January game

Alright, so time to start brainstorming ideas for what to do for January. I usually brainstorm system design by trying to just jot down my thoughts, however things come to me. I usually do this on paper but in case someone out there is reading this, i'll try to jot everything down here :)


- simple mechanic
- remake a classic arcade game?
- space invaders? (have some code for this laying around)
- breakout?
- no skeletal animation system in yet, but meshes + lighting + controller input all works
- maybe do a non-interactive demo?
-- this might put pressure on turning it into a graphics demo, I think I'd rather make something 'playable' and leave pretty graphics for later months
- something Journey-like?
-- this could blow up in scope severely, and would have high art demands
- platformer?
-- not really feeling any ideas here right now, but I want to implement the logic for climbing up geometry, sliding across rails, etc
- something two-player (2 controllers at same PC)
-- top-down action battle game?
-- ie square levels with obstacles, geometry-wars kind of controls?
-- can have environmental hazards, powerups
-- this might be doable to some extent in a month.
-- i have no particle system/editor and transparencies don't currently render
-- i think it would be trivial to get transparencies working properly. I'm already building a light list for the compute shader based lighting I have, so it would be trivial to send the light list to a fragment shader instead and do "forward+" style lighting
-- need to write a quick tool to assign materials to meshes in maya. Right now it's hardcoded in the maya exporter
-- moving/rotating ships based on controller is trivial
-- 'bouncing' off of the environment will be the tricky part. I have no physics system integrated
--- integrate bullet?
--- write everything myself (some simple version!)
--- not completely familiar with what's all necessary. Can i solve this with just raycasting? I think so, *if* all walls are at right angles, can just raycast in 2 directions from each corner of ship square (in 2d) to see how far I can move