I’ve been going around trying to test and rate some of the games. One thing that I like is how this competition heavily encourages you to rate games, so your own game gains visibility. I feel this helps create the great community for this competition.

I’ve personally been checking my entry page every once in a while to reply to every comment and thank them for checking out my competition, and check out their game if they have a submission. I feel like I really want to give back to the community, and really like getting constructive criticism.

I remember there being a lot of complaints on the IRC chat after the theme was announced. I personally really liked the them, because it forces you to cut out unneeded elements from your game until you get straight to the core of the game. That, at least, is my interpretation of the theme. I feel like if you really embrace the theme, you can get a lot out of it, no matter the theme. It really gets you to think outside the box, and outside your comfort zone.

My game is quite finished… This is my first entry, so I hope you’ll like it. I don’t want to expand it because i’m having a lot of error unsolved and i don’t have time to learn how to make some clean engine and stuff.

Thanks to everyone for this event this was a lot of fun and i have a lot to learn !

Heya ! First timer here, i’ve always had a lot of idea for every LD, so i told myself “let’s do it, push it through the limits !” so here I am:

Tools -> Unity 4 Notepad++
Graphics -> Photoshop CS4
Sound -> SFXR – Inudge – lmms – Audacity
3D -> maybe Blender/SketchUp 8

and Flash for some textures, maybe some nice text or logo

I haven’t set my own library of scripts so i’ll have to start from nothing, but i’m here to have a good time, challenge myself, and play a lot of your games !

Hello Guys!!
This is my first competition like “Do this as fast as you can”. Maybe I can not not finish on time, but will do my best!!

Well, the tools:

Language: Haxe;)
“IDE”: Notepad + +
Lib: HaxePunk.
Graphics: Inkscape, Gimp, Paint.net, pyxel.
Music: LMMS, Sound Club.
SFX: Do not know yet …

Well, that’s it folks!

Good luck to all!

Sorry, for my baby english…

Ever since I was a kid I had something with video games, whether it was making silly card games with pieces of papers or making lame interactive stories in power point, I always looked for a way to create them…bla, bla bla! I don’t have time and nor do you to read the story of a 16th year old who always has dreamed about being a video-game designer, and has gone through everything form Modding to Unity 3d (which I guess is the case in many of us!)  so I’ll go to my point

When the charity game jam was first announced I told myself “Cool I’ll give it a try”…and finally, the day arrived,  November 24th at 12:00 A.M. I hadn’t read the rules or the jam’s theme until that moment. When I found out it was a NES theme I got excited and started working immediately.

After some minutes of thinking about my game, I found this book called “Mitos y Legendas de Guatemala”  (Myths and Legends from Guatemala) which is a compilation ghost stories and urban legends from my beloved country, Guatemala There I found this famous legend of a diabolical dog called “El Cadejo” who wanders the streets at midnight looking for drunken people, whose souls he devours. But there is another type of Cadejo, the white coated one, who instead of having a feast on it, protects the human soul from being cursed or stolen by demons and other supernatural beings. That’s how I came out with the simple story behind my game: You’re a white Cadejo who has to protect the soul of a drunken man from incoming hordes of  black Cadejos who are trying to devour it. 

Since I’m not good at 2D games in Unity, I decided to use an old tool called Game Maker. Everything (except the music and sound effects) was made from scratch for this game. The music is from ‘Retro PC Games – Tokyo Japan’ and for the sound effects I used SFXR. The barks and growls are from Nine Tails and Venusaur from Pokemon I would have loved to use my own FXs but I don’t know a thing about creating 8-bit sounds!

At the end of the post there are some screenshots of my game. You can look for it at the funkytron as “El Cadejo: A Guatemalan Horror Story” or if you don’t feel like it, go directly to the mini-site where you can download the game (just a simple .exe ) and watch the first five minutes of gameplay! I’ll be adding more levels and a boss fight at the end. If you are interested, follow me on twitter (@Hyde_WS) so you can know when the update has been done.

In conclusion, I LOVED the Charity Game Jam. It was a great experience and I learned a lot, I’m definitely in for the next Ludum Dare. I hope you enjoy my game and If you feel like giving some feedback and constructive critics, please do it

I can’t believe that in the first LD, and the second game I’ve ever written I managed to make it into the top 10 for a category! Not only any category but theme, from the looks of things it is an area that a majority of people work very hard to make a game that fits the theme. I was also please my result of 100th for innovation and for other areas it was what I expected around the 200 mark (there were 400 entries into the jam so they were very average scores) .

Play it here!

I’ve had a fantastic time, learning a new language, object orientation and how to quickly generate an achievable if ambitious goal.  I am very please with the community and the mature approach to constructive criticism.  I’ve had great fun playing, rating and reviewing games (I made sure to comment on each and every rating I made).

I’ve learnt a lot, pleased to have actually taken part at last, even more pleased by my results. I’ll see you all in December!

This is in all regards a post-mortem just with a different name. A post mortem implies that the game is dead, but from the comments I’ve got the game has potential and any thing with potential is very much alive!

Bear Selection(Web)

The Good

+Stuck to the original concept, a sandbox world where creatures evolve and the player can only indirectly interact with them.

+Mutations can be clear to see, creatures start moving differently or go really fast

+Images are a million times better than I imagined MS paint could produce.

+Getting my brother to draw the creatures, allowed me to work on coding creatures larger than a pixel and some fresh direction in how to implement the images into the game.

+The world is dynamic, creatures can eat foliage and starve if none is left.

