Just a quick post to let Ludum Dare raters and reviewers know about Ludum Legacy, a twitter bot set up to post one LD48 game every hour. There are so many games, this takes us into August – the time of the next Ludum Dare!

Follow Ludum Legacy here!

Well done for a great LD as usual. See you in August

This was my first Ludum Dare and WOW! What an experience.

I aimed for more than I could chew when I embarked on my game “Life/Routine” and thought “I’ll submit this for the Compo”. Having never finished developing a complete game, let alone on Unity, I knew the odds were stacked against me. On top of it, I had real-life obligations which included a Senior Year project seminar on Saturday and birthday dinner on Sunday.

If that weren’t enough, my home PC internet went off for almost an entire day.

But I’m not here to boast. I’m simply here to express my excitement.

LD26 has been a brilliant experience. Reading through the #LD48 tweets and seeing the excitement among devs — many of which were first-timers like me has been some experience. It is true when someone said that “Excitement is contagious!” because the LD48 fellow co-participants’ struggles and little victories sure inspired me to finish this game by the Compo deadline.

But there’ll be time to talk about my weekend and struggles. For now, the game:

Life/Routine

A minimalist “dynamic rhythm” game.
Concept:

Life/Routine captures the duality of a life built around their daily routine. It describes both the calming beauty and the overwhelming claustrophobia that comes when you run the hamster wheel of the mundane routine. It captures the very essence of “familiarity” created by our own actions and how we can either fall in an endless pattern of a life of same beats or break free from it.

Gameplay:

You either create objects or destroy them. The objects will give out specific sounds when they touch the bottom of the screen and they become part of the pattern and repeat after a short point — very much like your daily routine.

You can choose to either revel in the mundane and try creating your own sounds from the “pattern” or break free from it by destroying it and choosing a life that suits your comfort level.

The difficulty is entirely dependent on the player and their actions in creating/destroying objects will dynamically adjust the difficulty.
Creating more objects results in more sounds and a more vibrant routine/music pattern but also makes the game difficult and more overwhelming(music can turn into noise).

Every “life” has a specific course and will end after the “life bar” on top has been filled and the life has been lived.

Related to the Theme– “Minimalism”:

–Minimal art and music.
–Controls — only two
– No overlying narrative/explanation of concept. Everything that needs to be interpreted is conveyed through the gameplay concept.
– Score and other details are abstracted from players only to be revealed in the final “Death” screen

The music and the art have been created by me.

You can either visit the game page or download the game directly

Cheers and if you have feedback about the game,feel free to leave it in the comments! And if you like it,VOTE VOTE VOTE!

Ansh

What do you want?

This is just to tell you that I have recently created a Twitter account, @jorjongames. Feel free to follow me! I will only tweet about game development.

Why would I follow you?

Hey, I’m not forcing you if you don’t want to.

Who are you anyways?

I made a couple of games for Ludum Dare, and I wish to someday make a feature-complete game. But I also love making tools for other to use, and I have posted them here before.

Can I have a kittens animated gif?

Sure

Added high score tweeting!

Progress! The main menu and connectivity is done. Now for the randomly generated stuff and game itself.

In case you wonder, this started from the idea of books being tiny worlds. Then somehow went into Twitter, with writing smaller than any other.

This will be my first game jam, and hopefully also my first non-mod, non-prototype game.

This Week

1. Warming up, which will essentially be testing out tools and techniques I don’t have enough experience with.
2. Speeding up my laptop
3. Some university related stuff
4. Cooking (healthy) food for 48 hours
5. Explaining my girlfriend why I’m doing this (and not going out with her)

My Tools

• Building: Unity
  I’ve been using Unity for 2 years now, and I still like it. Luckily I have a Pro version that I can use, which has some nice new features like pathfinding, an awesome particle system tool and of course dynamic lightning. Not sure if I will use any of those, but it’s good to have.
• Coding: MonoDevelop
  Unity comes with MonoDevelop, Unity is partly integrated with it, the auto-complete is nice and I’m used to it, so I will be using it to code my C# scripts.
• Music: LMMS
  Sound, and therefore music, is the only thing I have no experience with, so I will have to practice it a lot before I start. I also have to find some nice VSTs which I can use. I do know something about music so I hope I can produce something worthy.
• Sound: Audacity
  When I have to do something with sound, which rarely happens, I use Audacity. I will probably be recording sounds with my smartphone and/or laptop microphones, and I know how to remove things like noise with this tool. Also editing and looping sound works pretty nice with this free tool.
• Graphics:Photoshop
  I love Photoshop, I have been using it from time to time in the past 10 years, I’m far from a pro but I know my way around in it. And, most importantly, it works really awesome with my Wacom.
• Modelling: Blender
  I usually use 3ds Max for 3D modelling, but I only have a student license for this, so I use Blender as substitute. Since the new interface I no longer really hate it, but I do not have a numpad on my laptop… Anyway, I want to try to make a 2D game, so I won’t use it extensively. Otherwise I will have to fall back to good ol’ 3ds Max.
• Motivation: Spotify
  I always work with music on. (Unless I’m doing hard mathematics) I usually listen to a few styles, sorted by requirement: For creativity: death metal, progressive metal and prog. rock. For speed: drum ‘n bass, deadmau5 (yes, that’s a genre) and industrial. For inspiration: minimal classical music. And for relaxation: Eddie Vedder, Foo Fighters, Muse, or any of my other favourite bands, that no longer need attention (because I know every single tone).
• Communication: Twitter - This Blog
  I never tweet, but I would love to give updates and give answers to questions. (Not that I would know why you would do that.) Follow: “@Siewart_”. I will be posting some blog posts as well, because the process of creating a game is awesome, inspirational and informative. (It’s also nice to look back when you are done)
• Timelapse: Chronolapse
  Everyone seems to do it, so I will do it as well. Also: I love timelapses .

