Yay! After a month of work and stress, here it is: Keys

Make sure to check out our website, too: www.splitbitgames.com

I set up my website, got hosting and all that, have a PayPal account.

How do you sell games with PayPal? Only way I can see would be to have people pay and then be linked to a download page hosted by the server. But then anybody can just go straight to that download page and get the game without paying.

How do you solve this problem? I’m open to any other solutions, including non-paypal ones, as long as they aren’t very expensive.

Finally got all our hosting issues resolved, uploaded most of the website.

www.splitbitgames.com

Feel free to go ahead and check it out!
Make sure you DON’T buy anything yet – the files are way out of date. Don’t wanna rip you off.

After 3 very successful LDs, I’m finally going to try and get my games out there in the market.

I’m writing a website from scratch in HTML, setting up PayPal stuff, I’ve bought the domain name, and all I really need now is hosting.

My plans are to release two games for free (one is my LD#24 game!) and one for $5. I’d say these all need a bit of polishing, but I can always release first and update later.

Anyone have some good recommendations for hosting? Sadly, I’m not so experienced with the whole website-development thing so I don’t really know much.

Thanks to everyone here for being part of the community and inspiring me to make games!

Ludum Dare #24 is now over, and it’s time to do a post-mortem!

Last weekend, pixelcake (fellow jammer) and I went out of our comfort zones and made a rhythm game.

In our game, you play as Charles Darwin, who’s had enough with natural selection and has decided to take evolution into his own hands with his 3-conveyor design artificial animal sorting machine. Switch lanes using the arrow keys, and press space to pop an animal off the conveyor belt. Only pop off the gray, sickly-looking animals!

All in all, it was a great experience. I’ll tell you how it went, starting at the theme announcement:

On Friday, August 24th, at exactly 6:00 pm, I was on the Ludum Dare IRC channel, waiting to hear what the theme was. When I heard that the theme for LD#24 was “Evolution”, I thought it sounded pretty good. I wasn’t going to start any sort of work on a game yet until the next day, around noon, when I would get together with pixelcake and begin development. Of course, we would still have more than 48 hours of jam time, but sadly, we both had school on Monday, which interfered with our plans. We still managed to pull together a game in about 28 hours.

On Saturday, pixelcake and I began development. Or not. The more we thought about ideas for a game about evolution, the more we hated the theme. Why couldn’t Evolution have been beaten by Parallel Worlds, or Survive? Surely both of these were more interesting themes.

After two solid hours of brainstorming, bouncing ideas off of each other, and screwing around on the computer, we cranked out a concept for a game.

Charles Darwin is in a rhythm game where he stomps out animals to the beat.

Charles Darwin! Evolution! Rhythm game! After having thought of such a great idea, we got right to work, programming, spriting, and composing music. By the next day, we had the core concept of our game finished. This left us with just a tiny bit of time to add a couple of finishing touches to our game. Finally, I filled out the almighty submission form, uploaded our game to Dropbox, and clicked Submit.

Overall, how did we do? Quite well, in fact. We probably won’t win LD#24, but we had a great weekend and made something we’re proud of, even if it could use a little bit more work. Next LD, I think the main thing to focus on for us will be maintaining a positive attitude, making better use of our time, and getting plenty of sleep. These are all things we improved on since our last LD, but I think we can do more.

And of course – here’s our game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=3200

If you need a Mac or Linux build, drop a comment on the game page and I’ll try to get one up.

I’m planning to do the jam with a friend, but I’m busy this morning and we can’t get together until around noon. We’ve made games in less than 24 hours outside of LD though, so no worries. I’m a bit nervous, but I have thought over quite a few concepts. We’ll probably end up taking the cool ideas from both our proto-concepts and making an interesting game idea. I look forward to hitting the submit button tomorrow or Monday!

All of your progress looks fantastic. Can’t wait to play all the LD#24 games later this week. Good luck, everyone!

Looks like I’m eating my words… it turns out that I won’t be able to do Ludum Dare 24 because of school.

However, I’m definitely up for Ludum Dare 25! See you guys then!

