If you start banning stuff you alienate people. I personally feel alienated just by this conversation. I’ve been using Game Maker for 3 years now, and I’m offended. Saying more or less that Game-Maker does all the work for you is telling me that for 3 years of my life i haven’t been doing anything at all, that the reason my LD17 got 20th is because i used Game-Maker, and has nothing to do with the what i did personally.

Just because you’re using Game-Maker doesn’t mean everything’s a pre-made breeze, I’ve run into more than my share of programming problems, and have had frustrating moments.

Yes, Game-Maker has a built-in level creator, that again, Flash has frames you can drag-n-drop your movie clips into.
Yes, Game-Maker has a built-in image editor, that again, Flash is an image editor in some ways.

There’s definitely more than one way of doing things on Game-Maker, go on YOYOgames in the “new games” section and you’ll see that even with Game Maker “helping you do everything” it doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a good game.

if you can code amazingness in C/C++, props to you, personally i find the whole point of LD is to make games together and enjoy exploring new things, not being “OH MAN I CAN CODE ____ FASTER THAN YOU” and “YOU’RE CHEATING BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T NEED TO CODE ____”

If tools such as Game-Maker get banned, i certainly won’t be learning a new programming tool/language just to participate, I’ll be taking my games somewhere where i can use the tools i want and know and have them appreciated for what i did, not unappreciated because of what i used to make it.

[/rant]

I think it is time to get something straight however. I am biest towards the 8 bit graphic thing. I give higher votes to puny 8 bit graphics because I like the world they create in contrast to Halo 3

I guess this really comes down to problem is sortof described like this:

Problem 1: I’m lazy and don’t wanna make it a billion times. Let’s use middlewares. Un-necessary repetitiveness I think is a good thing. Sharing code base I think helps with that.

Problem 2: Hey he’s using a fancy tool that costs lots and lots of $$$ or make it so he has to hardly do anything, how’s that fair to a poor guy like me coding away in C.

I mean would this competition really be any fun to people who do it all in assembly?
not to everyone.

Would this competition really be any fun to having everyone using the most advance stuff that makes it so easy to do anything that everyone’s games are super ultimate?
not to everyone.

I really think this one is answered by the fact that the Ludum Dare is trying to be fun for all skill levels and all types of game designers. (Still not seeing too many board games out there… ohhh That would be an interesting theme )

My one teacher in my programming class once said people used to say “Real” programmers only used assembly code. Now those kinds of people are the guys who say real programmers only use C++.

I actually like the fact that everyone is doing it in so many different ways. I have always been a fan of options. often times I vote higher graphic scores on 8 bit games than 3d games because I like the graphics more. art quality is not graphic resolution. It really is based on the opinion of the gamer, his tastes likes dislikes.

Honestly I think what shines though in all the categories is not what you use to make it, but the effort put in to make it. You spend alot of time thinking up of a catchy game play. People will notice that. You spend time making great concept art for you game. People will notice that. You make everyone laugh so hard when playing your game. People will notice that. What people don’t notice is what is not released so work hard at it.

I really like music, I tend to make better music in my games than I do with my graphics. So be it. My graphics score plummeted last ludum dare, I am ok with that. I had tons of fun competing.

I think I am ranting on random things at this point and will stop. Good night everyone

I also vote for having entries categorized by middleware so you can compare against other games in the same vein or at least take the middleware into consideration when voting.

One thing I want to point out is a misconception with GM, which is that most users use the drag and drop methods instead of the scripting. If you look at the top half of the last competition, you will most likely find that all of the contestants who used GM solely used the scripting language. Another one is that GM does an exceedingly amount of work for the coder. If you take a peek at my source for my entry, you will find that the physics for the player alone is over a hundred lines long (damn ladders).

The two areas that accelerate development are the room editor and GM’s collision system. Keep in mind that (I believe) LD’s rules say that the game logic must be original, so you may write a general purpose room editor beforehand, and only write the level loading scripts and create the levels when the comp starts, which is not too much work compared to using GM. GM’s collision system is harder to implement in other languages, as a collision check uses a single line of code. I believe it can be done with just slightly more work with Pygame, though.

I’ve ranted far too long. But I don’t believe the rating system should place weight depending on what language you use. It is the final product that matters, and as long as the language allows the programmer to put thoughts to disk with little limitations.

As I said previously, I could do a wrapper on the engine, with LUA scripting or something and do all the gameplay code there… It would be allowed according to what most people are saying, but people would still not have access to the source code…

The point here is “One requirement for other proprietary engines is that at least a free demo capable of compiling your code should be available.”. If we took this rule off, and keep the source code rule, people could still learn from the gameplay source code, while enabling people like me to use our engine to actually do the game. Note that my problem is not wanting to show my source code, is more the fact that I can’t for legal reasons.

