Hi,

I just set up a community website.

ghbrvlowabrvfladberogvlwrvfwlo games

It’s aim is to enable game developers to sell their games in a neat and hopefully profitfull manner.

Unlike e-commerce websites, it works in a different manner. It values quantity over quality, by accepting all the games you post there. The games are accepted until 700MB limit is reached. when that happens, I will assemble a CD ISO containing the games, a neat autorun menu for them, and a booklet for printing. Then I will distribute it online (probably through torrent protocol), so everyone can burn it and sell it themselves.

I think you guys made many games, that you think are of too low quality to sell, and this is the opporturnity.

I’m really looking forward to see some LD games there. also, tellme what do you think of this idea.

PS. It’s the catchiest domain name ever

Here’s something that may interest some of you… especially those missing GDC.

Intel has an App Store for Netbooks called the AppUp Center. It’s new, and scheduled to start being preinstalled on Netbooks from numerous computer OEM’s this year. So, Intel’s running a fun little promotion this month to get some more apps. Details about the contest can be found here:

http://appdeveloper.intel.com/fund

In summary, 250x $500 cash prizes (Visa gift vouchers), 100x royalty profit matching deals (with a $2 value given to free apps), and further prizes to be announced March 9th.

Timeline: March 1st to March 31st (for the first 2 prize categories).

Join the Developer Program here.

No doubt you’ve seen the App madness of the iPhone App Store, and after seeing some of the apps thought “I could do better than that”. Well, here’s a good place to do it.

My thought has been, if you have a good LD game you can polish up (or two), you should consider doing something like that for the contest.  Or even shape a MiniLD 17 entry towards this.  We all know how talented the people in this community are, so really, those prizes are yours for the taking.  Remember, you can even enter a free minigame, and if you’re one of the 100, you can still earn up to $2 per download (capped at $5k).

I actually won and am a winner in their last contest, and will be doing some interviews with them at the show. I wasn’t asked to post this, but my time GDC week will be short, and I wanted to give you all a good head start on this.

Great! So what’s the down side you ask?

The SDK is technical, and currently only supports C and C++. *********

There might be some *cough* creative solutions to that though.

Still interested?  Here’s some tips.

(more…)

Hey,

So this year at GDC we’re having an official Ludum Dare get together!

Where: Metreon food court
When: Wednesday, March 10, at 5:30

I should be pretty easy to spot.

So, show up, get some food, and we’ll have a good time!

See you there!
-Phil

P.S. If you are speaking or presenting or showing your game off in IGF, or whatever, be sure to leave a comment with times and locations so the rest of us LDers don’t miss the awesomeness of whatever you are doing

PoV P.S. If you’re working on something cool, bring it along. It might make a good conversation starter. Also, if I remember correctly, the Metreon has a pretty nice sized Arcade too. And if you can’t make it to San Fran, check out the comments for something you might be able to catch that I’m up to.

I submitted an entry in LD14. Those of you reading my journal during the compo will understand that I didn’t expect to win, place, or show. The goal for me was just to finish something, anything. After 48 frantic hours I was astonished to discover that I made my goal; I’d written a real live game! I’d finally succeeded at game development, which is something I’d tried in vain many times before.

That was about nine months ago. Next challenge: commercial game development. I came up with an idea in January, and just under a month of furious coding later, I finished my very first iPhone game, Teragati. Other than alpha channels, 22KHz sounds, and accelerometer as the principal control, it’s straight out of the 1980s. Good, clean, crack-like addictive fun.

Apple approved it for sale today in the App Store. 99 cents. If that’s out of your price range, let me know and I’ll find a promo code for you.

Next challenge: is there a Ludum Dare competition for marketing? 1,000 sales from scratch in 48 hours?

GDC is coming up soon, and it does seem like we have a reasonable sized group attending. The traveling part does suck however. So I thought I’d open up a fun little discussion topic. Can you LD on the go?

There’s a thread on TIGSource that reminded me of the idea. One key point this thread brings up is battery life. In their case, they were on a train without outlets, so they had to make the battery life of their laptops matter. Traveling by plane though, there are often several connecting flights, so there may be opportunities to find a power outlet at airports. Charge up for the next run.

Another point brought up is art, how it’s rather difficult to draw a straight line while on a train. In LD’s case, good art is never really necessary anyways, but it’s always nice to see.

