Lately, I’ve been mostly using Unity for my game development needs, but I’m kinda bugged about the various limitations the free version has, so I’m now looking at using the Ogre 3D rendering engine for my graphics. OIS for input, OpenAL for audio, Bullet for physics if I need any. Ogitor for a scene/level editor possibly. Does anybody have experiences with any of these? I suppose I am still missing some sort of unifying “game engine” part here, but I have to do some work, don’t I?
In other news, I just went through some surgery on wednesday, so I’m not quite sure yet whether I’ll be fit to participate in LD16, but so far I’m feeling really good so I think I’ll be able to make something.

So, I just now took a look at the LudumDare site, and see the counter…

7 days left!

Naturally, I flipped out and started to hyperventilate. I soon realized that it was the same weekend I had to leave on saturday to participate in a competition elsewhere.

I knew I should’ve looked sooner! I could’ve tied the vote! XD

Anyhow, despite these problems, I’ll still try and get something in. So, that’s all.

That took forever to compile and get online ok, anyhoo, its a timelapse of both me and Logan making ‘Delusional’

Well we’re always looking to try something new, so here’s a voting round for the participants of MiniLD #14, the team competition.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-14/

I plan to leave it up for about a week, so act now. If you entered MiniLD #14, please give your fellow entries a spin. We need a majority of you to vote on everything to get some decent statistics.

Good luck!

EDIT: Aaaaand switched off. See link above for results.

(Don’t vote for this one.  We totally know that we’re past the deadline.  We actually finished 95% in 48 hrs, but had trouble publishing… mostly just want feedback on our first group effort).

Here is our entry for Mini Ludum Dare 14

You play the role of the mustachioed newspaper editor who is trying to maintain a balanced coverage of world events.

When the game loads, press any key to begin and then use the up/down arrow keys to catch incoming headlines.

Some are tragic… some are comic… your balance-o-meter will tell you fair and balanced you are being in your headline gobbling.

Headline sources include realtime Google News Feeds and Onion. Comedy? Tragedy? I dunno.

• Windows Download
• Linux Download
• Mac OS X Download

Ok, I think that weekend’s over

Congrats to everyone who took part! It looks like we had 13 participating teams, which is a lot more than I expected given the complications with the rules this time – you can view all the entries here. Let’s have a playing party in irc sometime this weekend

Next month is THE REAL Ludum Dare, with proper deadlines and everything! Find out more here.

Thanks again to everyone who took part, and congratulations!

Hi all! My name’s Jordan, I currently live in Korea, and like Vede, this is my first ever LD entry. If you’d like to know a bit more about me, I’ve got a little bio over at my website. I’ve been out of game creation for a long time, but am excited to be back into it, and I had a lot of fun with this mini LD. I collaborated with a friend in the States via Skype, who contributed  ideas, and created the graphics. We kind of mucked about most of Saturday trying to fix on an idea, but then spent Sunday through Wednesday working hard. We completed and posted the game yesterday, just making it in under the “Wednesday weekend” radar, but I was too tired to post anything else at the time .

Anyway, the game is sort of a platform rts, kind of, with rabbits. You can get it from the LD entry page, or via direct download link (Windows exe).

Tools: Game Maker 7, Photoshop.

If you’d like to know a bit more about the game and the creation process, and how the heck it fits with the theme, just hit the break (you may want to try playing the game first, as it’s a bit spoilery):

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Here is the game Andy Wolff and I made.
It’s a game about a small boy in a large sewer. It’s your job to get him to interact with his surroundings in the hope to find the five different endings. I’d like to think of this as a complicated love story with the raw emotions of humans really showing. It brings up the complexity of how people deal with relationships and ultimately what they do to keep them alive. It’s very deep.

download (windows)

I recommend against eating them. Wholly unmodified photography by myself and hamumu. Really! Maybe!

So, here’s my first ever finished entry into any game development competition.

It’s a two-player co-op game, where the two players see the world from wildly different perspectives. One funny (the two players are clowns in a world made of gift-boxes, throwing pies at walking piñatas), the other tragic (you play as soldiers mindlessly killing innocent civilians).

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The Helix Community unveils its long awaited submission to the series of Miniature Ludum Dare Competitions. Built upon many of the classic staples of modern and old-school gaming, while bringing a new and unique twist, Click The Clown: The Ultimate Collection: Director’s Cut Edition is certain to please gamers of all creeds.

As you’d expect, being a collaboration between all of the top minds behind your favourite video games, CTC:TUC:DCE stands at the top of its field as a rare example of the perfect game. Get ready for a non-stop action-packed rollercoaster ride of intense gameplay, beautiful graphics, and epic storytelling, backed by one of the most masterfully composed soundtracks in recent memory… and that’s just on the menu screen. CTC:TUC:DCE will keep you glued to your computer from start to finish and leave you begging for more when it’s over.

To miss this is to make the biggest mistake of your life.

“This is, perhaps, the deepest game I’ve played in my whole career as a gamer. A truly astonishing experience.” ~ LFF, co-creator of CTC:TUC:DCE
“I agree.” ~ chuchino, producer of CTC:TUC:DCE
“Stunning… simply stunning. Easily the best indie game released this year.” ~ theindiegamereviewers.com
“Play CTC, and you’ll never want to go to any other game ever again. It worked with me several times.” ~ Acium Radd, age 13
” 一度幸せな星に “は来た; CLOWN 望まれただれ世界を変えたか彼は生命および愛を持って来たそして全体的なしかし中心のチッカーのまわりの子供へ笑うことはカチカチ音をたてることを止めた 彼のとして”を受け取った; CLICK そして悲しさは消えた. 10/10/10/10″ ~ Famitsu
“I heard it has clowns. Can’t go wrong with clowns.” ~ quakster, creator of Megaman sprite comic B.O.L.D.
“Awesomely cool…” ~ Roger Ebert

Download now!

