I’ve received a few requests now, so here’s the announcement nice and early.

Ludum Dare 17 is scheduled for April 23rd-25th weekend. Themes can be suggested on the wiki. Specifics will be announced as the date gets closer.

Also, stay tuned this month for the other 17, MiniLD #17 hosted by Tenoch.

Hey,

So this year at GDC we’re having an official Ludum Dare get together!

Where: Metreon food court
When: Wednesday, March 10, at 5:30

I should be pretty easy to spot.

So, show up, get some food, and we’ll have a good time!

See you there!
-Phil

P.S. If you are speaking or presenting or showing your game off in IGF, or whatever, be sure to leave a comment with times and locations so the rest of us LDers don’t miss the awesomeness of whatever you are doing

PoV P.S. If you’re working on something cool, bring it along. It might make a good conversation starter. Also, if I remember correctly, the Metreon has a pretty nice sized Arcade too. And if you can’t make it to San Fran, check out the comments for something you might be able to catch that I’m up to.

Since several persons on the compo blog and the IRC channel seemed interested in my original idea, despite the closeness with the previous Mini, I am hereby releasing the aforementionned Retro engine!

Weee!

Source code, Linux binaries, Windows binaries

As you can see, it lacks terribly of Windows binaries. I’m terribly sorry, but couldn’t get my cross compilation thingy to work. It usually goes flowlessly, but here I’ve been battling for an hour, and I gave up.

EDIT: Thanks to Sos, we now have Windows binaries. Yepee! Thanks a lot to Sos. All hail Sos!

If someone with a good heart would like to, it can be built as follows: compile io.c retro_lua.c and lua_api.c into retro.exe. That’s all. But you’ll need dev libs for SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and Lua 5.1

First one to publish a windows binary will win my eternal gratitude, and a cake*

Both source and Linux distribution contain full documentation (I hope), and an example game to help you get started.

And, as promised also, there is (a bit more) than a week before the actual Mini LD, which will therefore be held on the week end of the 20-21 of March 2010. No worries though, we’ll have the usual “take 48h when you want” policy, or even more if you like.

Okee. I hope I didn’t forget anything. Of course, don’t hesitate to ask questions on IRC and in the comments. Meanwhile, I’m gonna catch some z’s (I just love this expression, sorry).

Yours truly,

Tenoch

* The cake is a lie.

a towlr game made in unity, made in 2 hours yesterday. trying to get faster at making games.  first towlr with bloom?

unity web player

mac os x universal

windows

Hi,

I just set up a community website.

ghbrvlowabrvfladberogvlwrvfwlo games

It’s aim is to enable game developers to sell their games in a neat and hopefully profitfull manner.

Unlike e-commerce websites, it works in a different manner. It values quantity over quality, by accepting all the games you post there. The games are accepted until 700MB limit is reached. when that happens, I will assemble a CD ISO containing the games, a neat autorun menu for them, and a booklet for printing. Then I will distribute it online (probably through torrent protocol), so everyone can burn it and sell it themselves.

I think you guys made many games, that you think are of too low quality to sell, and this is the opporturnity.

I’m really looking forward to see some LD games there. also, tellme what do you think of this idea.

PS. It’s the catchiest domain name ever

Yay. I finally polished the graphics of my LD 16 entry “Where is the cheese” and submitted it to the iPhone App Store.
Get it if you like it.

So I had this great MiniLD idea, but it turned out that HybridMind completely ripped it off, without even knowing it!
Also, since he did it a month before me, it’s not really a ripoff, just bad luck for me. Stupid MiniLD booking a year in advance…

So here’s what we’re gonna do: I’m going to tell you what I had in mind, and if enough/any people are interested (despite the close resemblance with the previous month’s Mini), we’ll go with it anyway.
If not, I’ll find a new idea shortly. Maybe you could even chose between the two themes.

So, here it goes:

Constraints

Dear, dearer and dearest LDers,

in anticipation of this coming event, and giving in to my never-ending love for the golden times when awesome games held into 1 MB cartridges, I prepared for you a tiny game engine, humorously named:

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua and C API, offering the following characteristics:

- Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
- Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
- Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
- Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

It presents as binaries (for GNU/Linux and Windows, MacOS X if a good will makes the port) to which you feed a Lua source file in which you define callbacks such as update(), keypressed(), etc, and use an API that allows you to:

- Load images/palettes
- Blit images to screen
- Write pixels to screen
- Modify palette on the fly
- Load sound files
- Play sound files
- that kind of stuff

For those who do not desire to learn/use Lua, I intend to make a similar C API, so that it could be used from any C-friendly language (but then it requires you to compile the game yourself, thus limiting portability).

