Hi fellow entrants

I’m feeling a little under the weather at the moment but that’s not going to stop me taking part! I have decided to go low-tech this time though, to make things a little easier for myself. So I’m planning to make a very simple command-line text adventure in plain old Python.

The theme is an awkward one, in my opinion, because it pretty much dictates a backstory rather than possible game mechanics, and all that springs to mind at first are artsy, depressing, story-based exploration affairs. I did manage to think further than that, so if like me you’re struggling for ideas a bit, how about these:

• Alone doesn’t necessarily mean physically alone (Nobody understands me! I’m the last of my people!)
• The aim might be to become alone (Hounded by papparazi? Defending your hermit cave? Looking for a quiet place to revert back to your gelatenous state?)

Anyway, my tools of choice are:

• Python
• Curses, maybe
• Nano
• Paper
• PyInstaller

My goal this weekend is just to finish something, even if it totally sucks.

This is an official challenge to all Ludum Dare gamedevs.

This weekend, your quest is to put a KITTEN somewhere in your game as an “easter egg”.

This “kitten challange” will be like a meta game in which everyone tries to find the kittens in each game they play. You know you want to.

Do it – for the love of kittens. For the love of meta. For the love of all things LD48.

Edit: Dock was cool enough to make an icon that you should put in your game title screen or game thumbnail screenshots so we know to look for your kitten:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/12/16/1-kitten-badge/

Finally, be sure to post to the blog using the “kitten-challenge” and “easter-egg” tags.

Here are the tragic results of theme voting. Where’s the kitten love?

1. Alone+227
2. Randomly generated+206
3. Evolution+41
4. Parallel dimension+14
5. Forgotten places-29
6. Falling-77
7. Moon-105
8. Tunnels-108
9. Consequences-113
10. Decay-116
11. Dreams-118
12. Underground-125
13. Time-travel-133
14. Teleportation-148
15. Self-replication-170
16. Territory-284
17. Mechanisms-291
18. Antihero-325
19. Reflection-417
20. Shape-shifting-477
21. Kittens-481

My favourite out of the them would be teleportation, I think that could result in some really fun games.. or really disorientating games

The ongoing discussion on irc/twitter/this blog about how the theme ‘escape’ enabled almost every game idea to fit somehow made me pondering, if there is some link to this big amount of new participants in LD21. So my theory goes like that:

• the theme was very open, so newcomers could submit almost every kind of game
• this encouraged a lot more people to try and made something very simple and stuck some sort of escape to it
• would the elected topic have been something like self-replication or recursion, the amount of submitted games would have been less

Especially the themes stated above probably would have needed a deeper insight to programming techniques and game design principles which could have put a lot of people off. Any opinion to this theory?

To fire the discussion, I can even give a counter-argument:

• There were so many new people attracted before the final voting ended (by notch, etc), that they had a significant influence on theme voting.

sneak peak

Ok, just got up and checked the theme. Wow – didn’t see that one coming! It’s certainly an interesting one. I think to fully do the theme justice I’m going to have to do a Zelda parody of some kind.

I have an idea, anyway. And hopefully its not too ambitious. I’m churning the idea around in my head still, trying to refine it into something as simple as possible. Like I said in my earlier post, I want to have my game more or less complete in half a day so I can spend the majority of the time tweaking and polishing it.

Well, here goes! Good luck, everyone!

Hi everybody!

Islands sounds like a good theme and I’ve already got a fairly good idea for a game which I might just be able to pull off in the next 48 hours.

So for this entry I will be using:

* Python
* Pygame
* Pygame-fenix
* Pycatcher (If I can get it working)
* Graphics gale
* GIMP
* Rosegarden / Cakewalk
* Sfxr

One of my main goals this time round is to get some music in there, so I’m going to have to round off my gameplay and graphics with plenty of time to spare for that, I think.

Anyway, good luck everybody!

The final round of theme voting is approaching, and I’ve been thinking. Considering how big Ludum Dare is getting, and how influential the theme is to the quality of the compo, I want to make sure we pick the right one. We don’t want to repeat LD#11′s mistake of choosing Minimalist and losing entrants just because they couldn’t come up with anything, or get a boring theme and be left with over 100 identical games. Plus, this time around we had so many theme suggestions (over 400) that they had to be trimmed down based on informal criteria, some themes that people would’ve liked to see were left out. I want to discuss what actually makes a good theme, so that we can get everyone on the same page and come up with a better way to select and vote for themes.

Criteria

To know what makes a good theme, first we need to know who it’s supposed to be good for. What kind of people participate in LD? Why do they participate? Here’s the reasons I came up with:

• It’s a fun, low-barrier-to-entry test of one’s abilities.
• It’s an excuse to work on something and get a feeling of accomplishment.
• It’s a social community event.
• It’s a chance to achieve fame and fortune, if you make a good game.
• Competing to win is a test of one’s mastery of design, coding, and art skills.