Note that I don’t object to hardcore rules (I’ve been participating in LD since the very beginning, and I love hardcore coding in 48 hours), my objections are related to the fact that it is very hard to stand out in 150 entries while being hardcore… I’m all about levelling the playfield… although I’ll participate either way…

Besides, having “good experience” sounds to me like “having fun” doing something instead of just “learning” to do so

You can even gain experience by learning game maker (Which I do not endorse but it’s a fact)

Best regards

I think GM and kin should be allowed. Tools that are freely available to everyone should be allowed.

Pre-existing custom content of any kind should not. (A grey area are default things like Unity/Torque scripts that control cameras.. I think we should let those slide, otherwise the engines would be useless)

I feel source/project inclusion should always be mandatory, and included in such a way that someone else can build your project. (Your custom fork of you’ve been working on for two years can’t be used, unless it’s available for anyone else to use.. pre-compo!)

Tech category… well, we used to have one, it was ok. I’m neutral on that but keep in mind 80% of people are going to give unity entrys with physics and shaders which will just cheeze people off anyway.

Two categories? Hrm. Sort of an unnecessary fracturing I think. The winner should be the overall winner, and there are difficulties in separating the “pures” and the “middleware enhanced” engines.

If I remember correctly, however, it never used to be billed as a ‘Game Design Competition.’ It was always a ‘Game Programming Competition.’ I guess I’ve always kept that as my impression.

I enjoy the increased participation that the compo has had over the past year, however, I am a little worried. With 150 people it becomes harder to make yourself heard over the ‘noise.’ Things like Game Maker automatically give you a leg up on the people who are doing it from a simple base. It’s impossible for all 150 people to vote for all 149 other entries, so each entry is only getting a subset of the people looking at it. I don’t know what the average is, but 10 or 20 doesn’t seem statistically relevant to me, since the 20 people who voted on mine may be completely different than the 20 people who voted on the entry ranked just above or below me, let alone the guys at the top.

As ArmchairArmada said, The solution might be to create separate categories, similar to auto racing where there are multiple classes of cars running on the same track at the same time. Let each category’s entrants vote on primarily their own category. Game Maker and the other ‘all-in-one’ tools vote on each other, making the pool size smaller and the same sets of eyes (and preferences, grading methods etc) giving input on the same group.

As long as we could define strict groups (two of them maybe being as TenjouUtena said above, Engine and Programming) we could get away with two or three or four of them. They would have to be different enough so that one entry couldn’t fit into more than one.

But you’re talking about a completely closed source entry. One requirement for other proprietary engines is that at least a free demo capable of compiling your code should be available.

Personally, I like the source code requirement, it shows that you’re willing to share what you do with others so that they can learn.

nitram_cero says: “If you choose C++ over Game Maker… probably you’ll never make 100 levels in time.”
While this is true to a certain extent, if I could use my C++ engine (of which I can’t publish source or even .h files), I’d be able to do 100 levels…

So the issue I have with allowing GameMakers and Unity and such is the fact that they place the user in a position in which they really don’t have to show the source code, only a small fraction of it (the gameplay code)… While I have to show all the source code and build from scratch stuff I’ve already built 10000 times…

For example, I feel much more confortable in 3d than in 2d, and I can certainly do 3d graphics much better than 2d graphics, but everytime I tried doing that in a compo, I can’t get too far, since I have to make texture managers, and mesh managers, and loaders, etc… even if I do that in a small framework, I can’t take the time to extripate my 200k+ lines engine to make it happen properly.

My point is: people don’t want to ban game makers, that’s fine… But let’s drop the source code restriction then, and just show the game’s executable/whatever… People can be a community still and talk to each other about the techniques they used to get the end result…
Or we can make the source code restriction apply only to the gameplay code… Best of two worlds, imho…

Also it’s fair to everyone:
If you choose C++ over Game Maker… probably you’ll never make 100 levels in time.
But that’s your desicion.

You can always learn Game Maker and use it for the next competition.

1. GameMaker
2. Python / Pygame
3. Unity
3. Multimedia Fusion
4. Java
5. Flash
6. Unity
6. Delphi / GLScene / ODE
7. C++, HGE, Box2D
8. Flash
9. GameMaker
10. GameMaker (?)
10. Construct
11. C++ / OpenGL
12. Python / Pygame
13. GLBasic
14. GameMaker
15. GameMaker
16. Flash
17. GameMaker
17. GameMaker (C418 didn’t post source, and didn’t say dinifitively ever?)
17. Python / Pygame

Totals:

GameMaker – 7
Python / Pygame – 3
Flash – 3
Unity – 2
C++ – 2
MMF – 1
Java – 1
Delphi – 1
Construct – 1
GL Basic – 1

Categories:
Engines (GameMaker, Unity, Construct, MMF) – 11
Programming (Flash, Pygame, C++, Java, Delphi, GLBasic) – 11

So I don’t think Game Engines really swept the compo.