Hey guys,

I’ve decided to move MiniLD 23 to the 21st of the month.  Check the announcement post for details.  See ya there!

It’s late, so I’ll be sending the e-mail’s tomorrow. I’ll update this post once I’ve contacted everyone.

E-mail’s sent. 17 18 of the 60+ timelapse videos were chosen. See the comments for the list. Here is the e-mail that was sent:

Hello!

You are receiving this e-mail because you recently participated in Ludum Dare 19, and made a timelapse video we liked.

For the impending 10 year anniversary of Ludum Dare (2012), Phil and I have been discussing a number of ideas for things we should do. Some of them include showcasing great timelapse videos by members of the community (and the games that accompanied them), which is where you come in. Some uses of these videos may include:

- As an example “timelapse video” during a conference talk
- “Ludum Dare Theater” Exhibit, timelapse videos on a TV at an Expo
- Ludum Dare “Exhibit in a Box” DVD

Again, this isn’t a confirmation that your video will be included, nor that the above projects will happen, but your video is up for serious consideration. To be included in one of our video projects, we need a few things from you:

- Your permission to use the video for anything (SEE DVD NOTES)
- Your name (or specifically, how you take credit)
- Your handle (your name on the LD site or elsewhere)
- Your website
- Whether it’s okay to credit you by your name(s)
- Name and license status of your chosen music (if you know)
- A high quality export of your Youtube Video (SEE BELOW)
- A high quality gameplay video (ONLY if not already edited on to the end)

In the case of the DVD idea, understand that WE ARE asking for your permission to potentially profit from your video WITHOUT any license fee or compensation. We recently decided to stop doing “donations for links”, due to the abuse of a few too many 3rd parties donating for the sake of cheap SEO back-links (Paypal refunds aren’t free). So one of my wild ideas was to produce and sell our “Ludum Dare Theater” exhibit reel on DVD, plus a bit to help us cover our costs. That way you get something, and we get the money to cover hosting, etc. Donations may return but without the link arrangement (just our gratitude). We’ll continue to honor the existing donors links for a while (especially you high donors), but may reorganize the page in the future.

How to send me video:

- SEND A LINK, NOT A FILE IN E-MAIL! (If you need space, try DropBox)
- Under 500 MB please!
- DON’T SEND RAW! Use a modern codec like H.264, DivX or XVid with the bitrate set extremely high.
- If you must, you can send lossless. I use Lagarith myself.
- .avi, .mp4 and .m4v containers are preferred (but I can probably convert whatever).

How I will use the video:

- Videos will be fitted to 720p (1280×720 30fps), upscaled and black barred if necessary.
- Your gameplay video will be placed immediately after your timelapse, showing the results of your effort.
- Videos will be faded in (from black), and faded out (to black), unless it already has fades included.
- Each of the videos will be placed back-to-back in the playlist.

Tips, if you want to tweak your video:

- Take Credit! Introduce the event (eg. Ludum Dare 19), the theme (eg. Discovery), as well as you and your entries names (eg. The Discoverizer by Mike “PoV” Kasprzak).
- Show your timelapse!
- Note that the videos will be seen by casually passing expo attendees on a TV. That means they may not see the beginning or end of your video.
- A countdown clock would help onlookers know what’s going on (if appropriate/possible)
- Showing a URL or “good Google search term” at all times might be a good idea if you want to be remembered. Be tasteful.
- Show gameplay footage! Something short. Keep it under 2 minutes, less is best.
- In-game-only sound is preferred for gameplay footage (if there is sound)
- Statistics can be fun, if you have any to share.
- Take Credit Again! We just saw your gameplay video, so how can I find you or your game?
- Add the fade in and fade out (so I don’t have to do anything )

I think that covers everything. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Please get back to me as soon as possible, even if your video files aren’t ready. I’d like to have all the files by next weekend (Sunday January 23rd), but if you need more time just let me know.

Thanks!

If you didn’t receive an e-mail, don’t fret! There were more than 60 timelapse videos created during Ludum Dare 19, and some especially stood out so we’ve used them as the baseline. I’ll post a list once I’m a little more organized. You still have 3 more chances in 2011 (plus MiniLD’s) to make it on the DVD, or be part of our 2011 exhibit reel.

