I swear, the hardest part of LD is naming my damn entries. Of course, that’s usually because they’re not worth naming. Here, though, the problem is different. What do I call this thing?

I also tried very, very hard not to use the phrase ‘build the level’ anywhere in the help text. Because by total accident I did LD #9 instead of LD #14…

Well, this is going to be my third Ludum Dare if you count the mini-LD I did. Previously I used Scheme/SDL/OpenGL, but since Lua’s a language I want to get comfortable with for other reasons, so I’m going to be putting it to use this weekend =).

I’ll be starting simple and working with the LÖVE engine. I have a bit of code already set up for miscellaneous things, which includes a small demo. Good luck everyone!

Hello everyone; I’m Dan! I’m 29, don’t work professionally on games, but I am a GIS developer and it tends to involve a lot of the same graphics skills, and I’ve dabbled in gamedev for years including a few not-entirely-successful LD48 attempts. Hopefully I won’t be too far out to sea this time around.

Chances are, unfortunately, that this will be a 18-to-25 hour contest for me though. I’m going snowshoeing on Sunday morning/afternoon, tonight is date night, and I need to be (mostly) normal on sleep come Monday a.m.

Which means I’m going to have to seriously address the personal weaknesses that have kept me from finishing in the past:

• Planning. I need to have a roadmap and stick to it! I’ve got something sketched out, and am now working on some base code to have that in before things begin.
• Ambition. No full 3D rigid body dynamics for my game this time around, alas. (I consider a prior LD48 to be a resounding success, despite how pitifully far I still had to go, simply because I had a cube fall, bounce, and come to a rest on the floor. This was before ODE was considered kosher.)
• Procrastination. As helpful as brain-breaks can be, I won’t really have the time for any (besides my already-scheduled prior commitments).
• Commitment. In the past when I was limited to well under the full 48, I sort of waffled around and gave up within the first six hours. Won’t be the end of the world if I do this again, but this time I’m being a bit more serious about the goal of finishing.

Now that I’ve reminded myself of my priorites and committed myself to them by posting them for all of you to see….

Best of luck to everyone! Once I have a working basecode (priority #1 is to be able to start working on the actual game right away) I’ll see if I can get a pic o’ my desk, etc., before 9pm tonight.

I am pretty sure I’m going to make a go of LD14 this weekend.  I will be voting in the theme rounds all week long and take a look Friday to see the theme that is picked.  I will make up my mind then for sure.  Why the hesitation?  Well, I have a lot of things I’m already working on game wise so I have to make sure working on ANOTHER game is the best use of my energy… ;)  I do love the LD compos though.. it’s what got me back into game programming again so it will always have a lot of pull on my heart.  It is just so much fun as many of you know to participate in this event.

As far as programming tech and libraries go I will be making a change for the first time in all my LD experience!  Previously I was rocking the Ruby language and using the excellent Gosu game dev library (which I still highly recommend!)

This time I’ll be using Flash / ActionScript 3.0.  I have spent the past couple months learning ActionScript (first used AS2 for one game) and then another game I did in AS3 to work on my knowledge in that.  Plus I’ve cranked through a couple really great books I picked up that I also highly recommend to anyone looking to make the leap.  Essential ActionScript 3.0 (O’Reilly), ActionScript 3.0 Animation (Keith Peters), and Flash CS4 Professional  (Katherine Ulrich). The Kongregate Shootorials were also a great place to start for AS2 and they have an AS3 version of the finished tutorial to learn from the code (it is well commented.)  I learn good from books so I had to grab a few to help out.  Anyway, I’ve been having a blast with Flash / ActionScript!

I’ve been very impressed by how quickly you can rough out a game prototype using the Flash authoring tool and some simple ActionScript classes.  I used to think that I’d be hard pressed to find as rapid a dev environment than what I was already using with Ruby / Gosu but all I can say is DAMN.. flash is fast. 

Plus, the added benefit of having both rapid playable cross platform versions for compo feedback as well as not worrying about the various builds after the compo and I think it builds a strong case as rapid prototyping tool geared for quick compos like this one.

Tool Set I want to use:

Flash / ActionScript 3.0

Libraries I want to use (if this seems ok par the rules?):

GreenSock’s tweening engine TweenMax / TweenLite

Looking forward to a great theme and a great compo everyone, take care!

