This will be my 4th time, and 4th consecutive time, participating in the Ludum Dare competition.

I’ll be using:

Graphics: Game Maker 8 and/or Paint.NET and/or Microsoft Paint
Sound/Music: SFXR and/or Beepbox.co and/or Audacity
Code: AS3 with Flashpunk or C++ with SFML 2

Shouldn’t Randomly Generated not be a theme? Certain people (not me), particularly those new to the field of game making won’t be able to create much that is randomly generated.

Sure, names. But not levels or worlds.

Hi,

Spielmeister is going to host a real world gathering for ludum dare 23.

Date: Friday, April 20th 7:00 PM till Sunday  7:00 PM (CEST)

Venue: Spielmeister HQ, Adelungstr. 30a, 64283 Darmstadt / Germany

There will be free beer, drinks and snacks

Looking forward to see you!

Greetings,

Julian /CEO of Spielmeister

My tools :

• Language : Action Script 3
• Library :  Axel Game Library or FlashPunk
• Graphic : GIMP and MS Paint
• Audio : AudioTool, iNudge and as3sfxr
• Other : Tiled

I have only the first 28 hours free, so, it will be difficult for my first participation

Hiya! This is pretty much my first time, so needles to say I’m pretty excited. I have little experience in game developing, but plenty in programming in general to be able to make some games. 😀

Language :AS3, everyone loves flash… Right?
Library: Flixel, it makes everything so much easier.
IDE: Flashdevelop, easy and powerful enough
Art: GraphicsGale for simple sprites, GIMP for additional editing.
Sounds: sfxr, what else?
Music: Aviary or Otomata, depending on the kind of game I’ll end up making.

Sadly I have no musical skills, so I’m not sure how I’ll handle this. I’ve heard of Autotracker, but I’ve never used Python, and it seems a hassle to convert to .wav then to .mp3. I guess I can use Wolfram Tones if it’s going to be a retro/8-bit ish game, else I might throw in some royalty free music. Anyone knows if the latter is allowed? If not, I suppose the game has to be so good that it doesn’t need music. 😛

EDIT: Thanks to Rybicon for sharing Caranha’s blog, it seems I have found a way to create simple music. 😀

Hi all,

I shall be participating, my weapons of choice:

Code: C# w/ XNA (for Windows Phone 7 and Windows), leveraging RapidXNA (which reminds me I need to implement the new features for it some time soon)

Art: Paint.NET/Photoshop

Sound Effects: sfxr

Music: FL Studio

I wish you all good luck!

Theme permitting, I feel like using this Ludum Dare to experiment with voxels…

Maybe also push in some procedural generation too, I’m feeling in a good mood about this. Only 4 days to go!

I doubt I’ll be able to do warmup now. I had very much to do, I’m stressed now and I’ll be busy until Friday. I don’t think I’ll even do warmup in Friday! (Because I have some evil plans for Friday. Mwhahahaha!) So I’ll enter LD not warmed up. And that’s when my Chronolapse isn’t working! And I want to sleep. I can’t imagine myself being OK during LD. And it starts in 4 days.

(Why would you read it anyway?)

Have a nice LD everybody! Make sure to sleep well before it and do a great warmup!

Yesterday, I submitted my warmup game, SameOrb, and was happy to be able to finish during the weekend. I picked an hard time limit to myself to check how I could manage the polishing phase. The engine/toy was quickly done the first day and the gameplay/balance/arts the next day, with a big gap between them where I was erroneously thinking that having few bouncing balls was an “almost-done” game. So it was something like a 2 half-days project.

It was a very fun exercise and I learned a lot of good lessons about time management for the true Ludum Dare challenge, except the theme part, we’ll see how that goes. Here are the steps which required more time than I expected, and I hope to fix that in my LD. Classic tips, but I can now confirm that I should follow them
– Challenge/gameplay. Even when the engine and controls are done, I still need levels, checkpoint etc
– Be nice with new player. Ok, no time to write tutorial or instructions, and *I* know them, but need to focus more on intuitive feedback to explain things.
– Don’t add sounds at the end, it’s not just arts, it can be an important interface feedback.
– Tweaking and testing physics is hard, and messy hardcoded values don’t help.
– Still need to watch performance. No time to optimize, but brute force everywhere sometimes leads to problems.
– Deciding when to stop adding features and when to start polishing gameplay and arts, is very important.
– Keep some time for the release step, stop coding *before* the last minute.
– Still take breaks, it’s important for performance and allow to think about the big picture.

Ok, I hope it helps someone (other than me), and don’t forget to have fun

Looks like my weekend is mostly free! That means I should have plenty of time for Ludum-Daring. Here’s what I’m using:

• FlashDevelop for code… with Flashpunk for game stuff, Flod for playing music, and bfxr for sounds.
• Graphics Gale, and maybe Gimp for pixels.
• OGMO editor for levels, probably.
• Milky Tracker for music.

