Read the rules, upload your source!
Maybe I’m just being anal here, but the rules of the competition clearly state that
- All content must be created during the compo
- Source code must be provided
There are still occasional entries with images obviously taken directly from the web.
And in many entries, the source is forgotten (ignored?). Some even claim proudly that their game is closed soure…
I know it’s an honor system, and it is very unlikely that people will actually check your source for copy pasted code. But how long can it take to zip your project folder and upload it along? You can even just put it in a single archive with the compiled game if you can’t be arsed to make two different zips.
Now it’s too bad because the game are good. But how should these be judged? They should theoretically be disqualified. Should they receive N/A, or minimal grade on Overall?
I’m pretty sure most people didn’t pay attention to that aspect, but somehow it’s bugging me. Has an admin advice on the conduct to take?
Yay, somebody else noticed this is a fairly major trend too.
I’ve just been giving N/As and leaving a note if I can’t find the source. I imagine some others won’t be so nice.
I agree, the source is an important part of things, I don’t see the point in being protective of source written in 48 hours (mine is horrendously ugly, and I’d be amazed if someone could get anything more than a headache from trying to steal it…).
The content creation part is a bit more grey though, I mean, do unity people get penalized for having a bunch of presets and stuff (especially the water and terrain…)? For people using fancier engines there are a lot of premade textures, terrain, ui components and fonts and whatnot… I’m not sure where you draw the line there.
I think it’d be cool if it were all 100% from scratch, but we’d get a lot less entries, and those entries would be all programmer-art… and if some people use Unity, I’m at least going to go for C++/Ogre/Bullet….
I will admit mine actually includes 2 images off the web, but they’re motivational posters from this site as rare easter eggs… so I hope that’s acceptable…
I used Unity and personally I considered that any art asset that came with Unity was not OK. So for example for water, I thought that while the water effect code was OK to use (it’s part of the engine), the default bump texture was not and I remade my own. But I used the default fresnel texture as that’s not art but simply a mathematical function baked into a texture.
I used the Unity terrain tools for my unfinished project and while my initial screenshots had some stock Unity terrain textures, I replaced them all with my own. I didn’t actually use Unity’s water shader because I didn’t want to make bump maps and such, so I just had a translucent plane with my own texture.
So yeah, I do think people should make their own assets, but using Unity or other such engines is ok. Otherwise it’s arbitrarily limiting people. I think people should use whatever with they can make the best game possible in the 48-hour time limit.
Whoops, forgot about the source. I’ll upload mine…
yeah we need to state this in big letters at the compo start, and maybe have a “flag for DQ” box in the voting (with a reason). Then the mods could go check anything that got flagged a few times.
I don’t think most people are trying to “get away” with anything, they just aren’t aware of it…
One of the bonuses of using Lua: the source is right there
I agree with you too…
I was going to use music and stock pictures from the web, and when I learned that I had to create EVERYTHING I even abandoned the default game maker buttons and drew everything in paint.
But I also understand how people could break those rules as I myself didn’t notice then till someone from outside the LD showed me.
The only image I used that I didn’t create was the easter egg that I doubt anyone has found already…
That’s another great reason to include source — i almost always skim through the source looking for easter eggs or hidden stuff.
Agree with Geti. I used the Love engine which is based in lua, and my whole game is simply a zip file with a .love extension. Your only one extract from my source
I hate purism.
I’ve seen LD games grow up to be really cool games. If the source was released then a bunch of leeches would copy, brand and plaster them all over the Internet with potentially no references to the author.
That’s a bullshit rule, I’d rather call it a hint. And enforcing vigilante-style with no/bad scores is even worse, it’s conservative fanatism. Would you disqualify A HUNDRED AWESOME ENTRIES just for that?
On the assets topic: Not everybody has shotguns, TNT or aliens in their garages to get their sound fx. What’s important is how you use your tools not making 100% from scratch.
Keep in mind that the people that vote is the same that participate, they’ll know how much effort you put on the game, using Unity’s assets or not. We can tell.
My 2 cents
No… absolutely not would people do that. Nobody has ever done that, nobody will ever do that.
Violation of intellectual property is a problem bigger than LD. Yes it’s possible that someone steals your game, publishes it wherever, and pretends he wrote it. Even if they don’t have the source.
