This is my first time participating in Ludum Dare. Hopefully I can at least get a game finished to submit.
Dev tools:
I can only guarantee a Linux build, but I’ll try to get a Windows build as soon as possible.
So, one glaring flaw in my LD22 game is that it had no music whatsoever. This was one thing that I wanted to fix for LD23. The problem is: since I’m not a musician, I have no idea whatsoever about how to use the many tracker tools available in the bar to the right side.
So today I decided to go on a quest for some simple music generators that I could use for my game. The conditions:
– Must allow me to use the generated music freely (so no wolphram tunes)
– Must be usable from the web, or runnable under linux/wine
– Must be easy to use by a total music noob like myself
– Must allow me to download my work so I can use it in my game
Luckly, in spite of all my rage and conditions, I managed to find some generators that fit the bill.
The first was “Aviary’s Music Creator”. It has a very wide range of sounds, but the sound sample has a very limited size, and you can’t make it larger. I found that if you select some of the percursion, drum or bass sets, and ask for a “random” set of beats, it can create something rather cool, like this.
The second was Otomata. A very cool celular automata based music creator. You create cells on the board, and as they touch the borders, they play sounds. As they touch each other, they change directions. The cool thing about this site is that you can change the board while it is recording your song, which allows for you to add/remove cells to make your song more/less complex with time. Here is a sample I did while meddling with it.
Hope this can be useful to other sound noobs like me. Also, there is this really cool site called inudge, listed among the tools – the nice thing about it is that it lets you use multiple instruments at the same time, in arbitrarily large songs. But for the life of me I can’t figure out how to save the output for a file. Other than pointing my microphone to my sound boxes, can anyone suggest me an easy way to save a song from inudge.net?
I plan on entering this compo. I will be using C#/XNA, Gimp. Don’t know about Audio yet.
Hello everyone!
I have been planning the entry for quite a long time (several months).
So in short, I will be entering the Jam, with one of my friends (she will help me with the graphics, you can check her gallery here).
I’m an experienced c++ coder, mostly working with maya, arnold, mental ray, cuda and such things (working on game trailers). Though my primary weapons of choice is raytracing, I’m looking forward to create a fun, sprite based 2d game. (or something simple in 3D if possible and I will have enough time)
So my choice of tools will be, C++ (mostly Visual Studio), SFML and openGL (with some GLEW and nvidia CG) for graphics, TBB for some threading stuff (hopefully I won’t need that), pugixml for xml reading and editing, devIL for image handling, mercurial for version control, some of my own libraries (math, some simple graphics stuff etc), google docs, FMOD for audio and I think that’s all. Most of the code will be written from scratch (I’m used to creating prototypes early and fast, so hopefully that won’t be a problem).
The only things missing, is a good level editor (possibly with exporting to xml), and some kind of an audio (music) editor / generator, what is easy to use. (so even I can create some background music with it) Any ideas?
Cheers,
Pal.
It will be my second try but my first entry as I didn’t submit the result last time, I wasn’t happy enough with the result…
I’ll use g++/vim with my own little framework upon Allegro 5 (meh2d), the gimp, bfxr, probably pixelblitz and maybe my instruments for a background song.
Cheers!
Not much to see here, but it helped me get some ideas
Played around with Google App Engine and tested a few things in Flixel. Still, I think it’s enough to GET CRACKIN’ next weekend 😉
My team and I are going at it again. We succeeded in producing a tech demo last time and making everything from scratch. This time we’re quite a bit more prepared. I wrote some tools and the base code is ready to go. I think we’ll actually finish a game this time around.
On a side note, we learned a lot from the first time around. It goes as follows, A, get sleep. B, get sleep. C, get sleep. Oh, I almost forgot D. Don’t attempt to sustain energy on one meal a day and energy drinks. It just doesn’t work. The third day was horrible last time. I had large black bags under my eyes as I pushed forward to add mediocre sounds to our tech demo before uploading it.
In the end though, everybody enjoyed it, even if we didn’t finish; cause it was intensely fun. This time though…it’s war! …and I’m proud to say, we’re in!
Language: Monkey (monkeycoder.co.nz)
Art Programs: Graphics Gale
My Team
Nicholas Grant (Me) – Leader, Lead Programmer
Michael Grant – Lead Graphics, Story, Game Design, Music, and Sound
Eric Rodriguez – Programmer and Magical Math Person
Elena – Graphics, Story, Game Design, and Sound
I’m in! Second time, using:
Why do I program an own library for 2D games? There are a lot of things I could use, like FlatRedBall. But… programming primitive components makes fun and I learn a lot – that’s all.
Here we go. The framework is downloadable here:
http://www.stevencolling.de/downloads/public/GameBase2D_16_04_12.zip
One of two main parts is the agent modeling. Every entity in the game is modeled as an agent which you can extend by loading the components you need. Available components are:
Audible: Playing sounds.
Bodily: For physical information like position in the game world.
Collisionable: This components allows to use collision detection. Two implementations (CollisionableBoxed and CollisionableLine) of this class exists: box-collision and collision with a set of lines.