Oh, and here’s my basecode.  Most if it is stuff that’s already open-source (Flashpunk, Flod, bfxr), or snippets of code that you could find or forums (Draknek’s preloader, a bitmap font class, an OGMO level loader), but I figure I should post it anyway just to be safe:

Download

I’ll be coding assembly for the original Game Boy (DMG) this time. I’ll make sure that the rom at least runs on the emulators “gambatte” and “visual boy advance” (as well as on the real hardware of course)

I’ve participated twice before without finishing, so I guess my goal this time is to try and actually have something to release when the compo is over. 😛

I’ll be using some tools and helper functions I’ve written before for things like loading images and maps. You can find it on github here: https://github.com/vidarn/rgbasm-dmg

Oh, and to warm myself up I’ve written a little intro/scroller:

Animated version (a bit boring)

Last LD was my first and I am here again to make something playable 😀 . I hope that I learned something from my last LD`s mistakes and my entry will be better and without so many bugs 😛

I will use :
Engine – Unity3D
2D graphic – Photoshop
3D graphic – 3DS Max
Sound – Audacity + don`t know yet
Timelapse – Chronolapse
Livestream – Join.Me ( no one will be watching it but I will have better motivation 😀 )

So I am looking forward to this sleepless weekend of programing.
VOTE FOR KITTENS!!! 😀

I probably won’t use this next weekend, but I’m posting this just in case I do want to use it.
GNI is a library to facilitate some simple, easy to use communication between a server and any number of clients.
Please note that this was coded in a relatively short time span, it was not tested extensively, network code is vulnerable to tons of unpredictable bugs, and my experience with netplay development is limited.
What I want to say is, don’t rely on it unless you’re capable of fixing bugs in it, as it might break at the worst possible moment.
The example chat program I wrote seems to work perfectly, though, so it should work. ‘Should’ being the key word here.

Features
-Simple way to send signals from server to client and vice versa, without bothering with minor technical details
-Automatically calls a function when a signal is received, a player connects, or a player disconnects

Download
Code includes a simple chat server project and chat client project as examples.

DLL download link (5 KB)
Source download link with example (19 KB) (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 solution)

How it works
Small packages of information called GNIDatas are sent through the library. When received, it’s reconstructed as a GNIData struct.
GNIData consists of a key-value pair, with the keys or values being shorts (16-byte integers), strings, or nothing.

Server
-The server class must inherit from the library’s GNIServer class.
-Call StartServer(…) to start the server. You can have it check for incoming signals automatically, or choose to do so manually by calling Update().
-Override OnDataReceived(GNIData data, uint source) to interpret signals. It’s called from Update when a full GNIData has been received. ‘Source’ is the clientID of the client that sent the signal.
-Override OnClientConnected(GNIClientInformation client) if you want something to happen when a player joins. (The client is automatically added to the client list.)
-Override OnClientDisconnected(GNIClientInformation client) if you want something to happen when a player disconnects. (The client is automatically removed from the client list.)
-Use SendSignal(…) to send a GNIData to a client, or BroadcastSignal(…) to send a GNIData to every client.
-Send empty signals (datatype and valuetype ‘none’) if you want the server to automatically detect if a connection has been lost; otherwise it won’t notice until it fails to send a signal to it.

Client
-The client class must inherit from the library’s GNIClient class.
-Call StartClient(…) to start the client. It WILL NOT check for incoming signals automatically; call AutoPoll() to have it do that. Alternatively, call Update() whenever you want to check for incoming signals.
-Override OnDataReceived(GNIData data, uint source) to interpret signals. It’s called from Update when a full GNIData has been received. ‘Source’ is always 0 and meaningless in the client.
-Use SendSignal(…) to send a GNIData to the server.
-To be honest, I’m not sure what happens when the client unexpectedly loses connection to the server. It’ll probably throw an exception, so just catch that.

Documentation
Does not exist. If you can’t figure out the code, it’s best not to use it as it might still be buggy.

License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
You are free:
* to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
* to Remix — to adapt the work
* to make commercial use of the work
Under the following conditions:
* Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Have fun, and good luck with your games.

Tags: client, CSharp, GNI, internet, library, multiplayer, netplay, network, online, server

Hi fellow game creators! I’m stating my intention to participate! I’ll be using XNA 4 or Unity 3D. I really like space games, so I’ll likely do one if I can. I will use Visual Studio 2010 for sure.

I was hoping I could do last years however I got called into work over the weekend.

Graphics: Photoshop and/or Paint.net and/if 3DS Max.

Audio: Aviary’s Music and/or Otomata and/or Bfxr

Middleware/Engine: FlatRedBall or RapidXNA

If I decide to use Unity 3D then I wont be using those but I’ll still be doing it in C#.

if (Try()) Do(); else DoNot();

I’ve been in competitions before, but this is my first Ludum Dare. I’m Martin Vilcans from Stockholm, Sweden. I’m hoping to gather a few other local participants for a meetup during the compo.