And I believe that if a rule is incorrect, the appropriate action is to change the rule for the next times, not to break it. It might be interesting to consider removing this rule for the next competitions, if there is a well constructed debate about it, and some kind of majority, or consensus.
Saying “your rules are dumb, fuck your rules” simply doesn’t entitle you to participate. No one forced you here. As long as the rules say you have to release the code, I suppose you have to take a side, and chose between participating to a cool competition and take a chance in having your name at the top of the list, or “protecting” your marvellous 2 days of work against the evils of thievery.
Any serious continuation on your entry would anyway require lots of additionnal work, polishing, code refactoring, and so on. I’m pretty sure that the few “success story” games that started from LD don’t have much to do anymore with the original entry submitted at deadline.
So yeah maybe I’m fanatical, but for the sake of fairness, everyone should be following the same rules. Those who think they are above them should either not enter, or reasonably try to have the rules changed.
Fair enough
None of the Ludum Dare entries are in a finished state after the 48 hours. The kind of person who would steal source code to re-release it with their name on it isn’t the kind of person who can be bothered to finish the entry.
do you even realize what you’re saying?
(I’m going to be harsher here, so if you’re too offended, sorry).
this is LD, and you don’t win anything physically. uploading source is also about fairness, for giving others the possibility to see, that you actually DID everything in 48h, and not made it years beforehand. it’s not a crappy rule at all. it is about pride in your code, even if it looks stupid
also, as ashera was saying, there’s no way that 48h hour code for the greatest game of LD ever is the best code of all times. i’m sure that most of the people write their ugliest codes here at LD, just because of time. heck, even i did a “def leveltype @leveltype end” in ruby and a lot of hardcoding just because of the rush, and should i ever deploy this game, i doubt i would reuse 100% of my code. plus, if you are a decent programmr, why would you care about code that you can rewrite, better, cleaner and faster in less time as you have it all in your head?
next, ever seen linux? ever seen thousands of copies ‘plagued’ all over the internet without references to the author? everyone can still see those systems are linuxbased
and if you don’t have an ufo in your backyard to record the sound it makes, do what everyone does and make the sounds yourself or leave them out completely. if you’d really deploy your game, you can still change em for better ones than the ones created in a rush in LD
also, if you don’t like the rules, simply don’t take part in it. who forces you to spend your weekend on the computer?
> Would you disqualify A HUNDRED AWESOME ENTRIES just for that?
Yes.
If you’re afraid of sharing your sources for others to learn from, don’t enter.
Yeah, and it’s also a solo competition, but I’ve seen at least one entry that had separate credits for code, graphics and audio.
Re:source- meh. I provided mine, but I never understood the requirement. The rules also state that rights to the games stay with the authors, so you can’t launch an open-source game project from what’s here without asking first. If someone’s done a really cool thing that I want to look at deeper, I appreciate having the source but I think it’s about a 50/50 chance (maybe less) that I can read and understand it.
And for us flash guys, providing source means that some 13 year old is going to stick ads and a link to his crappy website on our game and upload it to newgrounds… (I haven’t actually seen that happen
, but it’s been at the back of my mind for both LD15 and LD17)
I’m certain that I’ve mistaken sprite sheets from the web for someone’s own work. I’m certain that some people used all-but-level-design-complete ‘frameworks’ as their starting point. I’m certain that I’ve mistaken audio from the web for something someone composed and recorded during the compo….
… I’m also certain that this applies to less than 5% of the entries I’ve seen (and I’ve played about two thirds of the LD17 entries at this point), so I don’t care that much. I think that in two LDs which I’ve participated in, the best entries were clearly the product of one mind working during the compo. I’d rather Praetor57 be allowed to have his easter eggs, than have his entry get dinged by overzealous application of a DQ button.
Back to source- I think whatever the individual voter feels appropriate is appropriate. I don’t think there needs to be admin level action taken. We should be able to police ourselves.
Yes, it’s the law of IP that by default, the author keeps all rights on his work, except stated otherwise. Some of us released their sources under various free software licenses, but that’s no obligation. And it’s perfectly fine to not want to make your game free software!
Releasing the source does not mean you allow anyone to copy/re-use it. It certainly makes it easier for the evil minded, true.