During 2011 we may have the opportunity to exhibit early. We’ll let you know.

Also! If you made an especially extravagant timelapse video in a prior LD, and can meet all my criteria above, post a comment here with a Youtube link, as I may ask for a few more. If you have a great post-compo version you’d like to promote (iPhone port?), feel free to mention that (perhaps a “before” and “after” in your gameplay section).

Like everything LD, if this video thing turns out to be a good idea, we’ll probably do it again.

Thanks!

Are there any file hoarders about? I’m looking for the download of the timelapse video I had available in this post (I foolishly removed it from my webspace some 6 months ago thinking I wouldn’t need it)

Now PoV is building this new database of timelapses, I’d love to be able to hand a nice high-rez version of it over

If you know what i’m talking about, and have the file – please either leave a comment (and a link), or contact me by email (david AT wizardslair DOT co DOT uk)

Thanks for reading, and I hope you can help,
David/Devlin @ The Wizard’s Lair.

Gun Gladiator eventually deteriorated into an unacceptably slow (At least on my netbook), overly ambitious story-heavy shooter. I think that would count as a failure, especially in terms of my deadline.

So, I’ve decided that I need to try again with a different time limit. This time around, it’s a bullet hell shmup. Hopefully.

The game’s title is one that I’ve been trying to apply to a game for a while now because I think it sounds really cool. (I may have used this title for an uncompleted game that I’ve posted about here, and there have been many others) The title is Starrior. (A portmanteau of “Star” and “Warrior”)

The game will borrow its style from the game Frantic (And its sequel), but will use a much less abstract style. It will support arrow keys and WASD, as well as controlling the ship with the mouse. It will have multiple weapons, special attacks, and other fanciness.

I want to have the full game with at least most of its content by the night of the 22nd.

Currently, I have the player ship moving around on the screen, including with mouse control.

I’m really hoping I can pull this off. Really.

Peace,

— Mr. Dude

I simply wanted to say a big big thank you to everybody there for their votes for Time Pigmy. This was my first LudumDare participation. And let me tell you : I loved it. Every single moment during this long weekend
I will be there for LD#20 in April, for sure.

There was lot’s of good titles to play here, my personnal favs going to Mother Robot and Aquatic.

And finally, a big thank you to my friends here in Bordeaux (FR) who participated to this LD#19 : Benjamin/Bumdum, Whitetigle, Hane and Valandre.

Benjamin & me work in a french indie game company we made 10 years ago, Motion Twin, and we still take lot’s of pleasure in creating new concepts everyday.

Have fun everybody, keep creating great stuff and keep innovation & originality to it’s highest.

I have been working on my game some more since the competition version.

New features include:

• Improved player control
• Improved physics & collision handling
• Enemies now have a bit longer line of sight, making them harder
• More logical levels, no more unexpected death drops
• Some new tiles and graphics
• Flickering and occluded lights
• A preloader

Play it here! –> The Secret Documents

I’m mildly baffled at the audio ratings my game recieved.

[ - - 5  3 2 - - 4 - 1 1 - 2 2 1 - 2 1- -]

First off, look at all those dashes. My game certainly had audible sound, and my game being made in game-maker, I see no reason for it not to work. I do however appreciate the amount of dashes I got versus the amount of ones, Protip: make sure those headphones are plugged in.
Although I may be biased, my audio certainly deserved more than a one.  This makes me mildly angry because those ones are mostly either
A) I’m on mac/linux and I’m jelly because I can’t play it but I’ll vote anyways, I’ll just give audio 1/5
B) I don’t hear audio, has nothing to do with the fact my volume is turned down. I’m in a bad mood so I’ll rate 1/5 instead of n/a
C) the game only has one song and one sfx, I am completely ignoring the fact that the game really doesn’t need any more than that and rating 1/5 because there aren’t 50 songs and/or they’re not chip-tunes and all pixel art games need chip tunes

I also got a lot of dashes for community, which is almost more gobsmacking. Remember people, there is a handy button for viewing the person’s journal

The humor category also bit me hard, as I didn’t make a funny game. Which make memad at the category, as I’m sure I’ve said before, giving a game props for being funny is great, but we shouldn’t be forced into making a funny game, and we shouldn’t turn a cold shoulder to more serious or neutral games in the process.

