Hi everyone,
Burak / Novus Idea here. A week ago I submitted FUSED. I would like to share a short year-in-review here because this engine started breathing after an idealistic (if not stupid :) ) development desicion and really cool game jams like this one. Over the months I've focused on an engine that not just renders fancy stuff but a machine which can spit out a native x86 DPMI DOS games as well as 64-bit Windows builds of them. Most of the engine work have been completed on that direction and now is the time to taste the products. It's being a great journey as a computer scientist and a human-being.
August 2025. CyberVGA went live on itch as a Mode 13h prototype: palette tricks, a rotating cube or sphere, C with no dependencies, “does VGA still listen to me.” That was the whole product.
Winter 2025. It stopped being cute. DJGPP + NASM, 32-bit DPMI, Mode X 320×240 planar, Q16.16 everywhere it mattered, several renderers arguing in the same binary. More bugs than pixels, which was honest.
Somewhere in that stretch I also used a very early Harmony Tree build as a renderer stress test — shamanic forest prototype, more “does the pipeline still breathe” than a game. After that I tore out the temporary raycaster and started doing real textured walls and floors. Fixed-point wraparound, inverted projection, Mode X writes that lied. That winter was mostly math apologies.
Spring 2026. The thing started looking like an engine: cell-and-portal worlds, CyberEdit running in the same 320×240 as the game, lights, meshes, sky, particles, a manual nobody asked for. Then a Win64 port and a brush-to-octree path so the same worlds could live off DOS without pretending they were born there.
Summer 2026. Renderer almost completely re-written to use octrees instead of recursive cell tracing through portals. Standalone SDK. You own main() and the loop. DOSBox-X package and Win64 lib. PONG sample as the “yes, this compiles” sample.
This jam. FUSED is what the SDK looks like when you force it to ship a two-to-five-minute joke instead of another renderer essay. Spark is fire that learned to run. Charge is a powder keg that learned to walk. Live fuse between them. Touch = boom. Stretch = snap. Bunker at 5,000. Split keyboard, three fuse lengths, industrial night palette, software sprites. v0.1, as the rules allow.
Harmony Tree was the quiet forest test. FUSED is the plant that explodes if you stand too close. Same year, same constraints, opposite mood.
So, what's next? I'm planning two other submissions for this jam, one is a racing game with the spirit of ENDURO and the other one is a Wolf3D-Like narrative (story and gameplay mechanics inspired by George Orwell's classics) fps game COUNTED which has submitted to another game jam but still needs a lot of work and polish.
Feedback, snaps, and “I lasted forty seconds on BOOM!” all welcome. I’ll play other entries as they show up.
Stay on the fuse.
- Burak