I believe the original reasons for this rule are:
1. learning purposes. Being able to check how something is done, etc. Even if most of the code written in 48 is probably crap, it can still have an educational value (some guys here are super pros, their crap is probably better code than i’ll ever do…)
2. being able technically/symbolically/if needed to check that it is original code. Now there is indeed a hard to define line about original or not, since the rules are not *that* clear about it.
As for easter eggs, I’m pretty sure no one will mind if they’re not original content. I was not refering to that. More to the fact that when one guy will spend 6 hours making assets for his game because he wants to follow the rules, and the other just digs up an old sprite sheet from where ever, modifies two colors and is done with it in 10 minutes, there is a problem of fairness. Sure it’s your game, you can do what you want, but then you can’t rightfully be compared to the other games of the competition.
Same for music and all the rest. The point is not to make the game of the century, it’s to have fun, and mostly learn a lot. Incitate people to try and make graphics, music, sounds. Learn how to do it, if they don’t already, or use it as a pretext to improve their skills. Make cool technical achievements.
Sure it’s excessive to have a “report this dude and please shoot him dead, dirty CHEATER” button. And if their entry ends up in the bottom quarter, yeah, who cares. But the few ones that will get all the glory of “having made an awesome game in 48h” should *actually* have done so.
I think.
“All content and the game must be from scratch.”
“Ludum Dare is about creating games, not about writing A* for the 8th time. ”
I find this line ambiguous. How about this?
“Ludum Dare is about creating games, not about writing A*, making a Serif font or Record the sound a chiuaua taking a dump for the 100th time”
I think you’re misinterpreting the point of “Ludum Dare is about creating games, not about writing A* for the 8th time. ” The idea is that the game CONTENT (sound, graphics, etc) should be what people spend their time on, not necessarily the code to create a window and draw an image onto it. That’s the point of allowing various libraries, anything from custom libraries that people have been refining for a few years/months, to something like game maker. You’re right that people don’t have piles of TNT or alien guns to use for sound effects. Guess what? Game studios don’t have those either, they make sound effects with other tools (ie: celery for ‘breaking bones’ sound effects). A lot of people use sfxr for sounds, and others record their voices and modify them for sound effects (I did that in a recent miniLD).
Like people have said, the rules are there for a reason. I do think they should be more visible (it’s easy to miss the rules, especially when you learn about LD a few days before it starts), but if you don’t like the rules, you don’t have to participate. There’s other competitions out there with more relaxed rules. Eventually the LD rules might change for more flexibility, but for now, everyone should have to follow the same rules.
Re: easter eggs with ‘premade’ graphics are fine, it’s the major game content that should only be made in 48 hours, otherwise you’re cheating.
Sorry, I don’t see the effort/authorship of clicking 4 times in SFXR to make a sound.
I think nobody does fonts for their games neither. It’s absurd to be so strict about everything.
But it’s fair enough, I don’t have to participate.
While it doesn’t take much time to click a bit and make something in sfxr, the idea is that you’re not just downloading a sound effect from somewhere and putting it into your game. The idea is that you make everything in your game during the weekend.
As for fonts, they’re allowed (from the ld16 rules: “Fonts are allowed. You’re free to use any font you’re legally entitled to. Fonts are meant for text output, not as base for graphics (so you can’t get around the ‘no clipart’ part by using windings/webdings/dingbats and whatnot).”) No one expects you to draw your own font over the weekend. It mostly just counts as part of the framework.
Nitram_cero, I assumed that wonderful music you have in your game was your own performance or that are in a band or something. Was that music just pulled from the Internet?
May I suggest that in future LDs, there are multiple categories? Instead of everyone in the same competition, have a “barebones” section where creatores must follow the current rules exactly, and another category where anything goes/ loose ruleset. This would allow for people to continue to use Unity/Torque in one category without being ostracized, and those who like to do it all by hand can have the satisfaction of knowing they aren’t up against someone who started with half of what they made.
I win.
Even I also uploaded the source too late, I do agree 100%. Especially on the content-side. I personally find it so cool to be forced to do the whole content on your own. And the outcome can be hilarious(e.g. the “where is the cheese?”-soundtrack
) If some people violate this they make the games not comparable anymore. (Everyone knows the difference between a cool background music and no music at all!) Rules are there to be followed. If some say, BUT and BUT and BUT, then LD is not for them…quite easy.
