Hey there! o/

Kyatric and me will be holding a free online class on uReddit

We will teach the basis of construct2 by following more or less closely the making of this little demo

There will be a live session each saturday evening (GMT+1) for 4 weeks from Aprils 6th to April 27th.

If you can’t attend, don’t worry, they will be recorded and replayable on scirra’s twitch and youtube.

You’ll be able to directly interact with us during the live, and indirectly through our subreddit

So please, feel free to enroll and spread the word (:

I think the use pre-existing content, eg, royalty free images and sounds, should be allowed.

1) Publicly available code libraries are allowed.

I must admit that I myself never use pre-existing code or libraries and start all my projects from a blank canvas. I understand the rationale behind using such libraries – no need to reinvent the wheel – and I have no issue with it. But why doesn’t this reasoning apply to content? If I can use a royalty-free image of a simple space-invader why should I create it from scratch, especially if I have limited artistic ability?

Currently, this seems biased towards artists. Game developers are, above all, programmers; they may have some artistic ability, but first and foremost they must be able to program. Yet, we allow existing code libraries to be used.

Is it permissible to create, use and distribute a public code library which renders royalty free images or plays royalty free sounds?

2) “We want you to create something free of copyright restrictions” (from Competition Rules).

Surely, Ludum Dare is then the perfect place to delve into royalty free content then? It is a skill to find, assess, rework, and credit if necessary such content. This is the perfect place to practice such a skill, and a breach of copyright in the realms of a 48 hour programming competition is far preferable to a breach of copyright on release of a finished product.

3) “Photos and recordings you make of people or things are acceptable content, just you must acquire them during the competition.” (from Competition Rules).

Again, if coders complain of having to reinvent the wheel, isn’t this a far worse situation? For example, I want to use a siren. I now have to spend valuable time walking the streets, waiting for a police car to pass, while clutching a hand held recorder. It seems a bit unnecessary to me, when game development should be the priority – 48 hours is a much shorter time-frame when it comes to collecting media assets as compared to purely programming.

Can I ask a friend to play the assorted sound effects I need, and stand beside him with an audio recorder?

4) “Fonts, drum loops, drum samples, and sampled instruments are allowed IF you have the legal right to use them.” (from Competition Rules).

So samples are OK? So to circumvent the rules as they stand I can create a soundback of royalty free sound effects, package them together and claim that I am using an instrument?

I don’t see any practical difference between a “sampled instrument” and a “sample”.

I also don’t see any different between a character from a “font” (esp. wingdings) and an “image”.

I hope I’m not coming across as pedantic, or spoiling the “spirit of Ludum Dare”, but it seems to me that the current ruling as regards royalty free content fails for many reasons: It is difficult to “prove” if someone has used them or not; It is difficult to enforce; It can be circumvented in clever ways; It puts people with little or no graphic experience at a severe disadvantage.

There exist content generators, and one can procedurally create content – but why remove the option of pre-existing free content?

As an additional note, I love scrawly scratchy art and amusing sound fx generated solely for the competition – like people saying “BANG!”. Such content has it’s place, and it will always be used.

Any thoughts on this?

Panda7, my October challenge game is finally finished. Sort of.

I started on 1st October and finished 10 minutes into the 1st of November.

This is the first game I’ve completed and by completed I mean the first game I’ve gotten to a decent playable state.

On Development

Hello,
this is my first Ludum Dare. I will enter using GameMaker. For ressources I’m going to use the sprite editor of GM and maybe GIMP or Inkscape. Sfxr, which I got from here, seems like a good thing, too.
Good luck everyone,
free napalm

Hey there guys,
I pretty much liked the PoV’S post about software being free for Ludum Dare. However, what about software that is always free?

I encourage everyone to add their favorites in the comments

Don’t forget to read the Rules and check out this page too!

Graphics

PhotoFiltre 6 – Take it as a worthy paint upgrade. This editing software got your basic tools plus some nice features if you don’t own a PhotoShop license or have no patience to go through GIMP.
PhotoFiltre 7 – Adds layer support.
GIMP – Saw that coming? Pretty much a free PS equivalent.
Paint.NET -It’s Paint but .NET and that means better.
Inkscape – Vector graphics editor.
Blender – Ludum Dare isn’t all about 2D art so get this 3D editor to work.