Anyways, </rant>, I think I’m just disappointed because I got 95% praise in the comments, and then I get on the computer today to see this. I’d really appreciate it if people commented for reasons other than to congratulate as well. Being told your game is great is good and all, but nowhere near as helpful as some good ‘ole constructive criticism. A few people commented that the game was “missing something to make me really enjoy it” and it frustrated me that they offered no solutions (as in, I had to sit around for a week and figure it out myself).

I’m really happy with the game I made, but this puts a bit of a damper on my desire to work on it more.

also whoever rated 2/5 for graphics. . . just . . .

We didn’t get the full blown all-1s parade like last LD, but it did appear on my entry. What makes this particularly horrible, however, is that I didn’t get many legit votes, and would have scored 4.10 for audio rather than 3.82. ARGH.

What we did get, however, was a lot of all-N/As and even more all-N/As-apart-from-community. I got one and two from those respectively.

IT’S NOT COOL.

People who do that should get suckness points rather than coolness points, and whoever gets the most suckness points (above a certain threshold) should be banned from voting until they’ve removed all copies of Game Maker from their computer (and possibly Unity and whatever else is “the easiest way to make games for Windows”).

In fact, they might as well be tortured by being forced to program a game for an old console in assembler. Like what I did,  except done by someone who probably can’t even code in BASIC.

So, back to the topic.

If it doesn’t work, DON’T VOTE.

If you think the guy’s a complete idiot, PRETEND IT WAS MADE BY YOUR BEST FRIEND (I’ve yet to find an unexplained all-5s vote but these would be awesome (actually I think I just did on Coffee Forever)).

And now for the ultimate question: How do we stop these stupid, stupid votes?

I have finally found a solution to the effect I was  trying to go for. The finished version of Lunarium should be coming soon. I just need to get another obstacle out of the way.

Hosted by yours truly, Jonny D…  MiniLD 23 will be a good time (see below).

MiniLD 23 will begin at 9pm EST (2am UTC) on Friday, January 21st (moved up from the 28th due to conflict with Global Game Jam).  It will end at the same time on Sunday, January 23rd.

MiniLD 23 begins 370 days, 23 hours, 55 minutes, 42 seconds ago

Until then, you can vote on the main theme.  There will be a sub theme announced as well when the mini compo starts.  There will be either an immense amount of groaning or excitement, since your choices for the main theme are taken from LD 19′s Round 3 list.

That’s right! Vote here!! And like the monkey said at the fruit playoffs: Go bananas!

It’s official. Ludum Dare 19 has finally ended. Here are your results:

Top 20 Competition Games

You can check out the top 20 competition games here (including ties):

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=top

Winners are decided by the Overall category. To see the complete list, hit the “Show All Entries” link at the bottom.

Categorical Top 5′s

Here at Ludum Dare, being the best game isn’t the only way to win. Games are rated in 7 additional categories, with a special “Coolness” category highlighting people that went above and beyond to be sure you got a vote.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/

*NOTE*: You can click on the titles of the categories for Top 20 style lists per category.

Ludum Dare 19 Jam Games!

Ludum Dare 19 was our 2nd run of the new combined Competition and Jam event, and the results do not disappoint. So in addition to the 242 entries created by individuals for competition, there are 43 more games created teams or individuals that decided to take an extra day to polish their game. Be sure to check those out here:

ALL JAM GAMES (43) <--

[ ALL COMPO GAMES (242) | ALL GAMES (285) ]

Wow!

So THAT was Ludum Dare 19

We are keeping score here, and again, the latest event managed to annihilate our prior best … IN DECEMBER of all months too (our historically lowest month). Back in August, we were impressed that we inched 10 ahead of our prior best, with 213. This time, we were just 15 entries shy of 300! And if you look at the theme voting, more than 600 people cast a vote for the final theme!

