For the next Ludum Dare I want to try using a language that I’m actually familiar with for once, so I’m looking at C# libraries.

I’m considering three c# libraries at this point:

1) SFML

This one looks very straightforward. Simple class structure. Kind of a SDL done right with lots of organized classes. It was easy to build a simple game with it. Does not have any of the advanced stuff of a game library like physics or collision. The thing is I would want to use the 2.0 version that is in beta and I haven’t got that working with .NET and Visual Studio 2010 (works fine with 2008). I really want to use the latest tools and frameworks for this competition. Maybe I will check the beta soon and see if it is ready for prime time with 2010.

2) SlimDX

This is basically a C# wrapper for DirectX and Direct2D and all of Microsoft’s graphic stuff. New version in June came out and now it supports DirectX 11. I’d really like to play with this. Can probably get some great performance out of it. It has x64 frameworks and .NET 4.0 frameworks and it fully supports Visual Studio 2010. Looks like a good option if I really want to put the petal to the metal (with c#). I am looking at the samples right now. Not very familiar with it though. Need to do more research.

3) FlatRedBall

This is a game framework with advanced stuff like collision and physics. It runs under XNA or MDX. It is updated every month so that is nice. So far I have only got it working with Visual Studio 2008 though. Has a lot of specific formats and tools. For example there is an Animation Editor you use to build animations, and an AI editor for AI. I am looking at this one closely. It is really well structured and I was able to put together a simple asteroids game in about 10-15 minutes. I will probably choose this one if I manage to spend the time to get familiar with it. I really want to do some animations in this game, so it will depend on if I think I can get the tools working though.

Those are the options I’m considering. I have used XNA before and don’t want to use it for this competition.

Have you tried any of these libraries? Have any recommendations or tips?

Thanks.

This is not a game design-related post, nor even a computing-related post, except in a very abstract sense. It is to draw your attention to the fact that a solution to one of the world’s six hardest mathematical problems has been published. It has yet to be checked, and some people believe it may have holes in it, but this is still a very large development in the field.

P!=NP is a statement about the time it would take a computer to solve a certain class of problems: the “NP” class (which stands for “non-deterministic polynomial” if that means anything to you). If it takes a long time to solve a problem from scratch, but a short time to check your solution afterwards, that’s an NP problem. As an analogy, consider a 1,000,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It may take months or years to complete, but if someone claims they have finished it already, it only takes a second to check if they are telling the truth. The question is whether such problems exist (P!=NP), or whether there is always a simple way to solve them from scratch (P=NP). This question may seem very abstract, but it has a lot of important applications – such as optimising computer networks or creating secure encryptions.

Examples of famous NP problems include the Travelling Salesman problem, which is to find the shortest route through a city while passing everyone’s door at least once (this city may have overpasses and tunnels), the Knapsack Problem, which is how to fit the most value into a knapsack when you have a number of objects of known price and size, and solving many popular puzzles like Sudoku or Minesweeper. The paper at www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/Papers/pnp12pt.pdf concerns itself with the Conjunctive Boolean Satisfiability problem, which asks whether a list of logical statements can all be true at once. It asserts that the amount of time it would take a computer to solve such a problem increases very quickly – faster than any polynomial function of the problem’s complexity, in fact. If the proof turns out to be correct, Vinay Deolalikar may just have won a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

A number of blogs and magazines have already published links to this article. I thought you might be interested as well.

Hi Ludum Darers! There’s a game challenge starting tomorrow that I thought some people here might be interested in – RPGDX’s Alternate History RPG Challenge.

Participants have one week to make an RPG that explores the theme Alternate History. It’s very informal; there’s no voting and collaborations are encouraged! More info here.

Just wanted to share this little tool I made for Windows users. It takes your EXE and all its data files (even DLLs) and packages them into one EXE for users to run. Thought it was a perfect fit for Ludum Dare!

It’s time to check out the final tallies at the MiniLD #20 page! Congratulations go to gold medalists ExciteMike for Fun, TimSwast for Game Play, and increpare for Presentation! Also, the gold medals for Coolest entries go to Breakdance McFunkypants, wyverex, and 31eee384!

I’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who participated! It was a fun MiniLD, and I look forward to developing alongside many of you for the major LD coming up in a few weeks.

