See for yourself here.

I’m just back from a barbecue with the neighborhood. Well, now I don’t have to waste any time cooking. Back to work.

I just made some pea-soup for lunch.

Here i will be starting my work in the compo. (probably i will finish working in bed with the laptop)

This is my last meal before the compo starts.

Description:

• Breaded Fried Meat.
• Tomatoes.
• Potatoes.
• Lemon juice.

It would seem that I will be another heretic not using Python. I’m not a fan of scripting languages, so I’ll be using good old C++ with OpenGL I will be trying to do something in 3d and I’ve prepared myself a small framework using SDL (loading models, loading images, window initialization etc.) Apart from that I will be using only free ( as in freedom ) tools, so no Visual Studio or Photoshop for me. But that’s ok, I always prefered KDevelop and GIMP.

It’s still a couple of hours till the compo. I just can’t wait. It’ll be my first LD actually. I tried to participate in LD10 but due to some circumstances I wasn’t near my computer through the weekend.

I hope I won’t be the only one developing on a Linux powered machine Good Luck!

From the mailing list:

Hey there sports fans,

Ludum Dare 12 is coming up in about a month and a half. August 8th-10th weekend.

http://www.ludumdare.com

We’ll let you know the theme suggestion and voting details in the coming weeks.

Don’t want to wait that long?

Next Friday (July 4th weekend) is Mini LD #2, hosted by GirlFlash. You can read the announcement here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2008/06/20/mini-ld48h-2/

Keep an eye on the site for the latest updates for Mini LD #2.

That’s it for now. See ya there.

—
Mike, Phil, and the #LudumDare crew

From wiki:

I’ve participated in a few ludumdare contests over the years, one with a friend. This friend gave me a call about me helping out with some flash stuff for JunglePeak. I meet up with them and pushed that I’m very interested in making games. I also took a lower price for game development. I did a few things, mainly flash website stuff, for them and it worked great, well, except for me working more than I want, I wanna work with games and have the time off with my family. So I introduced my current day job with this entertainment company hoping I could consult, that resulted in nothing.

A few weeks later Ludumdare 11 took place, one of the highlights of the year, I made Exxon - The oil contaminator a game based upon an idea I’ve pitched for this company. So the Monday after LD11 I sent the game to the entertainment company and a few days later the CEO called me up. He wants me to lead the development for their MMO flash game. Three weeks later the contract is signed and after the summer I’ll start making games for a living, partly thanks to Ludumdare.

From the mailing list:

Hey everybody,

Big news about Ludum Dare.

First off, ludumdare.com is back. After years of floating around the internets, we’re finally back home where it all started.

We’ve been extremely happy with how Ludum Dare 10 and 11 with Wordpress have worked out, so we made it official. A bunch of us got together, threw some money in a pot, and set up a dedicated host. Phil Hassey has already migrated the combined LD10 and LD11 site over to our new host. If you’ve tried accessing anything off Phil’s Imitation Pickles site, you’ve already being redirected.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

The syndicated community feeds of user blogs have been isolated from the compo site, and now reside on a separate section called Planet Ludum.

http://www.ludumdare.com/planet/

If you have a development blog that mostly covers your game making and related efforts, let Phil or myself know, and we’ll syndicate you. Be sure to have an RSS feed url handy.

Finally, we now have a work-in-progress hub website at the root, plus a news feed for those RSS inclined individuals.

http://www.ludumdare.com

We still have much work ahead of us. Several unfinished pages (about), streamlining the site navigation, plus an endless wishlist of ways to expand and improve the community. Think of us as now in perpetual Web 2.0 Beta.

Next, a new non compo coming up in under 2 weeks. Friday June 6th, Hamumu will be hosting the first Mini LD48 Compo.

http://www.ludumdare.com/…/hamumu-style/

We’re trying something new here. If things go according to plan, Mini LD Compos will be monthly. If you’ve participated in our “non competitions” in the past, it’s very much like one of those. They’re not judged competitions, but unlike the previous “non competitions”, somebody volunteers to be the host. The host chooses the date, can choose to change/tweak any previously established rules, and the theme. Ultimately, a host can choose to run their compo the classic way (theme voting), but one of the goals of the Mini LD Compos is to try some new things. Be it to bring back some of the more experimental themes, or to ‘beta test’ new ideas for the compo process.

