Built in ~12 hours.

Working: you control a Mesh, kind of like a pixel-robot-organism that battles in an arena. When any two Mesh pixels overlap, they're knocked loose and float freely. Pick up the free pixels to regenerate yourself. If your "brain" pixel collides with anything, your entire Mesh will explode (game over).

Not Working: The idea was that you'd add a pixel onto your Mesh at the end of every level (evolution). Play would start each level in the same "+" form, but as you gathered more pixels you'd grow into your final form.

I was planning to make ~10 or 20 levels (there's an AI system complete for setting up paths for the AIs and the engine supports resizing to much smaller pixel resolutions). After 20 "set" levels, you'd enter a free-form arena where you battle your ancestors!

Stretch Goal: I'd also love to add support for multi-tier Meshes--a "mount point" would act as a second-tier brain. You could add pixels to either your main Mesh or your sub-Mesh, and even define paths for your sub-Mesh (think rotating blades or Dhalsim-arms).

Mega Stretch: It would be pretty easy to store all these in a database and load random enemy meshes to battle against (offline). It would be harder, but pretty cool, to make a live battle arena.


source link is the specific commit for the entry--i'll probably keep tinkering with it, but that source will construct the SWF i linked to as my "play" entry