In fact, if you don’t like the engine at all, you can even make anything you want, provided that you stick to the constraints and use no library other than simple IO (basically SDL + standard C/Lua). The idea was just to give the same basecode to a bunch of wizard gamedevers and see what happens.

So there it was. Feel free to express yourself in the comments of this post so that we can decide together what is the better option. Also, the engine is almost entirely coded but it still needs a big evening to finish things up,so if no one is interested, I’ll probably play the lazy card, and just announce a one word theme.

Let me know, LDers!

Here’s something that may interest some of you… especially those missing GDC.

Intel has an App Store for Netbooks called the AppUp Center. It’s new, and scheduled to start being preinstalled on Netbooks from numerous computer OEM’s this year. So, Intel’s running a fun little promotion this month to get some more apps. Details about the contest can be found here:

http://appdeveloper.intel.com/fund

In summary, 250x $500 cash prizes (Visa gift vouchers), 100x royalty profit matching deals (with a $2 value given to free apps), and further prizes to be announced March 9th.

Timeline: March 1st to March 31st (for the first 2 prize categories).

Join the Developer Program here.

No doubt you’ve seen the App madness of the iPhone App Store, and after seeing some of the apps thought “I could do better than that”. Well, here’s a good place to do it.

My thought has been, if you have a good LD game you can polish up (or two), you should consider doing something like that for the contest.  Or even shape a MiniLD 17 entry towards this.  We all know how talented the people in this community are, so really, those prizes are yours for the taking.  Remember, you can even enter a free minigame, and if you’re one of the 100, you can still earn up to $2 per download (capped at $5k).

I actually won and am a winner in their last contest, and will be doing some interviews with them at the show. I wasn’t asked to post this, but my time GDC week will be short, and I wanted to give you all a good head start on this.

Great! So what’s the down side you ask?

The SDK is technical, and currently only supports C and C++. *********

There might be some *cough* creative solutions to that though.

Still interested?  Here’s some tips.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry I’m late.  Couldn’t make it last weekend, and this weekend was spent between making this and getting caught up in the Canada/USA men’s hockey game.

This is my game

Controls are 1234 7890, and it’s a 2 player game.  Things collide with each other when they are of different color and are not blending into the background.  Instructions are in the ReadMe.  This game started off as a game about strategy and ended up more a game about everything being completely unmanageable.  Or maybe it’s just me.  I’m terrible at this game is what I’m trying to say.

This is my first Ludumdare entry, so any constructive criticism is welcome!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=1752

Also I maintained an off-site journal about the making of, because I didn’t think of just putting it up on here.  You can read it here:

http://www.faqr.org/ryan/tbc/?cat=49

I’ve decided to make my views on the subject of games as art known.

The text referred to in the title appears after the rant. It is a self-descriptive piece, and very ranty, but I personally think that it’s a perspective that needs to be addressed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well,…actually I tried to build a nice game with the codebase I created on miniLD. Well,…haha! I started with a tank-training scenario and in that I “just” wanted to build a method that let then tank-”tube” lookAt a certain point. My engine somehow cannot handle this if the tube is child of a node that already has a rotation,…Well,..I failed in this. So I really was killed by math. I tried and thought and thought and tried…a bit too confuse I have to admit…so my weekend-project stuck right at the beginning. But if you want to start the tank-training you can give it a try here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/tank/tank.html

At the moment the game violates the color-constraint…I will change this at the end. Here a screenshot:

Have a nice week,…

Here’s my game. Late on my goal of about two hours ago, but a lot of that time was spent finalizing stuff (embedding fonts, testing on other computers, uploading the right version…) and it’s ready now, I think, to share.

Here’s a link to the webpage to play it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I started late, last night at 7pm, and I’m going to work until 7pm Saturday.  So now I’ve had just over 15 hours of possible work time. Of course, I’ve used very little of that–how much I’m not sure.

I have done something at least. My goals will have to be a little scaled back, but I do have a working framework for the majority of the action part of gameplay.

Before I go into what I want this game to be, here’s a link to the current version and a screenshot.

Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s a screenshot of my miniLD-16 inspired project. This is mostly just my hexplanet demo with a new tileset drawn from the miniLD palette. I don’t really like the stripey pattern (unexplored land), I need to do something about that.