Mini LD’s are new and evolving addition to the community. If you have any thoughts or feedback, get in contact with us on IRC or respond to the discussions on the compo blog. Or if you’re a Ludum Dare veteran and want to try your hand at orchestrating a compo, visit the Wiki to claim a spot, and join us on IRC to discuss it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/

And one final note about the next event compo (Ludum Dare 12). We don’t have a date set yet, but we’re (I’m) strongly considering (pushing) for some time in August 2008. Stay tuned.

Thanks,
- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Welcome to the new ludumdare dot com.

It’s a lot like the old site, but it feels newer to us.

Migration of the old site is complete. Phil did a great job getting that rolling, and now we’re hanging out here in the new shindig.

URL’s pointing to Phil’s hosting automatically forward here to the new site. I suspect Phil may leave that up for a while, but if you’ve previously linked the imitationpickles site, you really should update your links.

There’s still a few broken links throughout the site. We’ll be working to correct these as they come up. If you find something not working, do let us know.

New to the site, we’ve now isolated the syndicated blogs to it’s own section of the site. Planet Ludum.

http://www.ludumdare.com/planet/

Also new to the site, something I’ve been working on for the bulk of the day. The Ludum Dare website hub.

http://www.ludumdare.com

It’s still a work in progress, but it gives you an idea of where we’re going with things. Eventually we’ll better integrate all the parts of site navigation. For the time being, you can start at the hub and get where you need to be.

The hub also features a Ludum Dare headlines feed. This is an RSS feed that you can add to your RSS readers to keep up on whats happening in the world of Ludum Dare. I’ll be passing this user account (news) to the other admins, so we can have a consistent stream of what’s going on.

If you have some Ludum Dare related news you think the community should hear about, let us know. If you’ve released a commercial remake of one of your Ludum Dare games, got it featured on a magazine coverdisk, or anything really interesting above and beyond the 48, we’d be glad to share it.

I especially want to thank everyone that’s donated towards our hosting costs. The donor’s list will become part of the about page, once that’s finished. That should be up soon.

For those that haven’t got around to it yet, we’re still accepting donations, and should continue to here on in.

Donate to Ludum Dare (PayPal)

Don’t know why we’re taking donations? Check out the “State of teh Union” post.

I’ll try not to be too annoying with the donation requests. The administration is more than willing to keep things afloat, but we welcome the community’s support.

There’s still much work to be done, and compos to be planned.

Thanks everyone for sticking with us.

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Hey everybody,

The migration seems to have gone smoothly so far.  We’re still playing around with things, but it looks like we’re almost moved in now.  The rules wiki link is something we still have to fix, but if you find anything else wrong, feel free to let us know.

Hello Ludum Dare Community!

We’ve got some big news today.

It’s become a bit of a running gag over the years, that Ludum Dare wasn’t hosted at the same place more than twice. Well, we’re keeping with the tradition one more time, but it’s a little different.

Your usual IRC admin’s, mrfun, hamumu, philhassey and myself, with several regulars in the channel actually did something. We got chatting as we usually do, and kicked in to motion a series of events that lead to this.

We’re going home.

A dedicated host explicitly for Ludum Dare is now up and running. We’ve been in contact with Geoff, and have arranged to point ludumdare.com there. It’s almost as if we’re serious this time.

As for what we’re doing, everybody seems to like how the WordPress blog has worked the past 2 compos, so we’ll be setting that up a little more officially. Over the next few days/weeks, we’ll be migrating the blog off the hosting generously provided Phil to it’s dedicated host.

As you can imagine, we each have a long list of goals for the compo and website. It wouldn’t be reasonable at this time to make any big promises of future features, but I think we can all agree this is a good first step. However, we will be making the effort to finally host entries again.

As it stands Phil Hassey is handling the administrative tasks, setting up the blog and migrating things over. Myself (Mike Kasprzak, AKA PoV) am handling the finances. Yeah, we have finances now. No, that doesn’t mean prizes.

Each of us (including Hamumu and MrFun) will be throwing $30 in to the pot to cover costs. I’ll be pestering everybody for more when the reserves run out, but it’s come to my attention some of you guys might want to help out as well.

Ludum Dare has been all about the community, so I’d like to be as forward as possible about the finances. I’ll be accepting donations on behalf of Ludum Dare’s hosting and other costs (domains, bandwidth accidents). I have a spreadsheet I’ll be managing locally, and I’d like to have a similar public page for you guys. I can’t promise I’ll be updating the public page on time to reflect each months hosting fees, but I’ll make every effort to credit donors as quickly as I can.

