudo 3D stuff, and as far as I could find there are no games or demos that do anything related to the third dimension for Chip-8. (Did I miss anything..?) Also, I like that the original game is almost as old as Chip-8 is, so that makes it a great match, I think. Probably no dinosaurs in my version though, I have some other ideas ;)

I can currently walk around the map in "3D" and I can also bring up a top-down mini-map to see where I am. I'm not sure if the mini-map is going to stay, or if it will mess with the gameplay. This screen capture is running at 30 cycles per frame:

These flat, boring images are just for testing the "engine". The intention is to get it to look more like this:

As you can see I'm still playing with shading the stones, making them dirty in some places? Maybe the ceiling needs some love too..? This project is going to be a lot of work, even in pixel art alone... ^_^'

As you can see I chose to use Octo's XO-Chip extension for drawing four colours and SCHIP's extension for drawing 16x16 sprites. That's all though, so another idea I'm playing with is to make a very bare-bones black-and-white version of this game that is actually Chip-8 only, and should run on the hardware from the period. It'll be slow, but it should just be playable, I guess..? We'll see! One step at a time.

If you're interested, my code is on Github, under a GPL license.

First, let me thank you here, Tobias, for contacting me and making me aware of OctoJam. The enthusiasm here is awesome and I hope that I can contribute something worthwhile (or maybe just fun) to the mix! In recent months I wrote a Chip-8 interpreter "MyChip8" in Qt and C++ and, that done, I am now revising "Surround," from Pips for VIPS I. Reading that code and text has really taken me back to my origins! The original code runs, but not perfectly (perhaps due to its MLS calls, which I had to strip out of course). I considered perhaps fixing the bug, but it's not really in Octo; it's just the Chip8 byte codes in 0xff format. I wanted to write a new game in Octo, so that's what I'm doing for the Jam. The revised game, which is close to working, is called "Snake Surround" (I see there is a Snake entry already and it's really good! Mine is similar but different -- but the more the merrier, right?!) Cheers to all. -- Tom

I've been doing some tinkering with a tile engine that can handle scrolling a large map and dynamically repainting the edges.

I think I have some ideas for turning this into an actual game. We'll see, I suppose...