Logical: Used for game logic and agent’s state.
Movable: Agent’s moving abilities. An example implementation (MovableSimple) of this class allows to move an agent in 4 directions with a given speed.
Visual: For drawing the agent. An inheritance of this class (VisualAnimated) allows to load an animation and provides animation functionality like starting a specific one etc.
So if you want to add a decorative element like a flying bee, you can initialize an agent with an own implementation of Audible (for humming), a Bodiliy component for positioning on the map, the Logical part to model the bee-specific flying in the game, a Movable part to allow moving in all directions and a VisualAnimated for drawing the bee.
A Collisionable component isn’t needed so it is not initialized. A decorative tree would have no Movable component. An invisible entity like a spawnposition no Visual part.
The second main part is a set of managers. Managers provide common and generic functionality:
DebugManager: provides debug textures and fonts for drawing debug things on the screen.
GameStateManager: handles the current state of game.
GuiManager: holds the GUI elements.
InputManager: manages the input from keyboard and gamepad. Allows to bind multiple keys to actions and set additional properties like a press lock, so an action is just triggered one time after pressing (the user must release the key and press it again to trigger an action again).
IntroManager: Shows a generic intro with name and that the game is used for the Ludum Dare competition.
MapManager: If the game has something like a map, this is used. It has just a MapSize attribute, an empty constructor, empty update and draw methods and a method to check if a given coordinate is within the map’s bounds.
MusicManager: Allows to load music and to play (stop, pause etc.) it.
PlayerManager: Holds the player’s controllable agents and was introduced for my network support (which is not part of the downloadable framework).
ScreenManager: This manager can handle multiple cameras on the map, different screens (split screen) and some methods to translate mapcoordinates to screencoordinates vice versa.
Many of these managers are just „stubs“, e.g. the GameStateManager – every game derives an xxxManagerImpl class to implement and overwrite the needed things, like introducing the game-related game state variables.
Additional there are some basic classes summed up as „common“ like basic math-method-wrappers in Util, a Line class or a Timer.
The obligatory Game-class (Game2D) for XNA-games is also included. It initializes the managers and the framework itself.
A very funny thing is the Textbox functionality which I implemented last days. Now it is possible to show a conversation – multiple textboxes typical in old roleplay games. Even the continuous display of the text is added and available via configuration.
There is also a sample project which sets up generic things like implementing the mentioned ManagerImpls. The IntroManagerImpl is fully implemented, because the Ludum Dare rules allow it. The Game1 class is filled with basic stuff, like setting up the empty and/or generic managers. The correspondent Content project includes a folder-hierarchy. The only content is a little sound used in the intro and some fonts (for intro and debug purposes, the latter used in the DebugManager class).
So if Ludum Dare starts, I will use the sample project, rename it and start implementing the Manager classes and agent components.
Preparation done 
If I have the time until weekend, I try to add graphic shader functionality or lightning.
0This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2012 at 10:38 am and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Yes, I too will be joining this Ludum Dare. I’ve been able to keep the weekend free of any major distractions. I am warming up this week with using the following tools:
Depending on how things go, I might also create (and announce, per the rules) a helper library by Friday.
I would’ve liked to do this in JavaScript, but I feel the tools and browsers aren’t up to where AS3 is. I also dabbled with Unity for a while, but really, how many people have it readily installed in their browser? So I went with the default choice that will work on the widest range of platforms (except i*)
My most important goal of the weekend: figuring out if game programming is something I want to do more of.
If any one lives in or around Ghent, Belgium and is interested in a gathering, please let me know.
Hi,
i’m in 😉
Hi,
I think I am going to give Ludum Dare a go this time. I have never entered one of these before and it looks quite fun. I previously had a go at the MolyJam even a few weeks ago and actually managed to finish a game in under 48 hours… Infact I didn’t get as much time to program as I would have wanted over that weekend…
Here is a link to a video of my finished MolyJam game from a few weeks ago:
I have been reading the rules about engine and libraries and was planning on using my own simple library/engine to create my game. It isn’t anything special, mostly just a wrapper around OpenGL calls and some basic Windows setup code, and 3d math… I would be writing ALL the actual game code over the LD weekend. Is this allowed? And how do I go about posting it here publicly, as it describes in the rules? Thanks
Dev Tools:
I’m planning on entering Ludum Dare 23. I will be using ClojureScript, and developing using various HTML5 technologies.
Last year I enjoyed entering the competition immensely, but I made some mistakes which I intend to correct this time around.
I didn’t do number one because I didn’t really know any useful languages. I had been a paid javascript developer for several months at that point, but I was still fairly green in terms of how to make a game, and I hadn’t done visual effects in quite some time (never being particularly good at them :). I’m choosing ClojureScript this time, as it compiles to JavaScript and can run in the browser. It also allows me to enjoy a faster pace of development compared to actual JavaScript. I did a test run this last week to push it to its performance limits, and it performed admirably
Number two fell out of not being that good. Surprisingly, I’ve become a much better programmer between last December and now. Last time I was very focussed on making anything that worked. I was hoping to follow the alone criteria by naming my game “Alone Where?”, and having no other characters. Eventually I dropped the “Alone” from the title because it felt like I was trying too hard, and then the title became shortened further to just “W”. Regardless, I’m going to follow the theme at least somewhat more closely this time.