And THAT was Ludum Dare in 2010

Lets crunch some numbers…

Event Games: 203+213+285 = 701
Mini LD Games: 2+21+2+6+14+24+9+7 = 85
October Challenge: 24
Total Games for 2010: 701+85+24 = 810

Thanks to Sos for helping me with the math.

Seriously, every single one of you that participated, whether you finished a game or not, you’re awesome. Phil and I (Mike/PoV) took over running Ludum Dare in 2007, and every event since we’ve been constantly impressed at how much it’s grown, and continue to be amazed that it keeps growing so much. What will 2011 bring? Will we break 1000 games?

A big thanks to all of you for helping us make 2010 such a fantastic year.

More Ludum Dare 19 links

Lots of timelapse videos to dig through. I still haven’t had a chance to watch them all, but I’ll give them a browse soon. I’ll try to do that this week.

- Keynote!, starring Some Bear Thing — With Special Guest Mjau
- Ludum Dare 19 Timelapse Videos, list assembled by Fififox
- Entry counts in the final minutes, by me
- LD Census, by demize
- Wallpaper of all entries, by ExciteMike

Interesting Tags: montage, motivation, foodphoto, food, deskphoto, desk, timelapse, bear

Ludum Dare at the Game Developers Conference

Attending GDC? Stay tuned! Like last year, Phil and I want to get a whole bunch of us together somewhere, perhaps more than just once!

If you haven’t already, sign up for the mailing list, and we’ll keep you informed. Also, you can follow Ludum Dare on Twitter.

Ludum Dare 20 – Coming April 2011!!

Like always, stop by again in April for our next regularly scheduled event. We’ll try to have a date nailed down before GDC (Feb 28th), so we can brag about it at the conference. Again, don’t forget the mailing list, and Twitter.

January Mini LD #23, hosted by Jonny D

Fans of LD19′s Silly Themes, take note! Jonny D has a surprised planned just for you. Tune in this month for a very special Mini LD.

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for us (website, observations, etc), we continue to collect them in the comments here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/08/30/suggestion-post/

Thanks everyone for coming out and making 2010 such an incredible year for Ludum Dare! We’ll see you again in April!

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Source code now up on my entry page (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=3023).  Post-Mortem coming soon.

Hey all,

If anyone out there is bored and wants to help out, could you make a list of all the timelapse videos from Ludum Dare 19 for me.

Thanks to Fififox, we have an epic list of timelapse videos. See the comments for the master list, and if you were missed, just post a new comment.

I am going to try to warm up for upcoming LD’s and Mini-LD’s by giving myself a challenge. I have a game that I will try to make in the time between tomorrow morning (Morning in EST, that is) and the time I leave for my first class in this semester. (Which is on Monday) If I really need to, I’ll also give myself the time between getting to campus and going to the class.

For those who would like to know a bit about the game I am making, information about it follows the break.

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I made a census!

So, since somebody on IRC had the wonderful idea, I made a census. It’s short, 10 questions, nothing too personal. It would provide some insight into the LD Community as well, so if you could take it that would be awesome. And here’s a link to it: LD Census

my game this contest:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Dogstar669/in-the-darkness-i-shall-fall

This was the first time I used a toolkit like Unity to make my game rather than writing it all in code. I chose to do this because I knew I would be limited on time; I had two long Christmas parties scheduled for that weekend. In essence, I only probably had about 12-15 hours to make my game.

Well, thanks to Unity I think the game came out pretty well considering how limited my available time was. It is a pretty fun game (though super simple) and there are five levels and some cool sounds and music too.

My determination after using Unity in this contest, after having written code in all my many past entries, is that clearly those that use Unity and the like have an unfair advantage in the game competition. In fact it is not even close. I spent almost no time writing code and completely leveraged the physics and other aspects of Unity that came for free in the toolkit. Instead I could spend all my time in 3DS Max creating levels. I love the fact that I have finally done enough video courses in 3DS Max to actually use it effectively for the game competition! Besides the music and sounds effects, all my time was spent creating levels and testing levels (probably 50/50 time spent on each).