In the meantime, enjoy this competition and give it your all. I know I’m going to see some great games.

For my first LD, I was frantically trying to get some more experience with Allegro before starting so that I wouldn’t have to spend half the compo reading library docs. One LD later, I spent a couple weeks writing test programs so that I would be able to use custom fonts and particle effects in my game. This LD, I’m trying to learn a new game library and set up an uncooperative IDE to compile my game easily.

How prepared do you feel for LD#24?

My first Ludum Dare was #19, which I did solo (lots of fun). The community is so helpful and not super-competitive, and it felt great to be part of the competition. I missed the next Ludum Dare, and stopped following the competition for a while. A friend of mine reminded me a week before LD#22 that it was coming up soon, and we ended up having lots of fun making a game together. I had to miss #23 because of other obligations, but I should be able to do #24, hopefully with the same friend!

I’ve just released yet another update for our game Follower (submission page here). Thanks to everybody who played and commented our game, I was able to patch in a few post-compo bugfixes and additions, so that you won’t jump out of a 12th-story window screaming after playing our game. Please feel free to play it and leave behind a comment or two! All of you who already did, we really appreciate it. Thank you Ludum Dare community members!

We finished our game! Whee! Download the windows package here.

Here’s a screenshot:

Even though it does say “Game Test”, this is the final version. If you’re running on Linux and want an executable, drop a comment on the game page and I’ll submit one. The game runs fine under wine too, I got it to run under wine on my mac and Linux laptop.

Time to put in that final sprint and get everything done and polished. It’s coffee time!

It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve added scrolling to the game, as well as fixed a LOT of bugs. I’m working on a windows port of the half-finished game right now, so I can port it quickly later.

We’re getting really far along on our game. I’ve finished the engine, written a level designer, and we now have 77 tiles. However, my code is relatively short (only 638 lines), and I still have lots to do.

Just went outside to look at the stars, it’s 1:19 AM. The sky was really clear and we could easily make out Orion’s belt and some other cool constellations. Ludum Dare is fun.

So far, we’ve made about half our tileset, I’ve coded the engine, and got most of the functional tiles working. We will soon be working on implementing the concept of our game (which we have changed).

Good luck everyone!

We have an idea for a concept! Unfortunately, I’m busy this morning, so I can’t do much work on it. After lunch, though, we will refine our concept and start working! I have my coding environment all set up, and pixelcake’s ready to do some spriting. He already has done some music for our game.

Even though we weren’t really able to utilize this morning, we’re still going to have a ton of fun and make an awesome game. Lucky for you, though, we can only enter in the Jam, so our game won’t pwn yours. Jk.

Finally got custom fonts working for Allegro… been working on this like all day.

The competition is ALMOST HERE! LESS THAN ONE HOUR LEFT!!!!!!!!!!!! OMG

Alright! I was just able to compile and run my test program for windows. All this on my linux laptop. Whenever I use wine to make ends meet in situations like these, I always feel very evil…

I’m super hyped! Time to watch all the keynotes.

I added to my simple arrow keys move program. Now it has sprites and animation! Pretty pathetic really, but I just did it for the experience to save valuable time looking at docs later. The player is moved around by arrow keys, has momentum, and has an emoticon/smiley face 4-frame animation. I’m soooo ready for the jam!

After I’m done with the jam, I hope to submit a good executable. Last time I just submitted my source code and Linux executable, because I was too lazy to finish and submit my windows version (even though it worked). This time, I’ll be ready, and you can look for a windows executable to play. I don’t even have a copy of windows – just my iMac and a clunky laptop running Linux. But I have wine! And I can run Dev-C++ under wine on my Linux laptop to compile my C++ games for windows. Don’t worry, I’ve done it before. So – after the competition, look for my .exe submission. And please try it! I promise it will be fun. And if it’s not fun, then you can laugh at my fail.

I’m going into this competition armed and ready! Even though I’m actually doing the jam with a friend.

By the way – one of the best ways to feel prepared is to open sfxr and create some sound effects. You’ll feel really prepared.