As far as the third is concerned…. I’m notoriously terrible at doing anything social online, especially when there is code to be written! I have no patience for social networks or blogs, but who knows…. I’m at least making an effort to not be as antisocial this time around by posting this :p, and I’ll see if I can post at least nightly status reports regarding my game next time.
I’m unsure as to whether I’ll enter the Competition proper or the Jam this time. I will likely only have time to do the Competition, but who knows, that ended up being a spur-of-the-moment decision last time anyway based on “whelp it ain’t good enough now, so Jam it is”. Either way, it’ll get released!
I can’t wait.
Edit:
Seems like typically people list their tools and such.
Tools:
Hardware: Macbook Pro, Wacom Tablet, iPad
Game Engine, Languages, & Tools: (Unity 3D Pro 3.5, C#, MonoDevelop IDE) or (flixel, Flash Builder 4.6)
Graphics & Art: Corel Painter 10, Photoshop CS5, Blender 2.6, Procreate iPad
Music & Audio: sfxr, GarageBand, Nanostudio on iPad
‘Tis the first time IN THE WORLD when three people from EUROPE have COME TOGETHER in an EPIC ATTEMPT to make a game in just 72 HOURS. Some called us MAD! Some called us INSANE!
Some called us PRETTY EPIC DUDES. With awesome muscles *kissy kissy*
The team consists of three (3) members!
Limb_Clock
Role: Art and occasional psychosis
Country: Finland
StarLight
Role: Code and muzaks
Country: Russia
Fififox
Role: Code (and muzaks sometimes too)
Country: France
There might be times where people are all like “FIRE ZE MISSILES” and the Russia is all like “AAAAAAAH MOTHERLAAAAAND” and Finland’s all like “GET THE BEER”. Rest of the world will still be like O SHI~ dot dot dot
NEVERTHELESS what we need is DETERMINATION and GOOD FOOD. Because we live in countries WHICH HAVE IT we are PRETTY DAMN SURE that we’ll be able to do an AWESOME GAME.
YEAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!1!!!eleven
[Note from Fififox: I’ll let you guess who wrote the text and didn’t post it 
]
This LD, some of us from the CubedHost.org team decided to participate and give it a shot, as we had admired the past few compos from afar.
So to pass the time and give me an excuse for procrastinating further, I began work on our base code; just some simple stuff like getting our code skeleton down, a tick system, and a simple window opening and automatically optimizing the framerate. The latter of those three proved to be the most difficult.
Through trial and error I applied different algorithms, ideas and whatnot, in an effort to calculate the current framerate, and essentially figure out how fast it could refresh, without falling behind or eating up all your CPU. Finally, I have found one that I am satisfied with, and although it is by no means perfect, it shall do for now.
As you can see, it’s not too exciting; however, I’m proud. Feel free to look around the code: here.
Enjoy 😀
I have been trying to save the next week end free from other responsibilities so that I could join LD#23. So if all goes well, I’m in!
Tools that I’ll be using:
…and who knows what else. Perhaps I have to use some text editor, compiler and stuff too…
Apparently I’m going to spend this Ludum Dare at the Free Lunch Design meetup in Gothenburg. Beyond pumped!
Not sure if there will be jamming going on or if I’ll go solo.
If solo, I’m prolly going with flash+flixel.
Pretty sure it’s going to be a fun ride, just like last time 
/Hannes
Here is a link to my starting code base/program at Wonderfl.
At the time of writing, the program just plays horrible generative music but the idea is to use the included ChordInfo class to actually have such music in the game.
You are free to use it as well if you want something like that.
The plan is to use the SiON synthesizer, which I can recommend for both music and sound effects (as an alternative to Bfxr), for playing whatever the generative music module spits out.
It’s only 4 days away, and despite this being my first LD, it is not my first game jam. I thought it would be nice to take a step back and wonder of the magnificence of an event such as this.
Nearly thousands of people from all over the world are united here for one reason: to create a world. We are all laboring in a measly 72 hours (or 48) to craft an experience in which collectively millions of players will be immersed in from all over the world. We are but a meager minority willing to spend tireless nights under insane pressure to manifest something into this world.
The part that really amazes me is the collaboration. A programmer from England could be working with an artist from Canada with music provided by a musician in Australia, with the end product played worldwide.
Be proud of the fact that while others are sleeping or simply resuming their lives, you will be among the people toiling away, sleepless and battling exhaustion at the brink of dawn. You’re not just creating a game. You’re molding the embodiment of your thoughts and beliefs. You are presenting yourself to the world in a fashion that is both artistic and beautiful.
My apologies if this is way over the top, just wanted to put that out there! 😛