Here’s a bit of fun – a virtual CPU that’s so bad that it’s memory keeps getting corrupted. What’s the point of that? Well.. it’s perfect for glitch art!

So there’s a fictional computer that’s based around a fictional 8 bit CPU that has:
– 256 bytes of memory (used to store the program code and also doubles as registers)
– 29 different instructions (including drawing primitives like squares and circles)
– 2 addressing modes (immediate and indirect)
– 2 hardware (ie: not stored in main memory) registers (PC and SP)

I’ve been thinking about “gamejams” lately, and how to change things slightly to make a “demojam” – a one or two day event where a bunch of people get together and make demos. One of the big problems I noticed when I ran gamejams in the past was that people often have no real idea of what they can actually achieve in such a short space of time. We would have people who worked at gamedev studios come along and spend the first half of the jam writing an engine before the realisation hit them that they were never going to get a game done. So.. no.. don’t do that. You need to hit the floor running. And if you want to work in a team then you can’t expect the other members to sit there twiddling their thumbs while you write the perfect render pipeline or asset system. You have to arrive at the jam with something that you can start creating content in from the moment you come up with your first idea.

Creating a demo engine that is suitable for a demojam is actually pretty simple if you make a few assumptions and cut a few corners. These days you can go a long way with some full screen shaders, post processing effects and maybe a few image overlays. That doesn’t even sound like an engine, more like a framework. So what if you could get such a demo framework? What would be the most accessible platform for it? How about somewhere with lots of readily available, high quality dev tools and libraries that can run pretty much anywhere? Well, now that WebGL has matured and anyone who’s programmed anything can pick up and learn JavaScript as they go along – how about making it web based? Enter Simple Demo Framework.
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