The Paris “Computer Human Interaction 2013″ game jam was very… different. Researchers are odd people, not at all like most jammers.

Anyway, we played around a bit with a heart-beat monitor. Or rather I made a prototype which worked with the keyboard using processing (first time, but pretty easy to pick up) while the others got the Arduino to work. This evening I’ve polished up the keyboard version a little to submit as my compo entry.

Yeah sue me: the game logic is all mine, with no external code or assets, and done in 48 hours. It’s also plenty minimalistic, and not unintentionally

Not like this entry is going to win any medals, but I thought I’d put it up anyway: failures are just as important as successes, they teach us what not to do next time. As for what exactly it is that I shouldn’t do next time… well I think I may have to sleep on that

There are still a few places left at our Montpellier event in Southern France, so if you’re in the neighbourhood go here and sign up!

Although I’m one of the Montpellier organisers, I’ll actually be in Paris for the LD participating in the CHI 2013 conference’s Game Jam – funny how there things pan out. But apparently the organiser of this event may be tagging along with the LD theme, so I won’t have to miss out after all. It’ll be my first time straddling multiple LD events in different cities so hurrah, and stuff

Our little association Baptême du jeu (originally a Facebook group) has teamed up with Kawenga to organise our second Ludum Dare real-world gathering ^^ Here’s a teaser poster (awesome pixel pirate by PixelBlock):

We’re charging 7€ for food (a jammer jams on his stomach), and if you’re not already a member of Kawenga you’ll need to sign up for a year’s membership for another 8€. You can sign-up here. We only have about 50 places, so don’t dilly-dally

I finally got around to posting my Ludum Dare 25 time-lapse, accompanied with some idle musings and some epic open (GPL3) music

Check it out!

http://youtu.be/90V72BQvPOo

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We were interviewed on fight4game during Ludum Dare 25, and the footage has finally been edited and released: I’m afraid it’s all in French, but you get a decent look at the room were were in

I can’t seem to embed youtube videos, so here is a direct link.

I want to point out for those who do speak French that I was exhausted (this was taken Saturday morning: remember that in France we start at 3am) and that French isn’t my mother-tongue – sure, I repeat myself a lot, but considering the circumstances I think it went pretty well

The Montpellier real-world gathering was a great success, and hopefully we’ll be able to organise a similar gathering next time around

Here you can see Gaael and FlowerPower engaged in “witty” banter while Pierrec (in Black), Niavlys (blond), Doelia and company are hard at work. On the right you can see our buffet (the participants got a LOT of food) and Christmas tree, and perched up on top of the mainframe in the corner of the room is the web-cam we used to stream the event.

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Right, I’m sick of doing course-work surrounded by people doing a game jam, so I’ve decided to make a game as well. In 2 hours and 10 minutes. Time starts. Now.

Ludum Dare Montpellier has assembled! Currently live-streaming our… checking that the live-stream works We’ll have to cut the feed between 9:00 and 13:00 tomorrow (GMT+1) but otherwise we’ll be live

Can you spot the Swing Swing Submarine developer?

The workspace for the 14 Montpellier dare-devil – this is the angle from which our stream will be taken

Hi all

This is my second Ludum Dare and my 7th jam, though I still have a lot to learn about making games Here is my entry from last year.

I’ve organised an real-world gathering this year at the University Montpellier 2 with the help of Gaeel, my fellow Brit’ in Southern France, and a few other people. The faculty has been great, but we only had confirmation and security permissions at the last minute, so we can’t invite any more participants (though visitors can come by Saturday morning). There will be around 14 of us in total, including Guillaume from Swing Swing Submarine and Pierre from Oujevipo. It’s going to be legend… wait for it… dary!

We also plan to stream the event as of Saturday midday using the university’s web-tv.

That said the organisation has eaten up all my spare time this last fortnight and I have a number of projects to hand in next week, so I may have to hijack the dare to work on technology for either:

• multi-agent systems project
• crowd-movement (troop formations) simulation project

I’m a bit sad about this :’( Both of which are open-source projects – In this case I’ll develop code tangentially to the base… I’m not sure how kosher this is, probably not at all. I also predict that organisation during the event will eat up a considerable amount of the 48 hour period, so I may not end up with much  – that said I’m super psyched about this event and happy to provide others will a cool working environment

Happy New Dare everyone

Since we’re participating from Europe, we received the theme at 3am and slept on it This morning I had a great idea based around the Bacterial Resistance: enemies will have 3 resistances display in their R, G and B channels. They will mutate with each generation, but by and large should become harder to kill simply because of natural selection.

The goal is to exterminate them all before they reach plague proportions!

Obviously it would be boring to wipe out germs, so instead we’ll be exterminating kittens. Hurrah!

Want to stay up to date with development? Go to my Ludum Dare game page: there are links to the base-code I’m using, github repository, my (real) website and and rolling-release version of the game itself (so far pretty basic).

Hey there!

I’m William (aka wilbefast) and I make games for Linux … and sometimes Windows, Android and the Web. I look forward to making games with you!

I’ll be participating from France with a bunch of friends, each making their own game but doing so together to keep each-other motivated We’ll be live-streaming, etc, so please feel free to stalk us.

Depending on the theme I may use HTML5 (javascript) or LWJGL (Java), and I’ll probably borrow bits of code from various projects I’ve posted to github or my website. Maybe. In my experience one should never be too prepared for a jam.

Looking forward to playing your games, though bear in mind I’ll be playing those which run on Linux first for convenience sake… actually I’m hoping there’ll be enough that I never need to boot up Windows (sorry guys).

Not looking to win, just to have fun: looking forward!