So, theme announced at 3am. I actually got an idea very soon, and decided to go with it because it is both simple and fun (more about it later).

However, I went to be at 6am, woke up at 2pm, and spent most of the day coding a curses-like library for SDL and my wrapper evöL. Of course, it’s always during the time limited compos that I finally motivate myself to do what I wanted to do for a while…

And now, after 13 hours of work, I have… the title screen, hurray!

My god, it's full of ASCII!

Fortunately I had coded a part of my html parsing right after theme was announced.

Now, gameplay!

I’ve posted about my progress on my blog. Until I get PoV to hook me up with some syndication, here’s a link:

http://pekuja.com/ludumdare/92/wikipedia-mapping/

OK, so I have a working prototype!

Kind-of pointless screenshot.

Not very exciting, but it works. Create and edit pages here (starting with ‘Adventure/’, link them up, and it’ll let you navigate between them. To make it easier, pages that don’t exist will give you a link so you can write them. To jump to a page, simply add ‘p=PAGENAME’ (without the ‘Adventure/’ bit) to the URL. It’s case-sensitive.

Um, not really sure where to go from here. Making ”’ become <b> and ” become <i> would be good. Then maybe some kind of inventory…? I really have no idea.

EDIT: The best bit about this is that other people are already writing the actual game pages for me!

I really, really, really shouldn’t be participating this weekend, as it’s my son’s first birthday and there are relatives from all over filling my househole.

But the theme!  It’s too good!  And worse, games with this theme will probably be LESS good if you just decide to release them later on, because they will require way too much explanation.

I don’t have a lot to show yet, just a title screen really.  I’m reading data from the wiki (specifically, from http://www.minild12.sophiehoulden.com/index.php?title=Special:Random ), but that’s not evident here.  Game will be a frantic shooter, I guess.  Probably smash TV style.  Also I looked on the rules wiki for “profanity” and I didn’t see anything preventing it!  So!

oh f stop sharing information title

I wasn’t planning on entering miniLD 12. But the theme was just so interesting that my mind won’t let me not enter it, so here I go.

My original plan was C++, SDL and cURL. However, cURL refuses to work at all, so I’m stuck with PHP, the only other language I know reasonably well. This limits my choices significantly, but since I didn’t have any to start with, this isn’t really a problem.

So, my current plan is a choose-your-own adventure made of wiki pages. First name I could think of is ‘Wikiventure’, which is awful, sounds like a Wiki-based investment company, and is probably going to stay as the name because I can’t think of any others.

It’s located here, and currently just outputs the wiki page, not that exciting.

I’m still having trouble deciding on my idea. >_<;

The RCR clone may not really be what I want to do.

I’ll post again when I have something to show for my efforts. Until then, I’m going to refrain. I just thought I’d get this out so I don’t feel so obligated.

—Mr. Dude

Because I lack the coding chops to access data from a website in my game, I’m going a different route.

I was in IRC lamenting my lack of ability with regards to the theme, when GirlFlash suggested that I simply pick a topic in Wikipedia and run with it.

With that, I’ve chosen m’topic.

Yes, River City Ransom. A clone of it!

I’m going to make it as true to the original as possible without it actually being the original!

(EDIT: I’m actually leaning more towards Python/Geany/Pygame right now, so I really don’t know ’till I write some actual code )

And I’m doing it in C++! In Code::Blocks! Using SDL!