+The sparkline graph library made it easy to add a population graph: http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/#s-about

+The similar syntax between C and Java Script made learning a bit less painful.

+Web based, so that it is accessible to more people. Surprised to find it even runs on android browsers!

The Bad

-No collisions between creatures and creatures, or creatures and tiles leads to fish walking on land!

-No audio of any kind

-Pace is a bit slow and the limited interaction can make it boring.

-Didn’t have time to add terraforming or player activated events like meteorites or forest fires.

-First two days were mostly spent learning object orientation

-HTML-5 Canvas means not supported by IE

-No credits, no loading screen

-No entities like, eggs, blood splatter or fire. Despite the fact the graphics art was made.

Still all in all it was a mostly postive experience and a good game considering it was my first LD entry and my second ever game (first for the language, being web based, object orientated and non-ASCII graphics) so all in all it was a great success and learning experience for me.

You can play it and rate it here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15698

I’m glad I somehow ‘finished’ something, even if it missed 60% of the whole (small) game I wanted to do…

My HTML5/JS game is named “PixelVolution”d

Even if I didn’t go as far as I wanted to, it was great fun ! I will do more game jams, this is sure !

PixelVolution entry

Sleeping time now !

So I guess it’s customary to post an entry post? Very well! ^-^

This is going to be the first game jam I’ve really been able to enter into – military and life generally got in the way in past LD competitions, but this time I’m ready to go! And I plan on being in many, many more. :3 I plan to do a timelapse video with it, too, and I’ll try to keep friends up-to-date on my Twitter and Tumblr pages~

What I’ll be using:
- Windows 8 RTM
- C#/XNA
- Paint.NET
- Audacity + LMMS

じゃあ、皆さん、がんばって！

Update:
I’ve decided that, instead of using Torque 2D, I’m going to go ahead and use C# and XNA 4 to work on the project. This is mostly because I really haven’t used any of the Torque engines in ages, so I don’t want to focus most of my time on re-acquainting myself with the engine. I plan to, after the competition is over, convert the project over to MonoGame, so I can play around with its Windows 8 support a bit (my main problem being that MonoGame doesn’t have an alternative to the content pipeline yet, adding an extra layer of work on top of building the project itself). :3

My game for the SOPAjam (also my first entry ever) is finished! I finished it yesterday, but I didn’t have enough time to post anything about it until now.

It ended up looking kinda ugly, having a couple of annoying glitches and it wasn’t even close to what I attempted to make, but I have never made a game in under 24 hours before (including school, sleep and other stuff), so I am very satisfied with the finished product. I learnt a lot very fast and I had a lot of fun.

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but it is something

Download for Windows and Mac on my website!

PS: My game isn’t showing up under the all games category for some reason, but it is clearly uploaded (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/sopajam/?action=preview&uid=10299). Am I doing something wrong or is it supposed to be like that?

Right, I’m in! This is my first year of ld, so don’t expect anything special.

I’m (probably) going to use:
Pyglet + Pymunk + Python
and I’m developing on Linux

My development will be done in https://github.com/kragniz/ld48-22

Good luck all other contestants!

EDIT: Windows port added \o/

[ MY JAM ENTRY | SOURCES / LINUX | WINDOWS]

Now is Beer & Pizza time ! Whoohou good job everyone

Also, please read my entry presentation to know more
(I’ll post here if I can figure out how to make the game work on Mac and Windows)

Hello all,

This will be my first time entering the competition.  I will be using Blender‘s game engine (with python and Bullet Physics).  I’m hoping to keep it simple, finish an entry, and show off how great the Blender game engine can be for rapid game creation.

Good luck to all, I cannot wait to find out the theme and see what people come up with!

Gotten an, at least in my opinion, good start. A susurprisingly good start, as I always have problems when it comes to starting. Also having a good time, though my head is starting to hurt a bit from the hours.

Good Things:

Most of the needed art is done. Still need a car though.

Gameplay DESIGN is done. Decided to do it simple, so ended up with frogger only you are running down the road instead of trying to cross it.

Got a, sort of, backstory: While in town you where jumped by all the townspeople because they want your fancy sombrero. Because you, our hero, is deadly afraid of grass you had to run down the road with heavy traffic to get away (with your sombrero).

Got most of the basic programming done

Not good things:

Only got most of the basic programming done. Still have to finish up the controls (got a temporary solution to test movements), add collision, add cars, add scoring, add extra stuff.

No sound. Guess I have enough to do later tonight and tomorrow.

No menu’s yet.

Things I want to do, but dunno about time:

Visual variety. right now its 1 road piece on loop, 1 grass background and 1 obstacle (the grass on the road) and 0 (but soon 1) cars.

Add 2 player. Don’t think this is going to be too hard to make after I get the rest of the game mechanics done.

Highscore. I plan to have scoring based on how far/long you manage to run before getting hit by a car (our sombrero wearing hero is very allergic to getting run over by cars, in addition to his grass phobia).

SS (cars hopefully  coming on next report):

The yellow circle is the player characters sombrero, which was easy enough for me to make and still look decent.

Food so far have been bread for breakfast/lunch (which was the same meal). Dinner ended up being Spaghetti with Laban Seigmenn on the side. For those who don’t know Seigmenn, which probably is everyone not from Norway, is sugarcoated jelly shaped like small men. Don’t have any camera’s so no food shots. Will try to see if I can get one taken using the built in webcam on my laptop next time I eat however. Also got 3*1.5l soda ( 2 * cola rippof and 1 orange taste ) so I probably won’t run out.