Only a few days left to vote and comment on Mini LD #20! Have fun!

Ok, I decided to invest some time to change my game a little bit. Most important, the guys are now able to drink beer! Therefore I modelled a can with the very uncommen brand: BEER

But it is not only the beer drinking (the ‘punishment’ if you lost all your money) I actually changed the concept around the ‘blackjack’-scenario. Now it is more ongoing. You have money and decide how much you want to bet in a ‘match’ if you win you double, if not you lose it.And so forth…

Beside that I wanted to make the game more ‘game-like’ with an ‘esc’-key popup (resume,restart,exit) and a main-menu with instructions (that are for sure still very confusing), exit, infos etc. Actually I planned to change the mutant-fishes to real ones but I am too lazy now and somehow I feel cofortable now with my friends:’Hungry Eye’,'Hungry Eye’,'Glitshi’,etc (Who knows what kind of new fishes deep water horizion will produce…) . I added some birds that fly around, a wave sound and one nice fish (you can’t grab). Well,…actually as I wrote this down I wonder why this took me another 2 days and it is still such a boring game . It was for sure fun and I will upload it to a gaming-platform (the first time since my very first game ) and the people teact! (The first one I showed it was not very nice , but I don’t care!)

Here are the links:

WEBSTART WINDOWS .EXE

Ah here a beer-action-scene:

Actually I also planned to have gunshooting towards the opponet’s boat and fightings but first I rigged the models really poor for real animations and 2nd it’s enough now. I still have one game to finish and want to start something new…

It was a pleasure. Looking forward to the next LD,

ToM

My first official attempt at making an entry resulted in this flash thing: http://danik.gotdns.org/flash/crystals/index.html The crystals are randomly generated to be unique. The goal of the game I had in mind was to collect the crystals using the mouse as a magnet, but I didn’t have enough time by far this weekend to pull it off, so I just ended up with this little “demo”.

Crystals screenshot

A huge thank you to GBGames for following up on our requests for voting. You are one classy dude and the entire Ludum Dare community gives you a giant group hug.

Gratefully,
- BMcF

My apologies for the delay! I did not intend for MiniLD to just stop.

It is time for the entrants to vote!

Voting is now open! Since it was delayed, I hope it can run for a bit more than a week to give people who aren’t paying attention a chance to see that MiniLD voting is happening in the first place.

Delays aside, this MiniLD was off the hook, as I expected! There were 24 submitted entries (is that a record for a MiniLD?)! We had one entry finished in hours! We had games about fishing, games about poop, and games about spaceships. We had 2D games and 3D games. We had artistic games and mindlessly entertaining games. All in all, I’m very pleased with the quantity and quality of games made with the theme Greed and the special rule “Only one of each”.

So get voting, MiniLDers! Celebrate your awesomeness!

EDIT: Voting will end on August 2nd, so make sure you’ve got your votes in!

(EDIT: Woo hoo, we got voting! Thanks so much, you made my day. I officially owe you one, GBGames. I tip my proverbial hat to you.)

First off let me say I love Ludum Dare, and the few people that did bother to foster a sense of community between peers during the last compo were wonderful. But honestly, the silence was deafening this weekend and for me it felt like we all just worked alone. Sure there was some nice IRC chatter, and sure the host did have a power failure and wasn’t able to participate. It was not his fault at all.

What do YOU think? Was the sense of community “brothers-in-arms” that you got out of Mini LD #20 what you expected? Did you, like me, want more? Did it feel disorganized? Like a ghost town? Did you feel part of a community or did you feel like you were alone in your efforts? Did you wish for a bigger “pat on the back”?

A think a flameless discourse regarding how the minis could be better run would be helpful for the community – but I don’t want a troll fest so before you get angry please note that I do hold each and every one of my fellow coders in very high regard.

Much respect,

BMcF

I finished porting Greedy Towlr to webkit- and mozilla-based browsers.  The entry page is http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-20/?action=preview&uid=687

Just wondering when we can look forward to a
results page like this one from MINI LD#19:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/mini-ld-19/

I’ve been loving trying out everyone’s games and
can’t wait to see how it all pans out! How do we vote?

Well, I finally finished today. (Earlier today, but now I’m just making the post.) I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done, and I’m going to improve the single-player, put in some built-in help, and hopefully do something cool with it like make some money. It’s made in Flash and pure AS3, with tons of BitmapDatas. Play it here, and make sure to read at least some of the info first or it probably won’t make sense.

