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mix09 10k entry

I’ve authored an entry for the Mix09 10k Smart Coding Challenge called Verdant. It’s an experimental game idea where the player influences the growth of plant vines to collect as many rain droplets as possible.

Contest entrants are limited to 10kilobytes of source code and resource files, so like many others, I was constantly budgeting features, making lots of trade off decisions. It was a very enjoyable exercise, because I ended up cutting all my grandiose ideas like explanatory tooltips, sprite animations for the plants, keyboard input, background music, and lots of nice-to-have game mechanics like power ups and penalties, all of which would’ve been way over budget.

My thanks go out to Adam Kinney and crew for putting the contest together and making that weekend much longer and more enjoyable.