I am planning to go against conventional wisdom and use tools that I’m not 100% confident with, but I really want to do something with WebGL. I’ll be using three.js and some base code. Since I’m no big fan of JavaScript, I’ll be using CoffeeScript instead. There is an built version of the code online. It’s not very exciting yet, but it should display a gray 3D box that you can move by clicking and dragging the mouse. In case your browser or graphics card drivers doesn’t support WebGL, an informational message will be displayed and it’s time for you to upgrade! Please let me know in a comment if you have other problems and I may be able to fix it before Saturday.

WebGL is new and exciting, and this could become a great tech demo and an excellent game. Or a lousy tech demo and a crappy game.

Or I’ll just chicken out and use PyGame to create something simple but be sure to finish something. We’ll see when the compo starts.

Tags: three.js, web game, webgl

My first LD was a year ago. This will be my fourth, and I’m in!

This time I’ll be using C# with SDL.NET, rather than XNA. I wanted to try something new this time, but I don’t have the time to learn something new before this weekend, so I’ll just stick close to my comfort zone with C#, and at the same time I can learn a new way to draw stuff on the screen! 😀

And if it turns out to be easy, I might even try porting it to mono so I can get a linux version out as well.

Tools will be Visual Studio, Paint.NET, bfxr and iNudge. Frameworks will obviously be SDL.NET, and I might cook up a quick framework this week for some added basic functionality like screens, input and resource management, etc. I’ll obviously release that to the public if I do that.

Not really a whole lot, but still: Click. It’s for C++/SFML2. Make sure C++0x/C++11 is enabled.

You’d put all your game code in scenes/GameScene, with your variables as member variables and then your normal loop stuff throughout the five functions: initialize( SceneChangeEvent& ), terminate(), update(), update( const sf::Event& ), and render( sf::RenderWindow& ).

• initialize( SceneChangeEvent& ) is called the frame after a scene is activated. More on SceneChangeEvent later.
• terminate() is called when the scene is deactivated. This, like initialize( SceneChangeEvent& ), is called at the beginning of the frame after a scene change is requested. This is to avoid various bugs I’ve encountered in the past (which I don’t remember). 😛
• update() is called X times a second, where X is equal to Game::UPDATE_RATE (default 50). If it somehow gets behind, it will try to catch up.
• update( const sf::Event& event ) is only called when update() is called, but is only called if we get an event from SFML. So, you could get 5 of these in one frame, or get none for several.
• render( sf::RenderWindow& ) is called Y times a second, where Y is equal to Game::RENDER_RATE (default 50). This is just a call to sf::RenderWindow::setFramerateLimit( unsigned int ). If this gets behind, oh well. 😛

SceneChangeEvent is my way of passing information to a different scene when you change scenes without having to do something like std::dynamic_pointer_cast( game.getScene( "Options" ) )->setSceneChangeData( someParameterA, someParameterB, ... ). Basically, if you need to pass some data, you would add an entry in SceneChangeEvent::Reason (like GameSaveSelected), and then add a struct to the union, like this. Then, just create an instance of SceneChangeEvent, set the data, and change scenes.

ResourceManager is just a convenient way of getting resources without having to declare them, loading them, checking for errors, etc. all the time. For instance, to get an sf::Texture, you would run ResourceManager::getTexture( "image.png" ), and it will return the texture, or an empty pointer if loading failed. If loading fails, it also prints out to std::cout.

Now, you can either stuff every bit of code into the default scenes/GameScene, or you can be nice and separate your main menu, splash screens, etc. into their own Scenes. 😛

Ahoy there, you might recall my October Challenge game “Anathema Mines” which is a remake of an old LD#6 entry.

I’ve written a blog post about the original LD#6 entry. The re-make I was doing in October is coming out in mid-May, you can see the trailer here.

Cheers!
-Phil

Hey there, programmers and designers!

Chipcaramel here, along with the brains of the operation, Jimun, announcing our plans to get involved with Ludum Dare 23! We’re both fans of classic, 2D side-scrolling adventures and will likely produce one ourselves! We’ve taken on the LD Jam in the past with unfinished product, but also a world of experience and lessons learned! We will put our heads together and give it our best shot!

We both seem to have the weekend free, so will work together through the Jam with the greatest of effort. We’ll be using the following:

• Löve2D for the game engine
• Lua for the core language
• Photoshop CS5 and mtPaint for sprites and tiles
• MilkyTracker, AutoTracker, cfxr, bxfr for blips and tones and melodies

Wish us luck!

So, I posted earlier that I would be releasing the simple JavaScript library I’ve been working on.

I updated that post with the link to kilo, but I thought I’d make sure it was seen and post this (don’t want to get disqualified from my first LD!). If anyone decides to check it out, please let me know if you have any recommendations for how to improve. It’s a public repo, so feel free to fork and contribute changes back!

I’m 12 years old, this is my second gamejam, (first ludumdare), and i have no programming skills. Tips, please? Thanks!