I'm going to participate the the Ludum Dare October Challenge. Unfortunately I have just 3 hours per week for game development. I don't think there's any chance of meeting the end of the month (12 hours dev), so I'm giving myself a year (150 hours).

The game will be called Anastom, pronounced anAStom, as I have the domain and am not currently using it for anything.

It has the following design constraints:

• It must be fun.
• It must be playable within two seconds of typing www.anastom.com
• It must work in 80% of browsers (no WebGL, but 2D Canvas OK).
• It must be massively multiplayer.

I have the following ideas:

• Visibility like Roguelikes.
• 2D side scrolling platformer, but not 'twitchy'.
• Puzzles, like Castle Quest (BBC Micro).
• Solo Instances for some areas, and Group Instances for others.
• Mixture of Randomly Generated Maps and Set Pieces.
• Old-school pixellated graphics, maybe 3x or 4x upscaled. (Quicker to design.)

Platform:

• Client: JavaScript, with Canvas and Socket.IO.
• Server: NodeJS (JavaScript) with Socket.IO and MySQL.

I'll blog on progress each and every Friday, to keep my motivation up.

Lets see how I do...