Sound

as3sfxr – Generator for sound effects. Link to online version. sfxr is Ludum Dare old school stuff
MilkyTracker – Solid tracker software to write your 8 bit inspired songs. Supports at least .wav export.
GoatTracker 2 – Another good but hard to learn tracker software.
SunVox – A modern tracker i’d say. Gives you pretty output for dirty input.
Audacity – Your favorite free audio editing software.
Linux MultiMedia Studio (LMMS) – Fruityloops alternative for your Linux. (by dertom)

Level Editor

DAME Editor – Though it’s intended for flash games you can use this 2D level editor for pretty much every programming language as long as you are able to use two for-loops.
QuArK – QuArK is a map editor for games of the Quake Engine. You may ask why the hell Quake? Because most open source engines do support the map format of the Quake Engine or there is at least a plugin for it. It’s just famous and old school and awesome.

Engines

Irrlicht Engine – 3D engine running with C++.
OGRE – Ogre 3D engine supports C++, Python, .NET and Java. It is so open source!
Flixel – For the flash addicts.
FlashPunk – For the flash addicts.
jMonkeEngine 3.0 – Some Java 3D stuff.
RPG JS – For those familiar with the RPG Maker this one is a HTML5 version.
OpenGL – Choose your favorite language and go!
Allegro – “Cross-platform, open source, game programming library” for C and C++ (by Folis)
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) – “Cross-platform multimedia library” written in C but can also be used with several other languages. (by Folis)
SFML – Yet another multimedia library for those C++ geeks (by Folis)

Code Editor

Notepad++ – This text editor supports most programming languages and their syntax. Pretty good for a beginner that is confused by IDE’s.
Eclipse – Java/C++ IDE.
FlashDevelop – Flash/ActionScript IDE.
Codeblocks – C++ IDE.
MonoDevelop – C#, ASP.NET, etc. IDE.
VisualStudio – You could also use free Microsoft software< if you got a Windows computer.

Resources

Check the rules whether you are allowed to use the stuff from below!
48h Compo:

• “Photos and recordings you make of people or things are acceptable content, just you must acquire them during the competition.”
• “Fonts, drum loops, drum samples, and sampled instruments are allowed IF you have the legal right to use them.”

C64 font collection – For your retro dialogs.
Freesound.org – Remember to put everyone in your credits.
mayang.com/textures/ – Free (placeholder) textures. Give credit! Limit: 20 per day.
cgtextures.com – Free (placeholder) textures. Give credit! Limit: 5 per day (as far as i remember).
spriters-resource.com – Free (placeholder) sprites. Yet again: give credit!
staticvoidgames.com – Place to upload your game to or learn a few things. (by KevinWorkman)

Enjoyment

Lasf.FM – How could you possibly not know this website? Free music dude!
9GAG – No time to keep up with 4chan or reddit?
z0r – 0M61 It’s so random

10 Hour Torture

Epic Sax Guy
Nyan Cat
Amazing Horse
Dwarf Hole (Diggy Diggy Hole)
What is love? (feat. Jim Carrey)
I’m a banana

Well after an incredible amount of work I have finally released my first Flash / ActionScript 2.0 game! You can play it here if you’d like. I hope it is cool to post here because it is relevant in that the original game play idea came from my Cryptid Puzzle Challenge entry in the Mini-Ludum Dare #7 competition back at the beginning of the month.  I also wanted to really share it all with my buds here at Ludum Dare! 

TurnStyle is a unique visual and memory based puzzle game where each of the 15 puzzles are original illustrations that follow a complete story arc over the duration of the game.

Every puzzle is made up of individual pieces which have been randomly rotated so that they are scrambled each time. You must work quickly and efficiently to rotate the individual pieces into the proper alignment before the timer runs out.

There are easy, medium, and hard difficulty puzzles mainly guided by the amount of individual image pieces that make up each puzzle and the way that I break up the images into pieces.

Personal best records are stored locally for score and rotation count per puzzle. Global high scores may be submitted to the Mochi Leaderboards at any puzzle progress screen. You are able to retry a level if the time runs out.

I haven’t submitted it to any portals or whatnot yet so it is living at it’s mochi-ads home right now.  I’m using their encryption, version control platform, advert api, and leaderboards/facebook api.  Seems pretty easy to setup.

I will try to post more about my adventure in creating this game and learning Flash over at my personal site but for now this is finished!