== Development story ==

Concentration is focusing the mind.  Camp is where parents send kids
over the summer.  So a concentration camp must be a place where
kids with ADHD or other learning disorders can learn coping skills.
But no, it's a detention facility for minority groups disliked
by the government.

I came up with the idea of a better memory game for NES back in 2000.
The existing card-matching games for NES, GameTek's Classic
Concentration and Fisher-Price's I Can Remember, didn't resemble the
72-card Ravensburger/MB game that I remembered from my childhood.
So I decided to make one loosely based on Holocaust concentration
camps.  Google shows that by far, I wasn't the only person to joke
about connecting the literal and Nazi meanings of the term.  But for
several reasons, including the difficulty of finding NES copiers
back then, I only got as far as laying out the title and play screens
before giving up on it in favor of the PC projects I was working on
at the time.

In 2007, I tried again.  I drew a couple dozen card emblems,
including all fruits and all tools from Nintendo's Animal Crossing
series.  Then I revamped the appearance of the board and implemented
some of the features slated to appear in the deluxe game.  But
by then I had a day job, and crunch time for version 0.42 of
Lockjaw Tetromino Game took most of my free time.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, I bought a PowerPak, a CompactFlash
to NES adapter roughly equivalent to the SuperCard for GBA, and a
laptop running Ubuntu.  Sometime in the next year, the YouTube Poop
scene discovered a Chinese NES game called Dian Shi Mali, a virtual
slot machine with a Mario-like mascot named Fortran.  This character
and his catchphrase "PUSH START TO RICH" became an Internet meme,
which I discovered in early December 2009.  But by then, I realized
that the same fruit emblems on the slot machine spaces could become
fruit emblems on cards in a memory game.

This led me to go dig out my first and second tries at the game and
rescue the graphics that I had already drawn for the second try.
In fact, the dozen emblems I managed to rescue were clearer than
the Dian Shi Mali graphics.  Then I sat down with Wingdings and a
six-year-old cousin for inspiration and spent a few hours drawing
dozens of emblems over the next day.  As I spent one or two hours
of coding of each day for the next four weeks, the game slowly came
to life.  I felt less discouraged than in previous tries for at
least two reasons.  First, seeing my code run on an NES through
a PowerPak kept my spirits up the way no emulator ever could.
Second, I had already developed several reusable code libraries by
the time of the LJ65 project: the pads, sound, music, and unpkb
modules and part of shuffle.

By the end of December 2009, it was playable.  But in January 2010,
it became clear to me that better puns than "Concentration Camp"
existed.  A couple users of the nesdev BBS objected to such an
offensive title.  I asked on IRC EFnet#nesdev about better puns,
and Shiru mentioned something about concentration in the chemical
sense and needing to work a poison out of one's system.

== Day by day ==

2009-12
Sat 05: Watched videos of "Dian Shi Mali" and drew some card emblems
Sun 06: Drew more graphics; started background refresh code
Mon 07: Finished refresh code; started code for card sprites
Tue 08: Wrote intro story and designed the logo of the FLP
Wed 09: Explored opening cut scene options and made Tall Pixel demo
Thu 10: Colorized emblems and prototyped a 192x96+Tall Pixel still
Fri 11: Drew arrow images
Sat 12: Made the pad control the arrow and turn over a card
Mon 14: Made the opening text crawl
Tue 15: Made both cards flip back after a second and a half
Wed 16: Shuffled and dealt five patterns of 10 to 72 cards
Thu 17: Made matching cards disappear
Fri 18: Animated unflipping cards; ended 5th round with GSOD
Sat 19: Began to animate collecting cards; added sound effects
Sun 20: Drew title screen and added music and speed-up to opening
Mon 21: Made title screen work and finished collecting animation
Tue 22: Added difficulty menu for 1-round solitaire
Thu 24: Made player 1 score count down from 100 on each miss
Fri 25: Watched a family member to make sure level 5 was not too hard
Sat 26: Added two-player mode
Wed 30: Added tune for winning

2010-01
Fri 01: Began to compose letter of inquiry to bunnyboy
Sat 02: Added support for both controllers in 2-player
Tue 05: Learned that developers of original games contact RetroZone
Sun 10: Made the first public video: youtube.com/watch?v=_FuVTLFxrkw
Mon 11: New logo for Chosen; exclude level 2 emblems from levels 3, 4
Mon 18: Blocked A button repeat in 2-player and sketched out CPU AI
Wed 20: Implemented artificial idiocy
Thu 21: Realized necessity of denazification; asked for ideas on IRC
Fri 22: Wrote neurotoxin story based on pitch by Shiru; added vs. CPU
Sat 30: Made logo for the drug company
Sun 31: Game ends when 100 misses run out

2010-02
Sun 07: Worked on menu screens for deluxe
Thu 11: Worked on web pages
Fri 12: Explored options for weak DRM on non-public prototypes
Sun 13: Explored CHR compression options
Sun 14: Realized I lack IRL friends my own age; may rethink release
Sat 20: I may be able to save 25% on even 1-bit tiles
Tue 23: Wrote Python compressor; ratio matches CMM on all but SMB1bg
Thu 25: Wrote working 6502 decompressor; fills VRAM in half a second

2010-03
Sun 07: Made background color change on game over
Mon 08: Made animation on game over
Tue 09: Fade out in intro; started to write story mode scripts
Sat 13: Wrote main loop for story mode; added license notices
Sun 14: Released Concentration Room 0.01
Tue 23: Laptop died taking days of work; now coding on Windows XP
Wed 24: Made a tool to shuffle variables to expose buffer overflows
Thu 25: Started to shuffle each subroutine's memory allocation
Fri 26: Implemented daily backup procedure

2010-07
Sun 11: Sara sketched and inked opponents
Mon 12: Sara painted opponents between rounds of Spyro
Tue 13: Explored comics compression; Sara wrote opponents' dialogue
Thu 15: Sketched out DX UI
Fri 16: Pixel-reduced Sara's character designs
Sat 17: Displayed opponents on a background, with dialogue below
Sun 18: Moved pointer out of the way differently; released 0.02

== Trivia ==

* The first ten emblems are fruits and the tools used to grow them,
  inspired by Nintendo's Animal Crossing series.

