Since I finally managed to wake up, I guess it’s time to officially launch the compo.

Theme: Constraints (déjà vu?..)

To participate in the competition, you must use the provided “Retro” framework (links at the bottom of the post):

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua API, offering the following characteristics:

- Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
- Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
- Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
- Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

If you don’t like Lua, there is a C API as well, but you’ll need to compile your game yourself, while the Lua based games should be (hopefuly) portable. If you like neither of them, you can also program your game in any language/platform, provided that you stick to the given constraints (and use no external library other than what is provided by standard Lua/C)

Note: the Retro thingy doesn’t actually check if your game weighs more than a MB or not. Furthermore, there seem to be problems with “light” music formats like XM, so if the size limit is exceeded because of music, it’s ok.

Note 2: remember to read the documentation! It containts important and valuable information. The packages also contain an example game.

Optional themes: Cute but Evil or Legendary Cosmic Monsters

If you have no inspiration whatsoever, you can use this secondary theme list to get you started.

Schedule

It’s a Mini, so don’t worry too much about time limits. Take 48 hours when you can/want or even a bit more if you feel like polishing your game.

Downloads

Thanks to the community, we have several Retro binaries to use. They should be compatible.

Source, GNU/Linux (32bits), Windows (MinGW),  Windows (MSVC + more options), Windows (LuaJIT version), Mac OS X

See previous post + comments for more details

Final words

Oh well, have fun

Good luck!

Since several persons on the compo blog and the IRC channel seemed interested in my original idea, despite the closeness with the previous Mini, I am hereby releasing the aforementionned Retro engine!

Weee!

Source code, Linux binaries, Windows binaries

As you can see, it lacks terribly of Windows binaries. I’m terribly sorry, but couldn’t get my cross compilation thingy to work. It usually goes flowlessly, but here I’ve been battling for an hour, and I gave up.

EDIT: Thanks to Sos, we now have Windows binaries. Yepee! Thanks a lot to Sos. All hail Sos!

If someone with a good heart would like to, it can be built as follows: compile io.c retro_lua.c and lua_api.c into retro.exe. That’s all. But you’ll need dev libs for SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and Lua 5.1

First one to publish a windows binary will win my eternal gratitude, and a cake*

Both source and Linux distribution contain full documentation (I hope), and an example game to help you get started.

And, as promised also, there is (a bit more) than a week before the actual Mini LD, which will therefore be held on the week end of the 20-21 of March 2010. No worries though, we’ll have the usual “take 48h when you want” policy, or even more if you like.

Okee. I hope I didn’t forget anything. Of course, don’t hesitate to ask questions on IRC and in the comments. Meanwhile, I’m gonna catch some z’s (I just love this expression, sorry).

Yours truly,

Tenoch

* The cake is a lie.

So I had this great MiniLD idea, but it turned out that HybridMind completely ripped it off, without even knowing it!
Also, since he did it a month before me, it’s not really a ripoff, just bad luck for me. Stupid MiniLD booking a year in advance…

So here’s what we’re gonna do: I’m going to tell you what I had in mind, and if enough/any people are interested (despite the close resemblance with the previous month’s Mini), we’ll go with it anyway.
If not, I’ll find a new idea shortly. Maybe you could even chose between the two themes.

So, here it goes:

Constraints

Dear, dearer and dearest LDers,

in anticipation of this coming event, and giving in to my never-ending love for the golden times when awesome games held into 1 MB cartridges, I prepared for you a tiny game engine, humorously named:

Retro (the Recursively and Erroneously Titled Retro Object)

It is a simple and very constrained game engine with a Lua and C API, offering the following characteristics:

- Low resolution (160×100) with 1-4 zoom, plus smooth scaling algorithms
- Palette based (8 colors including one optional transparent)
- Old console like input: arrows, A and B buttons, start button (mapped to keyboard, and partial gamepad support)
- Total source + assets shouldn’t weight more than 1 MB

It presents as binaries (for GNU/Linux and Windows, MacOS X if a good will makes the port) to which you feed a Lua source file in which you define callbacks such as update(), keypressed(), etc, and use an API that allows you to:

- Load images/palettes
- Blit images to screen
- Write pixels to screen
- Modify palette on the fly
- Load sound files
- Play sound files
- that kind of stuff

For those who do not desire to learn/use Lua, I intend to make a similar C API, so that it could be used from any C-friendly language (but then it requires you to compile the game yourself, thus limiting portability).

In fact, if you don’t like the engine at all, you can even make anything you want, provided that you stick to the constraints and use no library other than simple IO (basically SDL + standard C/Lua). The idea was just to give the same basecode to a bunch of wizard gamedevers and see what happens.