Nevertheless I find the thought about categories not that bad. Something like: “totally from scratch” (just a lightweight layer like sdl/opengl on your side), “using an render engine” (like ogre with modelloading, terrain-handling and collisiondetection) and gamemaker (like gamemaker, unity3d,…).
Or just one category to honor the way of implementing the game. e.g. one might write a third-person shooter and doing it from scratch killing hours just for handling the interaction with keyboard and mouse (and the result is still trasg) while another just drags a behaviour to the character and got a perfect thridperson handler….(but that is another discussion)
The spirit of game making should not be the hardcoding, but the game on itself…
If you had a perfect game dev. tool that allowed you to create a game exactly as you think of it wouldnt you use it? Or would you rather sacrifice the game you really wanted to make just so you can say you’re hardcore to be coding it…
If you think so, maybe you should start learning assembly, or else you’re not “true” enough…
>If you had a perfect game dev. tool that allowed you to create a game exactly as you think of it wouldnt >you use it?”
Well, no! Guilty in that point.
>Or would you rather sacrifice the game you really wanted to make just so you can say you’re hardcore to >be coding it…
I really ask me this sometimes. Actually I’m much more a programmer than a gamedesigner. So the way of implementing it, does matter(for me). Maybe this will change someday,…. I know that this compo is about the game itselfs which is fine and I don’t say anything against game creators, did I?
I hadn’t realized inclusion of source was rule, but I updated the link with it when I became aware. My code is actually (relatively) legible and I want to do something bigger with it when the compo’s over. This may become difficult of my code is stolen. I really don’t want this to be a requirement, because it’s certainly a discouragement for me, if not some others as well, if we are required to put out our thousands of lines of code and make it ripe for the picking. There is absolutely nothing preventing others from claiming our work as their own when we upload our source.So yeah, I’d like the rules to be adjusted so that it becomes optional to include the source.
Suggestion to keep your code secure- Write it in FORTRAN.
You are all taking this way too serious…
I doesn’t matter if you made your game all the way from scratch (creating the graphics from pixel to pixel, the sounds that you composed and recorded and even the fonts where you text is written) and someone use some tool that allowed him to make something better and with less work.
The person who did everything from scratch will surely be more proud of their game than someone who didn’t made everything. Whenever the first gets a compliment for the graphics or the music, he will feel so great, different of the second person, who will know that it was not all his work.
And beeing the best voted game also does not mean anything, this is not a “who’s the best competition”, you do it for yourself “Your Product is Your Prize!”. The feeling of accomplishment is what’s really worthy in the LD, knowing that you could survive the 48h marathon doing your best.
I’ve seen some games that used a lot of web-based content, and other that didn’t use anything, and, to be honest, the best ones were the ones were the Dev had put so much of his hearth into the game that you could almost feel it.
And for the last time, you can download graphics and you can download audio, but you can’t download fun and innovation!
Honestly, I think two things need to happen: #1, the rules need to be a lot more visible in the period leading up to the compo, and during the actual compo, so that people can’t just go “well, i didn’t see the rules, so, whatever”, and #2, the rules need to be re-written so they’re clearer about a lot of things. There’s some progress towards #2, but it’s obviously not good enough, since there’s still confusion and arguments about rules.
I can understand the complaints against the “release your source” rule, and if it’s removed, it’d be disappointing to see it go, but it probably wouldn’t effect anything.
The content creation rules should stay, though. The point of the compo is to make a game in 48 hours, and that includes doing stuff like art, sound, and code. Pretty much every competition like Ludum Dare requires the content to be 100% original (there are some exceptions, and many compeititions are team based, so…)
> he rules need to be a lot more visible in the period leading up to the compo..
From a decade of organizing TMDC, I can tell you one surprising truth: people don’t read the rules.
The problem with rules is that the more issues there are, the more rules come up, and the more rules there are, the more likely it is that people don’t read them.
I have a question regarding content.
Usually I create my own music but would it be acceptable to tape a live performance of myself playing Bach?The performance is mine but the song is not.
I’m not authority on that, but I believe it’d be ok.
When you take a picture of a tree, you didn’t build the tree.