I think as a result, for this contest to actually mean anything, we need to consider separating the game toolkit entries from the code entries. I can say from actual experience now that there is no comparison between the two, and comparing what one person does in code is just not in any way fair to compare to what another does in a toolkit such as Game Maker or Unity. Let’s maybe consider this for next time. Why bother to rate at all if the competition is fixed, right?

My levels were static, so I created them as one gigantic model in 3DS Max, rather than assemble them from prefabs in Unity. I think this saved time as well. But it limited what I really could do on levels (no moving platforms and such). But I accepted that I wouldn’t have time for any extras anyway. I just wanted a basic game, simple but fun, with a win case and a lose case, and i think I accomplished my goal. I love how Unity handles levels. It makes it so easy to build additional levels once you have one finished.

To give you an idea of how easy it was to create new levels for my game in Unity. This is all I had to do. Save level1 as level2. Delete the level1 terrain model. drag in the level2 terrain model. Scale the terrain to the appropriate size. Place the player at the starting position for the level. Place the win marker where I wanted it in the level. Save the level again. Play and test. That’s it. Took about one minute to setup and begin testing a new level.

I wanted to spend no more than one hour on sounds and music. So I quickly assembled a kind of new agey tune with my Axiom Pro 61 keyboard, Cubase 5 and Omnisphere. The sound effects for falling and winning were actually tunes I created with the keyboard and Omnisphere as well. I really like the falling sound for some reason. I was pretty happy with the sounds and spent no longer than an hour on them. And Unity made it less than trivial to bring them into the game.

At first, I wasn’t planning on having a start screen, but then before going to bed on the first night, I thought I would give it a try. My goal was to spend less than 20 minutes on it. I quickly sketched something out on paper with pencil (my favorite way to draw) and scanned it into photoshop. I love to draw, but I’m not very good at it, but I do much better with pencil than the mouse or tablet. The only way I can really do decent computer art is to create something with pencil and then use illustrator pen tool to redo it to make it look decent. Didn’t have time for that here. Wasn’t really happy with my little sketch, but didn’t have any more time to allocate to it. So what I did was I tested a few different filters and found one that made it look like it was night and I thought that it at least conveyed the idea of the game and gave it a bit of style. The text really needed to be redone, but I just didn’t have time for it.

With Unity, it was easy to add buttons, but I had no idea how to make buttons that would fit the art, so I didn’t bother. Had to move on. Think I spent probably about an hour on the start screen including art and the coding of it.

So I then spent the rest of the time creating the levels. One level I created I didn’t use because I tried to create rolling hills, but for some reason I couldn’t get the lighting to show that the hills and valleys even existed. It made it impossible to get through the level because the player couldn’t tell you were trying to go up a hill. I tried a black and white checkerboard texture on the level floor (ala marble madness) and that showed the depth, but the lighting was off, so the player could see the entire level at once. I didn’t have time to mess with it any more so I just decided to try to keep the levels more or less flat (although there is a slight depth here or there, nothing too outrageous). If I did a new version that is one thing I would definitely add because I think I could create much more fun levels with more bumpy terrain and curves and stuff.

Anyway, I’m happy with it. It’s on kongregate. I’m already getting some inquiries on companies interested in it. And I’ve already made my $1+ from advertising!

Hope you enjoy and I hope the powers that be consider separating out the code entries from the toolkit entires, because I can now tell you having done them both, that the amount of work needed to make a game with these toolkits is just a small fraction of what is required to make a game with all code.

My resolution for 2011 is to enter for my first LD.

I’m a big fan of the analytics so I thought I’d share a few. I also wanted to share this clever comment from a guy named Mario… and a princess named peach…

(comedy gold that)

Up until LD19 I never really used my site. As such, I had no views. What that means is that every view since the start of LD19 has come through this website from my LD entry. If you head over to http://www.thefunkvan.com/ now this is what you will see:

And if you dig into google analytics this is what you will see:

Great stuff

Happy new year everybody =)