I have attended the Assembly event every year starting from 1992. Starting from 2002 they have also arranged a game development competition. I have participated in that compo every year – my first one there was Stair Dismount™ (which was also the winning game).
However, this year I won’t be taking part. I actually have been churning out code for a week or two for an entry. But the submission deadline was on last Sunday and I just didn’t have enough of anything playable to have a first submission… Updates are allowed, so it wouldn’t have been an issue to submit something half-finished, but I was far from that.
I have one long-standing idea for a nice additive feature to a normal side-scrolling platformer, which is what I had in mind. That’ll wait for another time. On the image right you can see a small glimpse of the test code I made – although the image doesn’t really tell anything. Even the tile graphics are taken from free graphics sets of Lost Garden (thanks!). But I’ll probably post a bit more about my prototyping tests later, as I had fun time making some new stuff as well as polishing some old code.
PS. For a few years I have also held seminars at the event. This year I was asked to talk about iPhone and our company experiences, but I felt I’m not the right guy to have that talk so I passed on the opportunity. I recommend you go and listen to scoopr‘s iPhone development talk (he’s my colleague).