Here’s my entry for Mini LD #14.  It’s a game about Don Quixote.  This is my first entry to LD and my first time using Flixel.  Let me know what you think.

http://pixelverse.org/portfolio/quixote/

Quixote Screenshot

Striking mess on the stage indeed...

A MiniLD #14 entry by Tût-tûûût  & Tenoch

(a.k.a. smots)

Get it here. (Available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)

Sources are inside the .love file, which is a renamed zip. You can also find there the music/graphic files, if you want to listen/watch them out of the game.

Might follow a postmortem post, once we both get some sleep to compensate the week-end. And yay for including wednesdays in week-ends.

Here is a copy of the README file, which contains instructions for the game:

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Hello,

Here in France, it is 2:40 AM. I’m hungry and so does my partner Tenoch (or at least so did he. Now, he’s eating bread with pieces of butter. I guess. Given that he’s in Finland I can only imagine). We have almost finished our game (well, he has almost finished, since I’m writing weird things to post on the blog), whom name is quite easy to remember : SMOTSBOTJOACDG. Nice, isn’t it ?

Ok, actually we just call it SMOTS. This name comes from a messy story of jealous girls… Jealous muses, exactly. It takes place on a greek drama stage, and there is an incredible love story . But you’ll also find a coat stand, a cactus, cerberus and a whale. And several very cute girls. Tenoch-approved.

Well, I don’t want to spoil the whole thing.

Just wanted to say this was my first LD. Anyway it was very impressive ! I lost my partner on satudray night (he took the longest break of his life), so I coded alone from saturday to sunday 2:00 PM in a language I discovered on… friday. About 6 PM, I think. Finally it was OK, Tenoch is a nice geek and his code is well documented

Well, that was nice. And fun. Next time I may play the game in solo ! But first I’ll have to finish my presentation for tomorrow 8:00 AM, and eat, and… ah, maybe sleep a little. Just a little. Or not. Wait and see.

I hope you’ll enjoy smotsing.

Hello! Is anybody here? We’ve got something real good for you here!

It’s called Slapstick!

Play it in your browser here, or download a Windows executable here. Make sure you click in the game window after it loads up, otherwise it won’t receive any of your keystrokes.

Doches and I had a great time making this. This game is our take on Greek theater. You will be playing two games at the same time. The hero’s on top, the chorus is on the bottom. I made the hero, and Doches made the chorus. These are two separate games, guys. Two Ludum Dares in one pot.

WSAD = control the top game. Arrows = control the bottom game. Both games have a progression, and you win the whole conglomeration if you win either game. You cannot lose, but you will find yourself in trouble if you neglect either of the games.

This was a crazy experience for us. Lots of fun. Okay, it’s buggy and it’s rough! But that was part of the plan! These two games didn’t meet each other until a couple of short hours ago, and they are still getting to know each other!

I hope this variety of blindfolded parallel game development can be expanded into some larger events in the future, because it’s been a pleasure. We hope you will have as much fun trying to wrap your head around it as we did wrapping our arms around it.

Doches + Hamburger == Dochburger

Hello game developers!

My new friend Doches and I are teaming up to bring you some Greek drama. A double feature of it, in fact!

Doches has been most kind in sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the classic dramatic form with me, and we’ve also talked a bit of game design. An epic email thread, currently 20 communications in length, sits even now in my gmail repository, where it shall remain for eternity (or until Google gets shut down by the DOJ, whichever comes first).

Our plan is to bring you two games that play in parallel, one by Doches and one by me. Two very different games, developed in separate vacuum chambers, which toward the end of the weekend shall be suddenly smacked together into an amalgamation of some kind. Our primary goal (or mine, at least) is to end up with something jarring and weird.

We have a really exciting plan for connecting the two games, and have spelled out in detail the exact set of 6 functions that each game must expose. I believe this is what real programmers call an INTERFACE! This is some serious OOP we’re doing here, my friends. Bjarne would be proud. As I put it, somewhere deep within our epic thread:

It’ll be like painting a beautiful work of art, then duct taping a light socket to one end and screwing it into somebody else’s painting. It’ll be like overlaying a corporate management structure onto an artistic endeavor. It’ll be like making the most of a bento box.

We look forward to it.

Yours sincerely,

Doches + Hamburger == Dochburger

I need to collaborate, so the potential quality of my work could (Maybe it won’t, but with younger siblings helping…) go down, but, I should be able to get more done, making a better overall game. Now to get collaborating and brainstorming, maybe my Mom or my siblings or friends can help.

So..

First screenshot:  http://ippa.se/ghost.PNG

Rubyc0de @ http://github.com/ippa/ghost

You just died, floating above your cross… such a tragedy..

Bah – it’s basically Friday, isn’t it?

Like the last TIGSource contest, this contest has a dual theme. You and you teammates can choose to use either theme, or both.

The themes are Comedy and Tragedy.

Unlike other Ludum Dares, this time you are required to collaborate! (If you haven’t found a partner yet, see the post below this one.) If your team decides to use both themes, each member should take creative responsibility of one theme each and ensure it finds a place in the game.

You can make the game at any stage this weekend that suits you. And don’t worry if you can’t start for a few days or if the project goes a little beyond the usual 48 hours – I have a very loose definition of weekends that includes Wednesdays.

Whenever you’re ready, you can submit your game here!