The prototype I’ve got as of the end of day 2. You can move an avatar around, and there are two screens, which you can move between.

Mac version
Windows version

In a sense, the game here or at least the code is “done”, at this point it’s just making more screens. However I’m very worried about time. I’d wanted to be further along by now than I actually am.

I just spent the last two hours on an incredibly disheartening, basically failed attempt to add music, most of it spent digging through boxes desperately trying to find a 1/4-inch audio cable. (I eventually managed to jury rig a cable by plugging a bunch of adapters together; I then discovered one of the cables was broken.) By the end of all this I was very loopy but I had an ogg file, which then wouldn’t play; after half an hour, and crazy lengths like rolling back vcs, trying to figure out why I couldn’t get any ogg files to play, I realized I had typed a line like “bgmusic = new Sound()”. Problems here: (1) that is a line of C++; (2) the program is written in Lua. At this point I realized I was badly messing myself up by trying to do this without sleep. So: Sleep now

Last night before I went to bed, I fed Drawception the prompt “Ludum Dare”.

This is what happened.

(Drawception is a web version of Eat Poop You Cat, it’s a telephone game where random players alternate trying to describe a picture with a phrase and draw a picture from a phrase without being able to see any of the words or images that lead up to it.)

Current windows build (as of 1:43 AM saturday morning)
Current mac build (as of 1:43 AM saturday morning)
Current source code (continuously up to date)

Current build is not interactive, it will display and animate the first of the three images above. I don’t actually know what my game mechanic is yet. I thought I knew when I started, now I don’t.

Currently concerned that this may wind up being a paint program and not a game. Maybe that’s okay.

What you are looking at is this running full-screen in your GPU.

This is gonna be my third Ludum Dare. I’ve actually participated in the last two– for LD21 I made an intricate and fairly complete prototype of a game I may go back and “finish” someday, for LD22 I wound up busy all weekend and made a bizarre generative sound demo on the last day. I think I’m getting better at this whole game jam thing– since I did LD21 I’ve also participated in two of the Pirate Karts and also the Molyjam. (You can find the full list of my games here.)

I am planning to make my game this weekend, whatever it is, with Polycode, a library I’ve been moving my development to over the last year in the hopes it would let me write part-C++-part-Lua programs with little fuss. There has admittedly been some fuss. Polycode is alpha and has some usability issues, so I spent most of my free time the last few days trying to clean up Polyconsole, my get-started-with-Polycode project (which has some niceties like a debug console), partly so that it would be in a good shape for me to use for LD, and partly so that I could then write up a nice blog post and post my tools before LD so that maybe other people could use them. And, well… I did get Polyconsole actually in what I would think of as a “ready to show to others” state before LD started! Here’s what the demo I’ve been working on with it looks like right now:

…except… that was all I had time for before LD, meaning I didn’t write any documentation. And without documentation and build instructions I don’t think my code will be much use to anyone. But, if you want to see the codebase I’m gonna be working from this weekend, see here. I’ll write a more useful blog post about what “Polyconsole” is after LD. You’ll have to take my word for it: It’s TOTALLY AWESOME.

Anyway: Ludum Dare 23. I’M IN

So I went into this LD with a specific goal to make a game using Polycode. Instead, I wound up out of the house basically nonstop from the start of the competition until late Saturday night. So Sunday morning I got up, STARTED a project using the framework I used for my previous Ludum Dare entry, and except for a break to go to Burger King did not stop until I was done. Nothing survived from the idea I had when I started this morning except for the sound.

The result is called “My own footsteps”, it took me about seven and a half hours start to finish and it is the first 3D game I have ever made. I hope it amuses people, I very much like the sound.

My Own Footsteps

Going to do Ludum Dare this weekend, for the second time! If you’d like to see my previous projects (including my last Ludum Dare game, which was called You Don’t Fit), see here.

My plans: I intend to use Polycode to make my Ludum Dare game this time. I’m really excited about starting to make games with Polycode but I’m still struggling to get past startup issues. I have a Polycode template project I’ve been working on which adds to the basic Polycode template project an SVG loader and an interactive LUA console; I’m hoping I’ll have that working enough to my satisfaction that I can use that as the base code for my game this weekend. If I succeed, I’ll be pulling from this open source repository as a base for LD.

It’s possible that either outstanding bugs with my LUA console, a shortage of time this weekend (I’m only going to get to spend a small part of the weekend on my LD game… I have tickets to see Dntel in Santa Cruz ), or a really inconvenient theme will mean I have to abandon Plan Polycode, in which case I’ll be using my personal C++ framework that I used for the last LD, and possibly pulling library code from one of the games I’ve previously released as open source.

I am excited about doing LD again, though I hope I can get my time/LUA issues sorted out before the weekend.

Uploaded my final mac/windows builds to my server at 6:55 and 6:57, spent the last two hours trying to get the LD site to load, making blog/twitter type posts and building a Linux version. In the end I named it “You Don’t Fit”.

And… success, I think! The game is small and I have no idea what will happen in voting, but my goal with LD was just to prove to myself I could make a game with the 48-hour constraint (even my simple game projects tend to take months and spiral out of control) and I met my own little personal goals. There are some things I might have done different with a longer timeframe– I think the puzzles could have been deeper than they are (although it does have a facility for user levels!) and I had some ideas about sound and graphics that I didn’t have time to explore. But: I met the deadline, and the game feels “complete” to me, it has non-placeholder (if simple) sound and graphics and it’s possible to win. So, woo.

- My blog post about the game

- My entry on ludumdare.com

Thanks everyone for the support and the platform, and now it’s time to go try to play everyone else’s games

Mac version
Windows version
Source Code

ATM I have a level loader and you can move around on the screen. That’s it, not much to see yet. I’d hoped to be further along by this point, but this isn’t terrible, either.

I do know where I am going with this.

Hi again! So I have this small music program I made a little while back, mostly just for fun, that lets you make little drum/music loops. When I made my I’m In post I got a comment from someone saying they were interested in using this to make music loops for ludum dare and requesting a wav export function be added. I’d gotten this request before, so I went ahead and added it!

So if you’re interested, here is version 1.0.1 of Drumcircle, with an export button under “Save” that emits a seamless-loopable wav of the current loop. Here’s a quick little music loop I made with it to demonstrate.

Hope someone finds this useful

Hello Ludum Dare! I have no idea how to pronounce your name.

I have been making games for awhile under the name RUN HELLO. I use C++ for everything– I am learning Flash but I am not to the point where I can use it for real projects yet. I decided this time, I am going to give Ludum Dare a try. Usually game projects take a very very long time for me but I am trying to get better at this lately so maybe I have reached a point where I can make a simple game in 48 hours.

In order to create my LD game, I intend to use this game library I have previously released,

As well as utility and graphics code from this game which I made for a Tigsource compo and then released as open source.

I am worried about being able to actually stick to the theme once it is announced. If so I will probably just go ahead and make a non-theme game and accept disqualification.