However, it should also be a motivation to try composition by yourself
I don’t think that’s the same. It would be more like taking a photograph of the Mona Lisa and saying that’s your art.
If you can use an existing composition, would it be required to perform it live? Couldn’t you could just enter the notes into your sequencer (and at this point why not a use a midi file?).
So I’d say no (but that’s just my opinion).
If YOU were playing Bach i’m sure (no offense against your musical skills) it would not be as good as the original, it would have a touch of “you”. But that would happen only if you actually played and recorded it, if you sinthesized it, then it would be no different than grabbing a really nice tune from the web and reverse-engineer it in order to synthetize it yourself on yet another music creation tool.
I may be a bit biased here as, I myself, tried to record a Bach song on my guitar. It took me about 2 hours to get a 1 minute song since I was doing it on Windows Sound Recorder.
If that’s against the rules, well, then please don’t rate my Audio.
Yeah, it would be more like a sketch than a photo. But still to me that’s more like copying someone else’s work than creating your own.
I guess I don’t quite see performing a musical piece as an original creation. Sure there are lots of skills involved that go well beyond the purely mechanical rendition of a composition, good musicians can put feelings into the music. But still, that’s not the same as creating an original music.
I think source should be provided for learning purposes. I have a lot more respect for multimedia fusion because hempuli does such great work with it.
I want to see his source to learn from him and try to be a better game designer. That’s what this compo is about to me. It’s trying to make us better game makers. Ripping off source doesn’t do that but studying and learning from the masters does.
I like the looseness of the compo.
One thing we could is look the other, but if a game makes the top 10 then it has to be vetted, making sure it follows all the rules then and only. I think if you want any limelight/accolades you should follow the rules to the letter.
I’m all up for people posting their sources, but I’m against it being a necessity. Personally i’m quite attached to the games i work hard on in these short periods of time. And i’m not exactly trusting of the internet to leave it alone, whether or not there are copyright/CC/things in place. That may just be paranoia, but it’s also my opinion
Clearly as our numbers grow there is going to be more problem elements that don’t want to comply with the rules. How can we deal with them?
We can’t expect the moderators to be able to handle that, it’s just an impossible task to verify 200+ games to be in compliance with the rules. I hate the idea of voting to disqualifying people which could lead to false accusations and an angry villagers mentality.
I guess we could remove the competition aspect entirely. But that wouldn’t really solve anything and we would have lost something in the process.
As for the source code requirement, for me it’s an important part of LD48, that I hope we will keep. And as long as that rule is in effect, people who refuse to submit their source after being reminded should not be ranked in the competition.
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On the topic of creating your own content – is using music from someone else, with their permission ofc, allowed? I’m hilariously tone deaf and I don’t think I could create anything even remotely pleasant even if I spent the whole 48 hours doing just that.
In my game I just had two thuds and no music which is… fairly bad.
>> is using music from someone else, with their permission ofc, allowed?
as it says in the rules, no. sometimes there are MiniLDs where you can have teams, which means that one can take care of/ make the sounds/music/sfx, so in those cases it would be ok. but there are still ways to have your own free music in the single contests. for example, have you seen ‘Where is the cheese’ from the last LD? hilarious, made with the trial version of microsoft’s songsmith (listen to that, i’m serious). or what i did, as i used music for the first time, i tried LMMS without knowing how to use it beforehand. a youtube 10min video tutorial and clicking around until i had something decent was all i needed. still, took two hours for a few notes, but it was worth the learning exprience
Yeah figures.
The ‘Where is the Cheese’ jingle was truly remarkable! I think you’ve just convinced me to try.
Most people don’t read the rules, but everyone reads their feedback. So if someone has missed the rules, all you need to do is politely explain what they’ve done wrong in their comments.
(Yes, first timers will still get it wrong, but that’s what first-timers are for.)
Actually, I have seen an entry where the user got a LOT of feedback stating that we’re on a solo competition, and then the user replied saying that it’s not written anywhere on the rules…
I guess we should, on the next LD, on the login phase, force the user to read the most important rules, using extreme advertising or something like that.
This way, we would be sure that all of the users that will want to participate will have read the rules, and, if they don’t agree with them, they can submit their games with a “non-rating” disclosure.
I uploaded my source. In the commotion I forgot to upload it.