My name is kiwibonga. I’m a 23 year old Computer Science drop-out! I’m a translator now. It’s an amazing job, I get to read instruction manuals for toilet bowl scrubbers before the general public gets their hands on them!

This is my first LD! I’m very excited!

I’ll be coding in C++… And I haven’t decided on a library yet… I’ll be exploring my options before the theme is announced. Sound will be a mix of raw midi commands and me breathing into a microphone. Probably.

All right LET’S GET PUMPED UP WOOOOO!!!

I see that a lot of people here are new, just like me, so it will probably be a very interesting week end.

I intend to use the Löve game engine, which is a Lua wrapper for SDL (it’s a little bit more, actually, but I love SDL and Lua, so I couldn’t not love Löve). If I fail, I can still fall back to my usual C + SDL or Objective-C + SDL setup.

Other than that:

- Multi OS (I’m on Linux, but Löve is for Windows and soon Mac OS X too)

- Graphics (or lack thereof) with GIMP and Inkscape

- Music/sound (or reeaally probable lack thereof) with several Linux audio tools, including Audacity, Ardour, ZynAddSubFX, a MIDI keyboard and a mic (I’m supposed to be a musician, but…). I hope I won’t lure myself into losing too much time for music.

- Photos for the food contest, and to show my messy environment.

- Idling on IRC.

- Sleep. What for? The compo starts at 5am here, anyway.

- Erm.

Oh by the way:

Oh, and please vote for Evolution. It seems to be a nice theme (and yeah, I have an idea for it…)

hello all, this is my first speed-coding game competition, so I don’t really know what to expect. like my fellow ludum newbies below, I too will be developing in a nice blend of PulpCore, JBox2D, and our very own custom physics integration library, PulpFizz (ooh, what a relief it is!). I’m hoping the theme will lend itself nicely to some magical physics awesomeness. also, whatever the theme, I plan to title my game “Kamikaze Koalas” if at all possible.

…hmm, I wonder if something like an Alka-Seltzer caffiene tablet exists?

Hi all,

I thought I’d introduce myself before the competition begins tonight (today? Tomorrow? I’m on GMT over here, so I’m too lazy to do the math). Partly because it’s in the rules, and partly because it’s the polite thing to do .

Much like ewjordan, I’m probably going to be using PulpCore combined with the nascent PulpFizz library (tentatively named) for my game.

In terms of design, I’m interested in exploring novel user interfaces—similar to the Experimental Gameplay Project, but focusing more on how the user is interacting with the game. I think that most software could benefit from being a little more game-like, and conversely, games could benefit from the modularity and encapsulation necessary for well-designed software.

Ok, enough pontificating. Just one more day of work to get through. Then, let the games begin!

This is the first LD announcement I’ve noticed in time to compete (last year I missed it by about three days).  While I can’t commit to anything until the theme is announced, I’m probably going to be using the following tools:

• Pulpcore, a Java game framework - Pulpcore has great applet support, which should make trying this a lot easier (and friendly to those on Linux or OS X, which includes me!)
  
• PulpFizz, which integrates JBox2d and Pulpcore into an easy to use physics-centric game engine (still in the very early stages, but it’s open source and available to anyone that dares to try it, so I believe that makes it legit for the purposes of this competition)
  
• Garageband for music, Audacity for sound
  
• Whatever I can find to make graphics, which might range from the procedural (Processing, maybe?) to the natural (a phone cam and the world) to the brutally manual (Gimp and paintbrush)
  

Er…I mean, I hope I finish my crap before the deadline.

LD#11 was great fun, and so I look forward to LD#12.

I was hoping to have learned enough Python to be dangerous, but practicing Python during a competition will have to wait until next time. I am, however, learning about test-driven development, and so I’ll be using UnitTest++ along with C++. Yes, I will be writing unit tests for my LD entry’s code. Will it slow me down, or make me a star? I’m staying tuned. So should you.

I thought that I’d have my build scripts integrating MinGW to build a Win32 version of my projects, but I’ll have to rely on someone else to port my game for me at the end.

Good luck to everyone!

Well, there is definitly a game here now.  It’s my take on a minimalist space battle.

The ships move around and will automatically shoot if they see an enemy in their weapon arc. The player controls the red shipsby clicking on one, holding down the mouse and moving it left or right, this determins if the ship will go forward, turn constantly to the right or the left. The mousewheel controls the speed of ships under the pointer and right click will activate some special function on the different ships.