Here’s hoping…

—Mr. Dude

And the theme is…

WIKIPEDIA / MEDIAWIKI

ok, so before I dropped the hint that you should be ready with some way of getting at web data, well heres what that is all about:

I want you to make a game that pulls stuff from wikipedia (or a mediawiki I set up especially) and uses that in your game. it could be something as simple as loading images on a page and making them enemies to kill, or perhaps you want to generate levels from the text, and links on the page are doors to other levels? or perhaps (if you really want to push yourself) you can get your game to add pages and content to the wiki and have a full on changing MUD going on.

reading information from mediawiki really isnt that daunting, and I’ve put up some examples on the mediawiki I set up to get you started.

if you cant (or dont want to) access the web with your game, saving a local copy of a page and/or images is fine. as is picking any page on wikipedia you want and using that as a theme instead if you want a more traditional LD experiance.

big important thing to know:
miniLDs now also have the new submission page for your finished games (if you only make a blog post about it I might miss it!) so when your game is done, post it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

and finally the optional bonus theme that gets you pretend points:
“Duke Nukem Forever”
…have fun with that one folks

finish time is 0000 UTC on monday, you have 48 hours, get cracking!

Well it’s the last weekend before voting ends. Also, in less than 30 minutes from now, MiniLD #12 begins. So here’s your last minute update from me.

First things first, hey voters! I’ve tried to collect a list of people that submitted Windows ports or stability/compatibility fixes late. If you previously rated these games without a working version, please take a 2nd look at them. And any other entrants with some time, we’d appreciate it if you could take a look at them too.

Moons Of Subterrane by stuckie
Mole Cave Tactics! by philomory
Cavern Escape by PSnake
Deep Escape by Cosmologicon
Byte Vs. GNOME – MrDude * NEW

Also, I ran across a game with *only* a Mac version. If anyone with a Mac could take a look, that’d be great as well.

The Evil Dark Cavern Which Leads Straight To Death – BenKo * NEW

If I missed you earlier, post a comment and I’ll add you to the list.

Also, these people currently sit at less than 20 votes. If you could give them a bump (and by bump, I mean actually play them and not “can’t play” vote them), it’d be much appreciated.

Cosmologicon, laremere, Tange, Jonny D, philomory, and Jach

That’s it for now. I turn the show over now to GirlFlash and MiniLD #12.

- Mike Kasprzak (aka: PoV)

PS: Prior post here.

I’ve made my decision.

Unless the theme is something really, really interesting, I’m just going to ignore it and do something else instead.

Why not? After all, Mini-LD is just for fun!

That said, I’m more than likely going to ignore the theme.

Instead, I want to make a 2-day roguelike in under 100kB.

I will be using C, NCurses, Vim, and GCC.

I’m very excited about this.

—Mr. Dude

I’ve been working on my game, and it’s come a long way.  It now looks better, the character moves faster, and there are 5 levels that were not in the competition version.  I think the new levels present some interesting puzzles.

Play Online

I still need to work on making the wall collision less sticky.  Also, I’d like to animate my character and explosion sprites.

EDIT: Oh jeez, I thought it ended on Friday!

So I’m finally getting around to writing a post-mortem for Mole Cave Tactics. I know it’s better to do it fresh off development, but I needed a break.

Since it seems to work pretty well for a lot of other people, I’ll go with the time-honored format of

The Good

• The concept: I had my concept in mind for this theme (and the many related themes on the list) since well before the theme voting wrapped up. In fact, I had been bouncing ideas for some sort of tactical rpg around in my head for quite some time prior to the compo.
• I finished: The game didn’t have nearly as much content as I had included in the concept, but it was pretty obvious that that would be the case from the beginning, anyway. Given that this is my first LD, I’m pretty happy I managed to upload a game which runs, has things for the player to do, and has defined ways to win and lose.
• The graphics: Ok, so it could be reasonably argued that my sprites would be better classified as ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’, but, I’ve never done any graphics from scratch by myself before, and I actually rather like how the moles turned out. They need some tweaking, but I think they’re pretty good. The terrain I’m less happy with.

