Hi all,

I am sad I could not participate to the last Ludum Dare mainly due to the simple fact that I was working to release the very  first commercial game of my very new small business.

Now that I have finished this project, and since I owe much to the Ludum Dare community because it is always a source of personal motivation as well as a trigger to enhance my creativity I would like to share some things about my developement (postmortem like ) in a series a articles which would cover a large array of themes  from project management, to languages, gfx, sfx, install process, strange device handling, etc…

So, would you be interested by this kind of information ? And is Ludum dare a good place to publish that kind of stuff ?

Thanks for your answers

Yes, I’ll be there to make a second attempt after my previous game last winter.

I will be using HaXe + NME + Inkscape + The Gimp + SFXR + my brain + my hands + a few litres of YogiTea as well as some meditation and Taïchi, all this to find a way to entertain my fellow ludum darists

As we say in French : Youpi !

Hi all,

I am like everybody there trying to do my best to rate all the games I can. However, due to personal constraints I fiund it really hard.

The fact that I use a linux netbook at home allows me to rate the following kinds of games : linux based, flash based, wine compatible.

The problem is that there’s no way to know if a game fits these categories before going to the game’s page. I have to click on a page, scroll down ( thanks to my netbook super high resolution ) and discover if I can actually play the game.

I know, I know I could wait to go back to my office and launch all your wonderful submissions on my 90″ 3D extraLED screen on my wonderful Windows 7 mega pro 256 bits edition . But I am on holidays !! So I must wait next week to take time to do so.

Now, now, the idea I had is to be able to browse the game by label or tag. So I could know if the game works on linux, flash, mac osX, win7, unity, etc…

So I could focus on trying the games faster than light ! Well I would have to scroll down of course, but this would be really much better .

Okay, that was the idea. Please feel free to destroy it as much as you like or consider it is my 50 cents to the next ludum dare rating system…

2.0 ? Noooo, much better

Hi all,

As a first part of my postmortem I just wanted to tell you about a language we used with two of my friends (ben & deepnight) during the competition : haXe.

The language itself is easy to learn and has many powerful features that make it a strong one. (link to doc)

It features a very complete API and multiplaftorm target. with the same language, using the same API, you can generate swf files, javascript code, C++ code, PHP code, C# and java coming soon.

Extending the language is pretty easy, so you can use your favorites game API (sdl for instance). And you can target specific platforms like android or iphone. Which means that with a single codebase you can quite make a game works on several platform…

So all the javascript I created has been generated with haxe. And the flash games of my friends too. We’ve been using the language for a few years now at motion-twin and it has enabled us to code fast, easy and switch platform whenever we wanted.

Of course, you can use the language on windows, linux or MacOSX (intel), the generated content will be the same.

So to finish this first post-mortem, I can tell you that having a strong typed language helped  me create my javascript project without worrying  too much. No js nightmare debugging at all !

Last but not least, it’free  and open source That was my fifty cent to rapid development (not a commercial, just my tribute to one of my favorites language, that’s all )

I beg every developer here to think global !

Please, WASD keys are not funny on a non qwerty keyboard ! There’s a number of games I cannot rate because I cannot play to them because of the WASD choice.

I quite don’t understand why you won’t use arrow keys instead ?

Thank you all for your understanding !

After nearly 40 hours in front of my screen i’ve managed to complete my first LD entry.

What I can say is that I am quite happy to have finished. I am also quite tired. Of course there’s many features I had to cut. Still I am quite happy to have something which works. (of course due to the fact that my game is made in html5, it works only on google chrome and there may still be some bugs…)

The Week end was also a very good opportunity to gather with with some of my friends at motion-twin. Now is time to go to sleep.

I wish to thank everybody who posted on the blog. We spent great times looking the photos. I must confess I didn’t take time to do the same. But next time I will try to participate !

Now for the sad part : my server just went down… so here is a new link to my game: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7838262/ld19.zip

Hi all !

for my first LD event, I will try to make a game using html5 + canvas (and maybe SVG with the use of raphaelJs library).

Having a flash + haXe background, I think this is a good opportunity to test the technology and see whether things can happen.

Anyway, as I don’t want to spend my whole week-end building a library, I will prepare a few helpers to get things started early so I can focus on the game code itself.

See you all !

Whitetigle