The game can be paused at any time and orders can be changed while paused. Not sure if I’ll keep that feature though.

TODO for tomorrow:

• At least some kind of AI for the opponent,  at the moment they just go forward or in circles.
• Levels, Goals, Score, Structure of the game
• Some more graphical special effects
• Sound
• Music?
• Possibly more types of ships. There are three at the moment

Oh well. I’m happy with what I’ve done today given the distractions, pauses, and so on. I can’t wait to see what kind of insanities everyone has made when I wake up tomorrow.

This is my first game competition. I plan on using pygame, blender, imagemagick, reason, and audacity.

Hello all … I’m a LD first-timer, intending to give it a shot this time around. I suspect I’ll only really get ~24 hours of actual LD-time, due to inconvenient timezones clashing with the “Day Job”(tm) … but I’m prepared to give it a red hot go. I’ll almost certainly be using Pygame (1.8) and Rabbyt (0.8.1) … unless for some reason the theme makes me want to write a text adventure

Since I typically develop on Linux, I’ve done some preparation by making sure I can actually produce Windows executables (the catch: still requires a Windows installation somewhere). My personal py2exe and cx_Freeze ‘tutorial’ is here … it’s actually painfully detailed for something that turned out much simpler than I expected. It would be great to compare notes on crossplatform Python/Pygame experiences/successes/pitfalls with any other Ludumdarers that code on Linux.

I, too, will be making somethign this weekend. Hopefully something good!

Also, my wife has already ‘thrown down’ in the food compo, having made a meal plan for the whole weekend.

Mr Head and the Cow Drowning is now complete. Or as complete as it will get this weekend. I have many ideas on improvements, but they must, alas, wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As said earlier, the game is about drowning cows to prevent them from dying. Granted, they die anyway, but in a much more nice way, and outside the screen, mostly. Anyway, to drown cows, you must use key 1-5 to select which slot is currently bouncy, which will make any cows falling there to bounce out into the water. If you fail to catch a cow, you lose a life, but if you catch two in a row, you gain a life. You can have ten lives, and if they run out, the game is over.

During the game, Mr Head will observe and give you points and make announcements. He’s the mastermind behind everything, but exactly how is not certain. Do use his combo scheme to get many, many points. I’ve gotten 22 million as best so far. There’s no highscore in this version, but maybe I can add one later.

So, except for what has been told here, and what can be seen, there’s also a fancy intro, and mighty fine sound effects.

You probably want to download Mr Head and the Cow Drowning. Binary and source are included, the binary is for Windows, but with the right libraries and some changes to the makefile, you’ll be alright on other platforms too. Hopefully.

Also, make sure you don’t miss the Banana Ship text adventure non-entry, also made during this warmup.

I finally have an idea of a game. And not only that, I have an intro for the game ready. So now I just need to make the game!

The idea is that you should drown cows. They come flying in from one side of the screen, and you must catch them, and make them bounce into the other side where there’s water. Otherwise the cows will die as they hit the ground, and we don’t want that, now do we?

The intro is a bit weird as to fit the game and the theme well. You can try it, but maybe it’d be better to wait for the rest of the game, too, so you can enjoy it all together. Here’s an image of it to inspect while you wait:

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands is a game made within 14h for the LD8 Swarms compo. However, it was never really entered into the compo, because I felt it wasn’t quite enough, but also couldn’t figure out how to make something more of it. In the end, I abandoned it, and instead used it as a base for Ultra Fleet, which I did enter. This might not have been the best of decisions, but no matter.

You navigated your hat swarm around islands to destroy dancers that tried to defend the islands, while at the same time trying to avoid the deadly dances that was danced at you.

The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands prime features was an intro, an island generator (that I later used as a base for rather prettier islands), the famous Hoids algorithm that simulates hats in groups flocking behaviour (later adopted for the fleets in Ultra Fleet), stick figures, and a lot of dancing. Strangely, it was also my very first LD game (together with Ultra Fleet) that didn’t use tiles.

There’s no dedicated distribution for The Hat Swarm Attack on Dance Islands, but you can get it as the bonus in the Ultra Fleet compo version. It’s for Windows, but if you’re a bit clever, you can probably compile it for Linux. It requires OpenGL with 512×512 sized textures support.