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[Lon]

Update January 11th 12:30ish AM:
 
  Well I missed the dead line.  What I have now I wouldn't consider a game, though it is getting close.  So no entry from me for Assemblee: Part 2.  Sorry to disappoint. 
   
   Good news is that I will release a playable version of the game and the source code for it before February 16th!  Also I had a lot of fun working on this game, learned a lot and have really enjoyed interacting with this awesome community of talented persons.

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Not much time left for the compo (just till the tenth right?), but I have decided I will make an entry.

   I am still trying to make some important design decisions.  Whatever I decide to do, I will have something to enter though.    Ill just have to jump and run in a direction here shortly.

   I was thinking of doing something with a swarm.  A swarm of what?  Energy? Bugs? Mushroom? Spaceships?  Not to sure yet.  I was originally thinking of doing a shootEmUp, but now I am not so sure...  Ive got other ideas now.

   Anyways, swarms are interesting and there size is mostly CPU bound.  Examples I have seen tend to grow at O(n^2) time (lots of ways to cheat/reduce this that are good enough for game purposes).  More information about swarming, flocking, or rather Boids can be found here: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

   I am using Processing (www.processing.org).  So my entree should be Java program(s) that can run on Windows, Mac or Linux.  Processing is very distracting to use... it is lots of fun just to create and tweak 'interactive art'.

Here is a screen shot of some prototyping I am playing with (trails are currently left by the particles):

User control of the swarm is interesting, will probably take a lot of tweaking.
NOTE: Some of my code is inspired/based/derived from an excellent example of swarm/flcoking/boids called Flocking by Daniel Shiffman (see: http://processing.org/learning/topics/flocking.html)

[jotapeh]

Cool dude! I like this.

I've always had passing ponderings about the 'duck in the middle of the flock' - how does it decide which direction to fly, when vision is limited to a small cluster of ducks surrounding it? That page provides a nice model for it.

Neat behavioural mechanics should lend itself nicely to a game 

[Lon]

Just a small update, I decided what direction to go with this game.  Going to control a squadron (swarm) of ships using the mouse and keyboard.  Fly around and destroy other ships.
Now I need to design the game and get it playable by the deadline!

I am also planning on releasing the source code for this entry.

[racter]

That sounds like a lot of fun - looking forward!