Hex Moon

Most of the work here isn’t visible in the screenshot — I ported the hex demo to OpenGL ES, using proper VBO’s and shaders instead of the immediate mode crap it was doing before. This screenshot isn’t running on the iPhone, but it could be. This is running on linux using the PVR SDK in OGLES emulation mode. I’m finding it to be a quite nice SDK, btw, if you’re doing any iPhone graphics stuff and you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

This will probably be my last screenshot of this as a mini-LD entry, and I might not get a chance to work on it much in the next few months as I’m trying to ship a completely different iPhone project but I do hope to get back to this one, I think it will be a lot of fun and worth finishing.

So yay, I finally got the tutorials to work properly. As promised (and I don’t feel late at all…) the game is released!

No AI, so the solo mode is deactivated. The rest should be fine.

Get it on the submission page (Windows and GNU/Linux).

I hope the Windows version works. I crosscompiled from Linux, and although it ran in Wine, it was super slow.

I don’t have new screenshots, except tutorial text, so I’ll put back old ones. Because, heh, a “final” log entry should have screenies…

Here’s the readme:

Read the rest of this entry »

This miniLD was like more or less all of the last competitions before. I work and work on writing frameworks for the specific game leaving not enough time to do something cool gameplay with it. So I decided to invest an additional weekend so that I finally can say:”Yes it is some kind of game!” So stay tuned and buy some fuel for the upcoming Tank-Missions

Ah, as the competition is over, I decided to add one green color to the colormap and I will really think about kicking the input-constraint or just adding additional gamepad-support. Maybe I will use a MiniLD and a Normal-Mode. Similar to the old “Turbo”-Button of my very first PC (8086) where you could lower the speed from 10MhZ to 4.8MhZ . Unbelivable 10 (TEN) MhZ…. seems to be some years ago

Here a very first possible new tank…(blender render)

It’s neither well coded nor robust, but circle versus circle and circle versus line collision response are now working well enough to continue prototyping. I’m going to put a bit more time into getting the physics working, then I should be ready to begin testing a few puzzle ideas.

I thought I’d finish tonight, but sleeping 4 hours last night really doesn’t help. I’m off to bed, and hopefully I’ll finish tomorrow… For once I’m gonna try to really polish this game. I think it might turn out good.

So I think the gameplay is done. The game is fully playable in versus mode (two players on one keyboard). I have texts and scripts ready for the tutorials (which will probably prove very necessary for a rhythm game), but I still need to plug them in. And I have the intention of thinking about making an AI. Or let’s modestly say a computer opponent, because I’m frankly doubting my abilities to make anything clever enough to make the game interesting against it.

I'm not sure about this title, by the way...

In a post-LD version (as if the deadline wasn’t two days ago already…), I’d like to think about networking. I know it’s not always easy to find someone to play around the same computer. On the other hand it’s a lot more fun…

Anyhoo. I really need to sleep.

Well, I doubt I’ll have anything like a game done within the allotted 48 hours, but here’s a playable test:

http://vacuumflowers.com/temp/miniLD16

And here’s a screen shot:

I’m having a big gameplay direction crisis. I’m wondering if I’m not making the game too complex, and on the other hand I think making it simpler would make it a lot less interesting.

Plus the “musical ear” aspect. Should I expect players to be able to reproduce reasonably complex rythms, and how many different ones? This is hard

Plus I suck at art. Boo hoo.

Note the split screen...

So the lil guys now have opponents to fight. Note that arrows and spikes don’t do damage yet, but that will come…

I’m not dead! Just very late, but it’s a mini so I guess it’s not that bad.

EDIT: also, i’m very high on caffeine. oO’

I spent all day thinking of a name and Horse Racing is my best idea.

I’m a little late, but had a late start, and I’ve been constantly distracted by the Olympics this weekend. That’s where the idea came from, watching speed skating.

It’s kind of silly. Just bet on which horse you think will win. 1,2,3,4.

I wish could have used more of those lovely blues. The sound and music is the best part in my semi-sane sleep deprived opinion.

link to download page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=505

Thanks for playing. It’s been great fun making this

Late

I gave up on my original idea and didn’t think I was going to do a mini-ld game this time, but then suddenly within a couple hours of the deadline I decided to whip together something bad but playable.

PLAY ONLINE

On a happier note, I did make four games this weekend!  The other three were for Klik of the Month Klub.  over here.

Edit:  Timelapse!

It’s done!
It’s a bit further then my last attempt, I hope it’s interesting!

Controls, use the numbers to select a car, press the same number a second time, after a brief delay, to drop the object. Try to fill all the cars!

http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LDMini16.swf