The Game:
Authorized Personnel Only will be a 2D, top-down game with elements of stealth that features light as a key gameplay element (not dissimilar to Shadow's Veil, from the third competition). Trespassing into an underground facility that, as the title indicates, is off-limits to anyone unauthorized, the protagonist must evade security and traps set up around the darkened facility while attempting to reach the very heart of the labyrinth for a mysterious goal (which means that I haven't figured that out yet). The current idea is that you'll explore the facility by figuring out what is in each room, using as little light as possible so as to not alert whatever is inside it that you're there, before disabling the traps set up or sneaking through to progress. I'm not entirely certain what the overall game will look like (whether it will be one large pre-made map to get through, or numerous independent rooms and set-ups for a procedurally generated map each time you play) or how exactly all the gameplay elements will be balanced, but that's a rough idea of what I have in mind. This is all not only subject to change, but likely to change, haha!
Achievements:
Thinking Ahead: Spend time before the start of the competition planning your game.
Seeing the Matrix: Share your source code with the people in the competition via GitHub, BitBucket, or a simple download.
Happy Accident: You accidentally create a bug that leads to humorous results.
The Tinker: Fiddle with a complicated piece of code and get it to work only after a lot of failed tweaks. (Yup, this happened a lot when programming basic lighting, especially when fine-tuning it to look nicer.)
Leveled Up: You learned something that you didn't know that you can reuse in other games or other programs. (When rewriting the calculations for the flashlight beam, I had to be able to find the closest point of intersection between a line and a point, which proved difficult, but hey, I did learn something from it.)
Vincent van Gogh: You create your own artwork for your project. (Sort of - I'm not making the 3D models myself, but I am animating, rendering, and assembling them into texture atlases.)
10 Hours: You spend at least 10 hours programming your game during the month.