Not to mention, catching flights often involves getting up early. You’re perhaps not in the best of moods, groggy, feeling ill, sitting a small uncomfortable seat, or such. Plus you need to spend a bunch of your time doing your travel duties (going through customs, waiting in a lobby, eating). So on an 8 hour+ flight, you’re not going to get 8 hours of work in. On the other hand, it’s an 8 hour flight, and what would your rather be doing?

Post your thoughts.

Dock’s game Tumbledrop is a finalist in the IGF Mobile, but he needs some help getting to GDC. For a small donation, he’s offering a nod in his current and next game’s credits. Visit his blog for more details.

http://starfruitgames.com/blog/?p=103

Here’s this years list of IGF finalists from the community.

Independent Games Festival

Sparky – Star Guard – Excellence in Design
crackerblocks – Enviro-Bear 2000 – Nuovo

Independent Games Festival Mobile

tonic – Stair Dismount – Technical Achievement
dock – Tumbledrop – Technical Achievement

Honorable Mentions
mrfun – Mind Wall (Ludum Dare 14) – Best Mobile Game Design

Congratulations everyone!

If I missed anyone (especially student competition finalists), let me know.

The mobile winners will be announced in a couple weeks (ahead of GDC).

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

I get these in the mail every so often. Seeing how this one relates to the community, I thought I’d share. My apologies, it seems my scanner is dead, so I had to photograph instead.

A suspicious letter showed up in the mail today.

Wow, "THE" Domain registry of Canada... I didn't realize we had a domain registry

It seems very professional.

How considerate! A return envelope!

I guess it’s time to renew our website…

Wow! We can save $40 by renewing for 5 years!

In case you didn’t know, we also own ludumdare.org as a backup site, in case something crazy happens and we lose the dot com to domain thieves.

If lawsuits are threatened...

Alternatively, you could use a registrar like Godaddy, then google for coupons. I usually spend less than $10 a year myself. Get hosting elsewhere though.

Have a nice day.

Hi everybody,

I’d like a quick show of hands who will be at the Game Developers Conference in March. I realize the IGF Mobile, IGF Student, and Gamma results aren’t available yet, but we’d just like to get a rough idea how many Ludum Dare folk will be attending (or *might be* attending). Post a comment.

Also, let us know if you’re a San Fransisco resident (or familiar with the city). We could use some expertise, as Phil and I are just tourists. We’d like to arrange some sort of Ludum Dare meetup one of the evenings, and could use some help picking an establishment.

Thanks!

Courtesy of Critical Distance, Gamasutra presents the best 99 free games of 2009.

http://www.gamasutra.com/…/The_99_Best_Free_Games_Of_2009

Numerous Ludum Dare entries and regulars make up a respectable share of the list, which is something we’re always proud to see. Check it out.

oh no LD haha its crappy game season

i hope the theme is snow because i know wher to get some LOL its in my back yard

i made a tutorial to help people I hope you like it

1. get an idea. like rolling snow balls
2. make a clear simple goal from it. “make the biggest snowball” isnt clear because you dont know biggest than what? i will use “roll up all the snow”. other good ones are: get to the exit without dieing, eat all the apples, kill the evil boss. if its not simple the game will be confusing
3. add obstacles to get in the way. if the snowball is too big it will be too hard to push so thats my obstacle (you can only push it downhill). it will be a puzzle game to rollu p all the snow by finding the right way to roll your balls LOL
4. make sure its not boring. if your game is about shoting enemys and theres no reason not to shoot them then its a crap game because “should I shoot him?” is a boring choice. good decisions make you give up something because fun is when you make risky decisions in your life. so the risk in my game is that rolling a ball makes it too big and then you lose the puzle
5. test it by makeing a simple version on your paper so you know its fun. delete all your boring ideas, you mihgt have a lot of them so dont fall in love with your turd game haha. look at my game that i made in like 10 seconds while i typed this (my camera string is not part of it tho):
   i also wrote down the rules which i edited until it was fun to play. can you get all the snow??? you move snowballs up down left or right, except against an arrow, unless they rolled into it. balls dont roll downhill automatically, you have to push them down. also its supposed to say “10 or more” snow. i already started that level it was kinda tricky
6. now you can add powerups very carefully but dont forget to make them intersting tradeofs and dont add them if they make the game boring. i could add a rule to remove one snow by melting it with pee but I havent played the game enough to know if it would be any more fun also its kinda gross

so now you can make your game. but watch out for these highly important tips:

• design while youre sleepy at night or just got up because thats when your brain is the best at creativity and art
• write down your ideas so you dont forget them when youre programming
• if youre not sure about an idea, do not do it. simpler is better.
• finish the game in 24 hours, because it always takes twice as long as you expect

good luck making your crap game, everybody! (plz vote this 5 stars if you liked it)

Hi everybody,

Apparently we have even more big middleware news. Epic’s Unreal Development Kit (i.e. Unreal Engine 3) is now available for free to game developers, much like Unity. Details can be found here.

http://www.udk.com

Licensing terms are FREE for non commercial, and 0% royalties up to $5000 (25% after). To compare, Unity’s FREE license allows you up to $100k profits before having to buy.

Historically speaking, Unreal Engine 3 was our go-to example of an unallowed piece of middleware. However, the terms above are reasonable enough that we really should consider it an acceptable development tool. To put things in perspective, we do allow several pay-to-use library/engines such as PTK and Torque. It’d be unfair of us to disallow something with FREE terms.

With that in mind, we’re looking for some information.

** If anyone is up for some experimenting, we’re curious how large a bare-bones redistributable (i.e. a binary) is, or if it’s even possible to make one. Thanks! **

Like any middleware, development with UDK for a competition would be subject to the same content restrictions as any other engine or middleware (i.e. content from scratch). It’s just you’re getting the renderer, stock shaders and tools they used to make Gears of War. This also means you run the risk of less people in the competition being able to run your game, as the hardware requirements are certainly higher than Unity or alternative shaderless middleware. XNA developers have had this problem in the past.

Even though the rules don’t fully reflect it yet, one of the goals moving forward with Ludum Dare is to better define where we fit in. We don’t compete with the IGF and other indie game exhibits, but compliment them. We aim to be a place where game ideas start, and encourage you to take them to the next level. Be it exhibits like the IGF or Indiecade, shareware and casual markets, online services like Steam, to mobiles like iPhone, consoles and beyond. That means embracing middleware and all practical ways of shortening development time, despite us from scratch purists.

Stay tuned, LD 16 info is coming.

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Well, that’s the big news today. Popular Middleware Technology provider Unity Technologies has announced that it’s flagship product “Unity” is now free.

http://unity3d.com/unity/download/

You still have to pay for the iPhone and Console versions, but the PC/Mac and Web version is free for Indies (According to their license agreement, that’s people/companies earning less that $100k from the games they make).

As usual, we’ll continue to encourage Unity developers to join us for our 48 hour game making fests here at Ludum Dare.

Or hey, if you’re looking for a reason to try unity out, the upcoming December compo sounds nice.

Ludum Dare 16’s date we’ll have for you in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Ludum Dare entrants are really on a roll this year.

The latest in the continuing legacy is Seth “mrfun” Robinson’s Mind Wall from Ludum Dare 14. Mind Wall is on it’s way to China for the inaugural Independent Games Festival China competition.

IGF China Info: http://www.gdcchina.com/events/igf.html
Finalists List: http://www.gdcchina.com/events/igffinalists.html

Download Mind Wall: http://www.codedojo.com/?p=104

Mind Wall was created for the 14th Ludum Dare’s theme Advancing Wall of Doom, and took place in April of this year. Seth has since improved on his Ludum Dare entry, and even ported the game iPhone!

One of our favorite Mind Wall moments has to be this youtube video recorded by a player. His girlfriend captured this tense and tender moment as he conquered the unforgiving beast that is the Mind Wall.

So hey, Ludum Dare. Not bad ‘eh? First it was Phil and I at the IGF Mobile in March, Lexaloffle at the TGS Sense of Wonder Night last week, and now mrfun at IGF China. Not to mention our record breaking 123 and 144 entries the past 2 compos. A fantastic year for us all.

Lets keep that going!

The Independent Games Festival and Independent Games Festival Mobile are now accepting entries for 2010. We’d love to see more of you keeping this little streak of ours going. Both competitions require an entry fee, and for you to provide your own travel if you make it. But if you ask any finalist, they’ll tell you that attending is totally worth it.

Independent Games Festival (Due November 1st, $100): http://www.igf.com/
Independent Games Festival Mobile (Due December 1st, $50): http://www.igfmobile.com/

I’ll be there at GDC next year (perhaps with Phil). Not that meeting me in person is all that monumental an event, but hey. If we get enough of an LD crew out there, we’ll totally have to do something.

Keep up the great work everyone!