Now, participants are very varied people. We have different development styles, different skill levels of designing/coding/art, and different preferences with regards to game genre and style. A good theme should be able to accomodate as many of these as possible, while unifying the entries with a common inspiration. With the goals of LD participants in mind, here are my proposed criteria for a good theme:

1. Can be interpreted in a number of ways such that it is a key part of the game.
2. Sufficiently restricts freedom of choice, to stimulate creativity.
3. Can be implemented in different game genres, using different mechanics.

(more…)

Hmmm – “Exploration” – what a theme.

It sounded really interesting at first and I’m pretty sure I voted it up, but now I’m having a bit of brain-fail trying to come up with a feasible idea. I’m tempted to try my hand at some procedural generation, but that’s gone badly for me in the past…

It’s that time again: LUDUM DARE TIME

I almost completely hosed my computer today too, trying to install Arch linux to dual-boot with my Windows XP partition. Being a GRUB n00b I’d managed to render the machine completely unbootable but thankfully I was able to repair my master boot record and go back to the warm, snuggly, familiar surroundings of XP in time for the competition. In retrospect it wasn’t the best time to start juggling operating systems.

I think GRUB was having a problem with the SATA disks I’ve got configured in as a RAID using NVidia’s software RAID thingy. The disks seemed to change order before and after boot – the RAID disks appearing last in the list at first, then first in the list later – and also depending on whether I tried to boot from CD first or not. GRUB got totally confused about where to load its boot menu from, as far as I could tell.

Anyway, time to put that little problem aside and focus on making the greatest game the world has ever seen. Some of the themes were really interesting this time round. If I was a betting man I’d say the theme this time is going to end up as Exploration, but I’ve learnt to try and not think about it until the theme is actually announced.

My tools are going to be:

• Python 2.6 – mmmm Python
• Pygame – a cool 2d game library for Python
• Eclipse IDE, with PyDev plugin
• pythonutils – a small collection of miscellaneous utility classes
• pygame-fenix – a pygame wrapper library which mimmicks concepts of the Fenix language, written by Fiona
• Graphics Gale – my fave 2d sprite editor, great for animation
• The GIMP – open source paint program
• Cakewalk SONAR – I will get some music done this time!
• sfxr – mspaint for sound effects, by the awesome DrPetter
• Goldwave – for tidying up sound effects
• pyCatcher – for making a timelapse video

I think that’s the lot.

Well, I’m psyched. Are you psyched? I am really rather psyched, myself. Jolly good. Can’t wait!

Okay, I am ready to start this now. I’ve been busy earlier today but I am free now. What’s the theme?

. . .

Oh, no..  I have no idea what “Advancing Wall of Doom” is supposed to mean. Damn, I have to be very lucky to make anything with this theme in mind.

HOORAY! You all have until 6PM PDT on Sunday (0100 UTC on Monday) to turn in your entries! To submit your entry, just post a blog post here on LD, in the category “Mini LD #1″. In the Tags section, put “final” (along with whatever tags are appropriate) to indicate it’s your final entry. Your post should include a screenshot, and a download link for your game. Please use ZIPs, not installers! There’s no hosting for your game here, but if you don’t have a place, you can use http://ludumtoybox.sophiehoulden.com/ graciously provided by GirlFlash.

With all that said, what’s the theme?!?! Well, keep in mind this isn’t LD. You don’t just take one word and interpret it as you like. Instead, you need to follow the recipe given below! And here it is:

VERSUS

Select two extremely famous and iconic characters (real or fictional, human or non-human). They must be well-known to a reasonable number of people. They should be as utterly unrelated as possible. Make a game entitled “A vs. B” (where A and B are the names of the two characters, duh). The actual type of game and content then should be inspired by what kind of gameplay you need for those two to be in conflict! It does not need to be a 2-player game, or any kind of head-to-head thing (like a fighting game). For example, one character might have a base, and the other has an airplane, so it’s a vertical shooter. Whatever fits for the characters! Existing example: Bambi Vs. Godzilla (not a game, but to give you an idea of the concept). Made-up Example: Frankenstein vs. Ghandi.

Go to it, minions! Make me a VERSUS GAME!

So far I have mostly been sleeping. Woke up to find that the theme was Chain Reaction. I’ve had a couple of vague ideas, and I think I’m probably going to go for the least interesting because it’s the one I’m most likely to finish. Here are my initial thoughts:

- Some kind of physics-based puzzler, like The Incredible Machine, or maybe some sort of domino variant.

- Something like Lights Out or Reversi/Othello, where your move affects other pieces on the board.

- A looser interpretation of the theme (ie. kind of ignoring the “reaction” part): a scrolling shooter where your weapon is a morning star.

At the moment, I’m thinking the last of the three. I never liked Lights Out, and I think the first one is too much to do. I’ll give myself another hour to think about it, though.