The Bad

• Mismanaged time: I kinda knew from the start that this was going to be too ambitious for a first time LD entrant, but above and beyond that I did a poor job prioritizing different aspects of the game. In particular, I spent way, way too much time on AI. I didn’t really appreciate just how difficult a problem doing AI for this kind of game is, I went for way too much sophistication, and as a result I didn’t pull it off at all. I should have known immediately I was doing something wrong when I started writing code to have the AI units look ahead multiple turns in planning their movement. Random walk may not have been very satisfying, but it would have been more than compensated for by the extra stuff I could code in the time I saved.
• No readme: I didn’t ever get around to writing a readme or even specifying a license, so the player is kinda left on their own to figure out what to do.
• Only one map: This game could *really* have used multiple maps, or a random map generator. This is one of those important things that didn’t get done because I was tinkering with the AI.

The Ugly

• The interface: Oh, God, is the interface bad. I should have taken it more seriously when I started adding undocumented keyboard shortcuts for nearly every mouse action in the game. I didn’t think the interface through very well at all during the competition. Having thought it through after reading the complaints, I think that if I want a mouse-driven interface, a radial menu centered on the unit under consideration (think NWN) would be best. Alternatively, just ditch the mouse and switch to all keyboard.
• The Windows port: for some reason, the Windows port was incredibly painful to make this time. For a long time I actually somehow managed to have a build posted which wouldn’t even run on the machine I built it on. I love Ruby, but packaging Ruby applications is a terrible, ridiculous mess. Next time, I’m going to look into Crate.

Pre Vita

All that said, I had a huge amount of fun doing this compo, and I definitely intend to enter again. I also plan to rework and expand Mole Cave Tactics into a full-fledged game, when I have some time to sit-down and code again. Don’t expect a release soon, though: my other game, Operation Lambda (shameless plug) took half a year to complete; it’ll take a few more LDs before I’m able to crank out games of any appreciable quality in a short time period.

So I’ve tried again, and this time I think I’ve finally managed to wrestle a working Windows build into place: download it here. For some reason I had a much easier time packaging my last (non-LD) game. Suffice it to say, it is probably best for everyone involved if you don’t ask why it’s necessary to distribute SDL_mixer.dll with a game that has no sound.

Public/private/whatever. I figure there’s no reason to hide this away in emails.

We’d like to try out the compo system again but for the MiniLD this weekend. Phil added a special mode for the end that will let us showcase the entries, and not require user voting.

I’ve set up a page specifically for this weekend here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-12/

Submitters should go there to add their finished entries. I’ll update it to mention the theme… eventually.

Good luck everyone.

I’m going to do a last call post some time tomorrow.

If your game previously didn’t work on Windows, but you made fixes after several “it doesn’t work” comments, leave a comment here. I’ll collect up a list and try to make them nice and visible to everyone. Hopefully that will give all the neglected people more proper/updated votes.

Also, we’re short 1 Windows port from the port request posting. Details and a link to the source can be found in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/09/08/defenestration/

Thanks!

Someone suggested that if I write a postmortem for my entry, it might complement the joke.. as long as it’s done subtly.

What went right:

- Um. At least some people seem to like it.

What went wrong:

- Should have included a getch() in the end so that people who click the game to start it have a chance of seeing the ending.

This was my first Ludum Dare, and I was really looking forward to it. Well, I did have fun making a game, but there’s one major problem: I don’t have Windows, I don’t have access to Windows, and I couldn’t find anyone to port my game to Windows. So I kind of feel left out. Not only can nobody play my game, but I can’t play most of the other people’s games.

I always have such a great time with PyWeek I thought for sure I’d like this too. But I really have to consider whether Ludum Dare is for me. If I needed Windows to participate, I would easily choose not to participate. But maybe that’s not necessary. I could write in C++ instead of Python, and maybe more people could run my source. Or I could learn Flash or something highly portable. I still couldn’t play most of the other games, but it’s a step up. We’ll see.

Anyway, it’s been enlightening. And at the very least, I enjoyed making something, so it’s not for nothing.

Thank you to all the people that have played and commented on my entry, much obliged.  I left it alone for a week, wanting to come back to it with a bit of a fresh head and hopefully fresh eyes.  In replaying it a bit there are a few particular points I think are worth talking about, important aspects of the game which I fell I either did or didn’t get right.

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