My hardware:

• My old HP Elitebook 8530w (Dual-Core 2.8Ghz, 4GB, Quadro FX770M);
• Samsung Galaxy S2 (Ice Cream Sandvich);
• Wacom Intuos 3;
• A random mouse;
• Hopefully a keyboard

Warm-up
For my warm-up a theme generator gave me a (cliché-ish) theme: Post-Apocalyptic Steam Punk. But I vowed to use it so I will.

Basic idea: A 2D sidescroller where you have to use nuclear waste to mutate plants, animals and NPCs in order to solve puzzles involving steam engines. Don’t know if I have enough time for something like this, but I want to go through the whole process once so I might make one short level, without tutorial. I will post it when it’s done, if it’s done.

One last thing
One last thing: Good luck and above all, have fun, my dear opponents!

Hi people! As I approach the end of day one, I thought I’d say hi on the LD blog.

My game is called “Ghost Town” (working title).

I’m tracking progress with Google Plus simply because it’s easy to toss photos and screenshots up there. I’m not really doing major blog posts this time. (Also I shoot random updates on twitter.)

I’m seeing tons of amazing stuff on the LD page, this is incredible.

Good luck to everyone!!

I’m looking forward to watching everyone make amazing games this weekend. I have a request: please connect with me so we can encourage each other to do amazing things! Be sure to post tons of screenshots on twitter using the #screenshotsaturday and #LD48 hashtags.

I’d be grateful if you followed (I’ll follow you back!):

Twitter: http://twitter.com/mcfunkypants

Google+: http://mcfunkypants.com/+

Hey, just scrolled through a dozen pages of posts, collecting people on Twitter like Pokémon, and I noticed that a few had entered the entire Twitter URL into the field on their Ludum Dare profiles.

You only have to put your Twitter name in the field, with or without the @.

Not a huge deal, but makes it easier for folks keen to Follow you up

Hi jammers! It has been super exciting seeing your progress even at this very early stage. Just wanted to put out a friendly reminder to everyone who uses twitter: post screenshots and tag them with the #screenshotsaturday hashtag so that users can see your wonderful creations in their twitter streams as well as the community website www.screenshotsaturday.com made by our very own pekuja.

Keep up the awesome work!  You guys freaking rock.

I thought I’d point out that Twitterbot is back up and running. If you’re a twitter-er (a-twitter?) just tag your tweets with #ld14 and they’ll by magically re-tweeted in the #ludumdare IRC channel. If you want to view a log of tweets, join #ld14 in IRC and do (in #ld14, not #ludumdare):

!rss show twitter

If you’re in the IRC channel and you want to tweet out (???), do:

/msg twitterbot twitter identify twitterusername twitterpassword

!twitter status Tweet

Actually, I don’t know why you’d use this last feature — I assume you have a working twitter client. Though I suppose it lets you avoid switching windows…

Also: Please do not spam #ld14! I’ll just have to kill the bot and we’ll all hate you.

I’m ready. As always, I’ll be using C++/libSDL, building on my Linux-based systems for both GNU/Linux and Windows users. I’ll be using The Gimp for art, sfxr and Audacity for sound, and good ol’ pen and paper to jot down ideas and designs.

For Linux users interested in creating a timelapse, I’ve provided a simple Makefile that should work for you, linked from the LD Wiki: http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/ld14:submit#optional_fun_things

I already posted about LD #14 on my blog, I’ve tweeted about it @GBGames and I’ve double-checked that I had all the tools I needed.

Unfortunately, I have a birthday party to attend tonight, so I won’t be there for the start, but I will be receiving a text message from my lovely girlfriend letting me know what the theme is once it is announced so I can think about it while I drink.

Good luck to everyone! Have fun!

Just a quick note that if anyone uses Twitter it might be worth everyone tagging Ludum Dare related tweets with #ld14 before and during the weekend.