So there it was. Feel free to express yourself in the comments of this post so that we can decide together what is the better option. Also, the engine is almost entirely coded but it still needs a big evening to finish things up,so if no one is interested, I’ll probably play the lazy card, and just announce a one word theme.

Let me know, LDers!

Sorry I’m late.  Couldn’t make it last weekend, and this weekend was spent between making this and getting caught up in the Canada/USA men’s hockey game.

This is my game

Controls are 1234 7890, and it’s a 2 player game.  Things collide with each other when they are of different color and are not blending into the background.  Instructions are in the ReadMe.  This game started off as a game about strategy and ended up more a game about everything being completely unmanageable.  Or maybe it’s just me.  I’m terrible at this game is what I’m trying to say.

This is my first Ludumdare entry, so any constructive criticism is welcome!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=1752

Also I maintained an off-site journal about the making of, because I didn’t think of just putting it up on here.  You can read it here:

http://www.faqr.org/ryan/tbc/?cat=49

I’ve decided to make my views on the subject of games as art known.

The text referred to in the title appears after the rant. It is a self-descriptive piece, and very ranty, but I personally think that it’s a perspective that needs to be addressed.

(more…)

Well,…actually I tried to build a nice game with the codebase I created on miniLD. Well,…haha! I started with a tank-training scenario and in that I “just” wanted to build a method that let then tank-”tube” lookAt a certain point. My engine somehow cannot handle this if the tube is child of a node that already has a rotation,…Well,..I failed in this. So I really was killed by math. I tried and thought and thought and tried…a bit too confuse I have to admit…so my weekend-project stuck right at the beginning. But if you want to start the tank-training you can give it a try here:

http://thomas.trocha.com/games/tank/tank.html

At the moment the game violates the color-constraint…I will change this at the end. Here a screenshot:

Have a nice week,…

Here’s my game. Late on my goal of about two hours ago, but a lot of that time was spent finalizing stuff (embedding fonts, testing on other computers, uploading the right version…) and it’s ready now, I think, to share.

Here’s a link to the webpage to play it.

(more…)

I started late, last night at 7pm, and I’m going to work until 7pm Saturday.  So now I’ve had just over 15 hours of possible work time. Of course, I’ve used very little of that–how much I’m not sure.

I have done something at least. My goals will have to be a little scaled back, but I do have a working framework for the majority of the action part of gameplay.

Before I go into what I want this game to be, here’s a link to the current version and a screenshot.

(more…)

So here’s a screenshot of my miniLD-16 inspired project. This is mostly just my hexplanet demo with a new tileset drawn from the miniLD palette. I don’t really like the stripey pattern (unexplored land), I need to do something about that.

Hex Moon

Most of the work here isn’t visible in the screenshot — I ported the hex demo to OpenGL ES, using proper VBO’s and shaders instead of the immediate mode crap it was doing before. This screenshot isn’t running on the iPhone, but it could be. This is running on linux using the PVR SDK in OGLES emulation mode. I’m finding it to be a quite nice SDK, btw, if you’re doing any iPhone graphics stuff and you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

This will probably be my last screenshot of this as a mini-LD entry, and I might not get a chance to work on it much in the next few months as I’m trying to ship a completely different iPhone project but I do hope to get back to this one, I think it will be a lot of fun and worth finishing.

So yay, I finally got the tutorials to work properly. As promised (and I don’t feel late at all…) the game is released!

No AI, so the solo mode is deactivated. The rest should be fine.

Get it on the submission page (Windows and GNU/Linux).

I hope the Windows version works. I crosscompiled from Linux, and although it ran in Wine, it was super slow.

I don’t have new screenshots, except tutorial text, so I’ll put back old ones. Because, heh, a “final” log entry should have screenies…

Here’s the readme:

(more…)

This miniLD was like more or less all of the last competitions before. I work and work on writing frameworks for the specific game leaving not enough time to do something cool gameplay with it. So I decided to invest an additional weekend so that I finally can say:”Yes it is some kind of game!” So stay tuned and buy some fuel for the upcoming Tank-Missions

Ah, as the competition is over, I decided to add one green color to the colormap and I will really think about kicking the input-constraint or just adding additional gamepad-support. Maybe I will use a MiniLD and a Normal-Mode. Similar to the old “Turbo”-Button of my very first PC (8086) where you could lower the speed from 10MhZ to 4.8MhZ . Unbelivable 10 (TEN) MhZ…. seems to be some years ago

Here a very first possible new tank…(blender render)

It’s neither well coded nor robust, but circle versus circle and circle versus line collision response are now working well enough to continue prototyping. I’m going to put a bit more time into getting the physics working, then I should be ready to begin testing a few puzzle ideas.