If you’d like to make a donation, I’ve set up a PayPal link here:

Donate to Ludum Dare (PayPal)

Please let me know either by e-mail or IRC your alias/handle. Also, when the donor’s page goes live on the new site, feel free to give me a URL so we can link back to you.

If you don’t have PayPal and would like to donate some other way, send an e-mail to mike AT sykhronics DOT com, and let me know what you’re thinking.

We’re starting out on $10 a month shared hosting plan. The hope is that’ll be enough, but we’ll see. Increments of $5 more a month give us all kinds of better possibilities. But rather than go overkill off the bat, and burn the cash reserves right away, we’ll start small and work our way up if we need it.

So that’s what’s going on. If you have any comments or thoughts, do feel free to share them. We’ll keep you posted.

- Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

I think I’m blind.

Started at about 2 PM today.

Spent pretty much all day working on cleaning up the camera, and the interaction (integration) between the mouse and the camera. It’s also to a point where it could nearly support multiple views, but it doesn’t yet (or at least I’m not happy with how that code would look right now). I don’t really need multiple views for the prototype, but the editor could use them… when I get around to that.

Hehe, it’s a good thing I don’t have a real Ludum Dare deadline.

I should just stop the clock, and start it up again once begin on actually hacking together a level/the mechanics.

I suppose the camera’s been fixed for a bit now.  Not quite done for the night, but if I do call it one, I’m at a good spot.

I still need/want to clean up the camera code.  It’s just some blah chunk of code sitting in main at the moment.  I need to sit down (in a different chair) and figure out what I want to do with it.  I would like this taken care of before I call it a night.

Next step is to perhaps hack together a level, or do the character particle stuffs.  The game I’m working on is one that would have suited the LD8’s “Swarms” theme.  Well, there’s aspects that could suit several themes, but it’s a swarm game more than any other.

Fun fun.

PoV’s Fake LD Compo! Me versus me! Winner takes all.

I actually planned to start this on the weekend, but it’s Monday already. I’ve had a game concept I wanted prototyped for the past few weeks, but between library development work and some portability stuff, I just hadn’t got around to it yet. Maybe a little bit of slacking too.

So I started today just after 1:00 PM EST (not that I’m forcing a 48 hour limit). The first order of business was to butcher the test suite application from my work in progress geometry tests library. It currently uses a wrapped version of 2D Allegro for graphics (suspiciously featuring many function calls that make it work like a 2D OpenGL, matrix stack and all). Currently the only drawing operations supported are circle and line based, which exactly what I want for geometry tests and prototyping.

Prior to LD11, I was working on a file format and loader/saver for 2D geometry. I call them PolyMap’s. It’s whitespace delimited text based format, sort of like an assembly source file. Unlike the dozens of geometry formats I’ve written in the past, I wanted this one to be generic and extensible. The last one I wrote was was a convoluted 2D mess supporting vertex, texture, geometry and spring constraints animation. Eventually I’d like to assimilate that format in to this one, but I want to keep the format simple enough to do other random things with it.

As is, it’s suitable for creating static background collision (polygons), creating 2D paths/rails, placing “things” that you’d normally find in a game level, and numerous straightforward hacks. The format could also be used to make polygons/circles + springs objects, but I don’t need that right. I’m editing files by hand at the moment, but eventually I’d like to have an easily reconfigurable tool for creating stuff in the format. I’m expecting to hack something together soon.

So anyways, the first order of business was to load and use a PolyMap file with my fake OpenGL rendering code. That came together quickly, so I dived in to some camera stuff. That pretty much brings me to where I am right now.

(The shape with the normals is actually a polygon, I was just too lazy to create a more obvious shape.)

Camera stuff “sorta” works. I can pan and zoom, and the camera is bound to a region of the map (noted in the PolyMap file). Cursor relative zooming doesn’t work right yet, and the bounds don’t restrict correctly when zoomed. Once that’s sorted out, I’ll probably gut the camera code and make it a feature of my fake OpenGL renderer.

Back to the fun.