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

There’s a new featured article on Gamasutra and Game Career Guide about game making festivals and competitions. You can find the article here:

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/784/features/784/winning_a_guide_to_finding_game_.php

On page 2 there’s a small plug for Ludum Dare and RetroRemakes, which is pretty cool if I do say so.

I participated in yesterday’s Glorious Trainwreck. My self-imposed theme? RAIN.

Play it! (Windows)

In playing through people’s entries I found a lot of them just jump straight into the game and stop when you win or lose.  This is a post intended to inform anyone who doesn’t know how, about a quick and dirty way to create a simple ’start screen’ -> ‘game’ -> ‘end’ -> ‘reset’ loop in thier game.  I’ve no idea if there is a more ‘proper’ way to do this, but this is quick, dirty, and works.  There may be some differences depending on how your game is structured, but you can fit the idea to most.

(more…)

A few of us in IRC did a Micro-LD to test out the blind date concept – each participant makes a set of graphics, and then gets assigned someone else’s set to use to make a game.

Myself, Edwardoka, fydo, Almost, and MrDude did graphics. Fydo didn’t start on a game, and Edwardoka and I gave up – that leaves two (very good) entries:
FLUTTER by Almost (MrDude’s graphics): http://filesmelt.com/downloader/FLUTTER.zip
Space Dodger by MrDude (fydo’s graphics): http://pycron-ld48.googlecode.com/files/Space-Dodger.zip

Just thought I’d give a shout-out

We’re entering uncharted territory here.

Thanks to everyone that contributed to our little demographics survey. We surveyed 100 people, and now have some actual data about your fellow LD folk.

Lets look at some charts.

Students, hobbiests, game jobs, ex mainsteam, full-time indies

This is one we’ve been wondering about for a while. Students covering about 25%, with nearly 30% being those with game jobs or enough entrepreneurial spirit to make their own.

I’m not sure what to take away from the “spare time” stat, other than to think more about my choice of words. For example, does a self employed game maker make games in their spare time anymore? Also, some people do contract game work, so wordings again could be problematic.

Games you've made (and own all right to), the cool things they've done

This data was crammed in to the 1st question. A set of questions on about how stuff you’ve made has done. This makes me realize a good question may have been weather you’ve released a game before (freeware, web, shareware, retail, etc). None the less, we can see nearly 20% of those surveyed have have had some notable successes with things they’ve created.

You and the game making community

This is what was left in the first question. I wasn’t expecting “the book one” to be on top, and only get a single vote (cough…). I know for a fact we’ve had other authors enter before, and I have a book on my shelf with an article written by Geoff (who obviously now didn’t do the survey). None the less, the subject of writing can certainly be expanded on. Articles for Gamasutra, the Escapist, gamedev.net, or other publications are certainly worth wording a question around. Whitepapers and tutorials too.

The last 3 refer to various compo styles, edited on the graph text so not to eat up all the space. The first being your Ludum Dare’s, PyWeek’s, and TIGSourc’esc compos. Glad to see a good turn out for that. The second being attended events like Game Jam’s (TIGJam, TOJam, …). The final being your Independent Games Festivals, Sense of Wonder Nights, GAMMA’s, PAX 10’s, Indiecade’s, and similar exhibitions. In other words, a real venue demoing your game.

Platforms: PC's, Mobile, Consoles

Next the platforms question. Windows rating, we expected something nice and high. It’s also good to have some Mac and Linux numbers too. And whomever it was that added the single vote for non big-3 PC OS, pat yourself on the back for being the only one. Keeping the dream alive.

Web made a good showing. Flash, Unity, and those crazy PHP game makers. Nice.

I did neglect PDA’s, but I’d imagine (hope) most people wanting to mention that put a note down for Mobile. iPhone could probably be given it’s own section next time, since I suspect it’s pushing up most of that mobile score.

Consoles, that’s always good to see. With a pair of 13’s though, I do wonder how many are distinctly A or B, or both. Also there’s the question of homebrew. Being an “indie” event, I’d expect a decent split here.

Classic computers, also keeping the dream alive. From that stat we know we have at least 6 really old people here.

Physical games, I’m glad someone suggested this. I imagine the majority don’t do a lot of board/card game development these days, but physical stuff is great for prototyping ideas.

The survey'ish question

Yes, finally the more traditional survey’esc question. I’m proud to report we have a 10% scandal ratio going on here at Ludum Dare. I’d expect no less.

