Everything I've created for #1GAM so far has been written in Flash and the excellent Flixel library. One lesson that has constantly come up is that constant practice with a set of tools makes it easier to build things using them.
This is not exactly a shocking discovery, but for some reason it totally escaped me until now.
With that in mind, this month I decided to make something with BlitzMax and a custom framework I've been building on-and-off for the last few years. It's something I've been using to build a large hobby project of mine, and what started as a few helper libraries has started to encompass everything from rendering to component-based entities.
However, the problem with building the game and framework together is that it's not giving me practice with all the various parts that make up a game.
So June's entry is called "Over-Engineered Invaders". Space Invaders seemed like a good test subject: it has a nicely defined loop, a couple of different entity types and the rules aren't too complicated. The name comes from the fact that Space Invaders really doesn't need a resource manager, rendering pipeline or customizable entity system.
In order to get something up and running quickly I used the original Space Invaders graphics, so for copyright reasons I won't be making the download available until I can replace the assets. Trust me, you're not missing anything.
I learnt some really important stuff in the process, and as always there will be a post-mortem in the next week or so.