…So it’s time to clean the cobwebs off the old OpenGL+SDL base code, so I’m not wasting valuable time setting up lib/include paths, and fighting with MSVC’s desire to inflict Unicode pain on anything you try to build…

Here’s what I’m planning to use, should be acceptable under the ‘custom libraries’ rule (except for the font texture, which will have to be replaced during the 48hrs)

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48Base.zip

Contains OpenGL+SDL init code (now featuring resolution switching), Texture loading, simple 2D blitting, a basic font renderer, and some pretty incomplete/untested vector maths code. Linked with FMOD and Chipmunk in case I get a chance to put some audio in, or want to use physics…  Somebody should have added ‘Chipmunk’ as a theme!

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 10 a great success. A fitting close the fifth year of of the compo.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the results can be found here. Final entries can be found here.

Now, as much as we’d love everyone to idle with us in #ludumdare until April, we understand this isn’t practical for everyone. So, in addition, we have a mailing list at gamecompo.com.

To subscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-subscribe@sykhronics.com

To unsubscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-unsubscribe@sykhronics.com

And when in doubt, hit up ludumdare.com.

- - -

Now, unlike prior years, we’ve tried to make it clear that the next compo will be in April. Anyone that’s stayed up with our shenanigans will know April is our magic month, the anniversary of the first Ludum Dare compo (the original 24 hour compo in 2002). If there’s one tradition we’ve kept over the years, it’s been holding a compo in April. Be it organized a month in advance, or pulled together last minute.

So the first order of business is to pick a weekend in April to hold the compo. I’m not looking for suggestions per se, but reasons to include or exclude a specific day. Our options include:

• April 4th-6th Weekend
• April 11th-13th Weekend
• April 18th-20th Weekend
• April 25th-27th Weekend

Ideally, we like to plan around such things as Game Industry events (GDC, E3, Game Connection, etc), Exam season (we love you students), national holidays, or any such event that either hinders or benefits the majorities chance to participate.

- - -

And in final, if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback for us, please do share them. Ludum Dare is and has always been about the community. Without you all, we’d just be an IRC channel.

Thanks again everyone, and have a great 2008.

Tomorrow is the big day people. Yee haw.

For the LD4 in 2004, we did a series of preparation compos. They were much shorter as a real LD, and as theme had the remake of an agreed upon classic game. One of them was Robotron (the others were Sapce Invaders, Frogger and Spy Hunter). In the Robotron one you had 4.8 hours for the game. My entry turned out to be a much better game than the one I actually wrote with 10 times as much time for the real LD. Oh well.

The game is rather simple. One directional input (cursor keys) controls the movement of the pink blob, another one (ASDW) controls the gun. Just like in the original.

There’s 30 partially random levels, and quite a lot of different enemies with unique behaviors.

Some of them, like the crab and the spider, were added in a post-compo version. Those are really hard (but fun, this is one of the few of my games I play through occasionally), as is the final boss. The crabs circle you, and the spider tries to aim ahead when shooting - back then I was still good at calculus, apparently The final boss doesn’t shoot you directly, but takes a lot of hits and spawns random enemies.

I don’t know what the theme for this Non-Compo was (I think there wasn’t one), but I made a yahtzee clone. Much more than a clone, though, it is far more complicated than Yahtzee, allowing you to score a bunch of different ways.

As you can see, there are 2 colors of normal ducks, and a King Duck. So you can score in the Same column if your dice involved are the same color, the Diff column if any different ones are involved, and in the King column if the King is involved. The High column is one you can use if you ever get another column twice, but your second time is a better score than the first. It makes some sense when you play it. And to stop a die from being thrown on subsequent rolls, you put the ducks to sleep (as you can see in the picture).

This was my first actual 3D game! Well, my most finished 3D game (even though it’s not finished). Those dice are pure 3D, hand coded from scratch. Take that! Their rolling is real, not just a visual representation of a random number generator - they get a random spin on all axes when thrown, and wherever they stop when they land is what they are on. The code to interpret their facing into a number was the tricky part.

Too bad for you, you can’t play it - there is no downloadable version at this time.

It was a dull Saturday afternoon and I needed to make a game. I proposed the idea in #ludumdare and got DrPetter and trick on board with the idea. In “4 hours” we whipped together a game about an elephant that jumps on a rolled up squirrel catching falling giraffes while dodging spears thrown by the natives. It’s more fun than a barrel of pigeons!

You can get the game here. Be sure to check out the forums, there are some pretty sharp strategies people have worked out to get ridiculously high scores