I thought I’d finish tonight, but sleeping 4 hours last night really doesn’t help. I’m off to bed, and hopefully I’ll finish tomorrow… For once I’m gonna try to really polish this game. I think it might turn out good.

So I think the gameplay is done. The game is fully playable in versus mode (two players on one keyboard). I have texts and scripts ready for the tutorials (which will probably prove very necessary for a rhythm game), but I still need to plug them in. And I have the intention of thinking about making an AI. Or let’s modestly say a computer opponent, because I’m frankly doubting my abilities to make anything clever enough to make the game interesting against it.

I'm not sure about this title, by the way...

In a post-LD version (as if the deadline wasn’t two days ago already…), I’d like to think about networking. I know it’s not always easy to find someone to play around the same computer. On the other hand it’s a lot more fun…

Anyhoo. I really need to sleep.

Well, I doubt I’ll have anything like a game done within the allotted 48 hours, but here’s a playable test:

http://vacuumflowers.com/temp/miniLD16

And here’s a screen shot:

I’m having a big gameplay direction crisis. I’m wondering if I’m not making the game too complex, and on the other hand I think making it simpler would make it a lot less interesting.

Plus the “musical ear” aspect. Should I expect players to be able to reproduce reasonably complex rythms, and how many different ones? This is hard

Plus I suck at art. Boo hoo.

Note the split screen...

So the lil guys now have opponents to fight. Note that arrows and spikes don’t do damage yet, but that will come…

I’m not dead! Just very late, but it’s a mini so I guess it’s not that bad.

EDIT: also, i’m very high on caffeine. oO’

I spent all day thinking of a name and Horse Racing is my best idea.

I’m a little late, but had a late start, and I’ve been constantly distracted by the Olympics this weekend. That’s where the idea came from, watching speed skating.

It’s kind of silly. Just bet on which horse you think will win. 1,2,3,4.

I wish could have used more of those lovely blues. The sound and music is the best part in my semi-sane sleep deprived opinion.

link to download page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=505

Thanks for playing. It’s been great fun making this

Late

I gave up on my original idea and didn’t think I was going to do a mini-ld game this time, but then suddenly within a couple hours of the deadline I decided to whip together something bad but playable.

PLAY ONLINE

On a happier note, I did make four games this weekend!  The other three were for Klik of the Month Klub.  over here.

Edit:  Timelapse!

It’s done!
It’s a bit further then my last attempt, I hope it’s interesting!

Controls, use the numbers to select a car, press the same number a second time, after a brief delay, to drop the object. Try to fill all the cars!

http://www.ericmcquiggan.com/Gameuploads/ludumdare/LDMini16.swf

Are tribal fights between Rolo and Bloco too hard for you?
Bored with constantly losing?
Can’t seem to pick your own side?

It’s time you unveiled a COMBO!!!

Shredder combo – keep pressing one button repeadetly!

Find more combos, enjoy the magical world of Rolo Bloco, and crush your enemy!

Remeber – Rolo Bloco means ‘endless fun’ in Bloco language!

Well, finished my mini-miniLD game, which i made in about 3 hours… it’s so rushed, it doesn’t even have a name! i spent way to much time on initial graphics, and in the end didn’t have enough for stuff like menu graphics, which ended up being quite simplistic, I like how it came out though, especially the character’s walk cycle. And…. i just realized you can’t win the game… well i guess that’s something i need to fix… anyways, screenshot!

Yay for Jpegs!

oh, and a link to the other page thingy for this:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-16/?action=preview&uid=1548

so yeah! fun weekend

It’s pretty basic and I didn’t get to half the stuff I wanted to, but here’s the two player versus space shooter, PEWPEW.

Controls:

Player 1 -
1: move down
2: move up
3: shoot

Player 2 -
0: move down
9: move up
8: shoot

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/139336/PewPew.zip

Windows exe. Unzip, open game.exe, shoot friends.

My entry for Mini-LD 16: Constraints.  I’d appreciate any comments you might have, as well as what scores you end up getting.

Click on the image above to play.

You can play this game in your browser (warning: sounds will play)

Concept:
It’s time for your final exam to graduate from your UFO school. Only problem is you were a complete slacker. You have no idea how to fly your ship. You have 3 minutes to impress your commander by destroying as many humans, cars, helicopters, tanks and jets as you can–or suffer the consequences!

All you can remember is to use the keys 1,2,3,4 and 7,8,9,0

Tools used:
* Coded in ActionScript 3.0 using the Flash CS4 IDE and using my mouth and microphone and Audacity to process the sound effects. I composed the music loop in Reason.