Thanks again everyone for taking survey. I hope you enjoy these colorful charts.

Hey everybody,

Earlier in the week we fixed up the old compo system, just to have something. However inspiration hit Dr. Phil Hassey today, and lo and behold, we got a new system.

It’s new though, so we gotta test it. We can fall back on the fixed old system in case of an emergency, but we’ve got a whole … oh … (looks at watch) 22 hours go! Lets beta this!

Hit my test compo here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/new-test-compo/

Create an entry for yourself. Upload at least a primary screen, and just make up some list of platforms and a URL. It should be pretty straight forward. After all, there’s red stars beside stuff.

Our hope is that this doesn’t break, and that we can get 30+ fake entries in so we can better test it under semi-realalistic conditions.

So go enter this latest fake compo!

Thanks!

If you ever wondered why Ludum Dare keeps going after all these years, it’s for awesome news like this.

Ludum Dare veteran Joseph White (aka Lexaloffle, aka Lex… when I’m lazy)’s latest game Swarm Racer 3000 will be on display at this upcoming Tokyo Game Show. It’s one of several titles being featured at the indie friendly Sense of Wonder Night. You can read more about it here.

Lets look at some gameplay footage.

Pretty sweet looking ‘eh.

The Ludum Dare connection? For those of you that missed it, back in 2006 we had the very awesome theme Swarms. And back then, Lex produced this really great entry named Swarm Racer.

http://indygamer.blogspot.com/2006/05/swarm-racer.html

Since then he’s made it far more awesome.

http://www.lexaloffle.com/swarm.php

And today, the all new Swarm Racer 3000 is looking pretty freaking great.

So a great big congratulations to Lex, from all of us at Ludum Dare!

- Mike Kasprzak (aka: PoV)

The definition of the Ludum Dare competition is:

“Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated solo game development competition. Entrants develop games from scratch in 48 hours, based on a theme suggested by community.”

But it seems we are doing things less “from scratch” than we used to. People are now using full fledged engines, physics libraries, their own engines, etc. I don’t think this satisfies the definition anymore.

I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing. After all there is limited fun in reimplementing texture loading and opengl setup in every competition, especially since all those simple things can very easily add up to whole day and leave only half the time for more creative tasks. But have we gone too far?

Is LD48 a competition meant to be from scratch or using existing engines? What do you guys think about that?

And now, you kids can get off my lawn…

Hey everybody!

Probably the biggest thing that didn’t go well last time was entry voting.  So we’d like your help to artificially create similar conditions as last time, that way we can tweak a few things before the real compo begins.

So here’s what I’d like you to do.  First off:

READ THIS CAREFULLY

We’re going to create a fake compo that happened sometime in the year 2000.  The year is important, because we don’t want to litter the front page with these posts.

SERIOUSLY! READ THIS CAREFULLY!

Create a new post and do ALL the following.

1. Choose the category LD Test from the categories box.
2. Add a Final tag in the Post Tags box (don’t forget to click Add)
3. Set the date to any day in the year 2000.  You can change this in the Publish box, by clicking Edit beside “Publish immediately”.  *IMPORTANT*
4. Upload a screenshot to the blog! You must upload a new image! Tutorial here.

Give your post a reasonable (or silly) name.  Pick a tasteful (or silly) picture.  And fill the body of the post with some text, just for completeness.

DID YOU ACTUALLY READ ALL 4 THINGS?

If you did this right, you should show up here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/category/ld-test/

Checklist (circle your answer)

• I picked a date in Y2k (i.e. year 2000) [True/False]
• I uploaded an image to the blog [True/False]
  • My image shows up in the grid [True/False]
• I couldn’t think of a 4th point, but is your image showing up in the grid? [True/False]

If you’re screenshot is uploaded correctly, it should show up when you click “show me the grid” at the top of that page.  If you don’t, then for whatever reason your image isn’t in your posts local gallery (some wordpress feature we’re utilizing to make the grid work).  Delete your image, and re upload it (i.e. step 4).

Thanks!

(more…)

Well, it’s not much of a press pack, but it certainly has a logo.

Under the bookmarks to your right, you’ll find a new link.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/logo-and-press-pack/

There you’ll find high resolution transparent PNG versions of the logo you now see at the top of the page.  Also a source PSP file for those few still living Paint Shop Pro users.

If there’s anything else like that you guys (and gals) want, let us know.  We’ll do what we can.