You can leave any comments here until the compo opens for voting, assuming it’ll do that.

Wow folks, there were some amazing games made this weekend!

I’m seriously blown away by some of the really “art” games. In particular, I love the wireframe graphics and story of low self esteem told by Via Dolorosa and the awesome graphics in Jetpack Get. I was disturbed as cancer by Covetous and really liked the art style of Want Everything.

Everyone did a fantastic job and even the games I didn’t mention are worth checking out! You can see all the entries at the Mini LD #20 compo page.

Thanks all, I had a lot of fun, and I learned a lot coding my first game compo entry ever.

See you next month for LD48 #18!

- Breakdance McFunkypants

I was happily working at 3AM when a power outage struck. My UPS kept my desktop alive for a few minutes. My laptop battery ran out within the hour. For a good chunk of my waking hours, I couldn’t work on the code. To top it off, one of the candles almost became a roaring fire somehow, so once I put that out, it was completely dark except for intermittent lightning, which meant I couldn’t even work on design.

In the morning, I went to a backup location which still had power, and I continued.

It’s now an hour after the “deadline”, and I don’t have a finished game yet. There’s some game play, but there’s no challenge or enemy.

The old man can pick up items, use the unique fishing pole to reel in unique items in hard-to-reach areas, such as the unique flask and unique spatula, as well as the unique gate key, which opens the unique gate.

The world is one giant image, and collision detection uses a black and white version of that image.

I’m exhausted, and I’m having trouble seeing how to proceed. Do I work on the monkey thief? I originally envisioned him jumping around the map, and if you encountered him, he could hit you, sending you all the way back to your home, and you’d lose one of your items. To implement that vision, I need (1) basic AI, (2) unique movement code, (3) a special game state for getting hit by the guy, and (4) a way to avoid/defeat him. Making each usable item unique has been time-consuming, and I’ve only made two so far! Doing all of the above is probably going to need another weekend.

OK so here’s my crappy game. hobo at #pygame called it ghetto to the max, so I decided to keep the name.

Anyway the reason it’s so terrible is I spent 5 hours in #pygame asking questions and trying to solve to stupidest of problems.

Description: A game where a ufo that fails at getting minerals, and clones itself every time it moves.

I'm just going to submit this "game" and get on with my life. LOL

Download: http://www.mediafire.com/file/cl536bvs5fb3uxw/GhettoToTheMax.zip

Requires python and pygame. Run game.py to play.

Here goes my game, my first on in the Ludum Dare.

GREED-O-RAMA SCREENSHOT

It is called GREED-O-RAMA, and was made on Lua, using Löve!
So bad i didn’t had the time to put the music on =(

I tried to make a classical point chase game with a little psychological approach. The in-game instructions explains more.

Link to download the game: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2850120/GREED-O-RAMA.love
Link to get the engine (necessary for playing): http://love2d.org/

PS:  I’m Editing the post to make it more clear. The first version was terrible! =P

Hi all, this is my first Ludum Dare entry.

I tried to make a fishing game that, instead of catching fishes, you catch treasure. You have to fish more treasures than the other boat, but be careful not to exceed the maximum weight allowed, otherwise you will sink. “Return” to fish and “Backspace” to stop fishing and compare the weight of your boat with the other one.

The game is not finished (for example, the treasures that you catch are not visible on the screen), but the time is over, so that is it =(

It was made using PyGame. The source code is available at http://github.com/diegodukao/mini_ludum_dare20.

See ya

I had to go into work on both Saturday and Sunday, but in the time between I put together this little number.

Covetous

I got a lot of influence from Increpare, especially when it came to the sound.

At first I wanted there to be more focus on the choice in the end, between letting the boy live or tearing out of him to be free.  But by the time I got to the ripping scene it had became a game of anger, and the correct answer became very obvious.  There was so much time put into the story of the parasite and not the boy, which is why the game was led into that direction.

I’m very pleased with the way it was presented.  The no-duplicate policy for this mini-dare caught me off guard at first.  I was forced to put the flesh into different positions that I might not have before, so I’m that rule existed. 

I hope you guys play it with an open mind and get something out of it.  Thank you!