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.
