Hello everyone!

I’m going to be participating in LD26! Really excited; this will be my second Ludum Dare (is it even better the second time?)!

I’m going to be using:

» Language: Java!
» IDE: Eclipse!
» Graphics: Paint.NET!
» Music: Linux MultiMedia Studio!
» Sound Effects: BFXR and LabChirp!
» Screen Capture: Chronolapse!
» Food: Whatever crosses my path!

I will be on holidays during the Ludum Dare 26, wich means that I will be able to compete for the second time !

I will be using C++ with Allegro 5.

Hello, Ludum Dare world! I guess this is my obligatory “I’m in” post. This time I know my libraries and utilities better, so I shouldn’t run into the problem I had last time.

Libraries:

-LWJGL

-JOGG/JOrbis (most likely)

-Prewritten base code (to make sure there are no screwups with low-level drawing)

-Prewritten appletloader code (to make publishing easier)

Software:

-Java by Oracle

-Eclipse by The Eclipse Foundation

-Paint.NET by DotPDN

-SFXR by DrPetter

So here’s a realization that I had about being an indie game developer, and it hit me when I was about to open up a project that I had no strong feelings for and wished I hadn’t started.

We indies get to make games that AAA developers don’t.

Stuff about quirky indie games and why we get to do them follows the break!

Games like MineCraft, They Bleed Pixels, Offspring Fling, and other quirky titles would be just plain unlikely from a AAA studio since they would not be guaranteed sellers. (Face it, MineCraft sounds awful on paper from the perspective of a risk-avoiding publisher, even if it works very well in practice.)

But…

Those games are (at terms of cost vs. revenue) successful. Offspring Fling has its fans, They Bleed Pixels even has fan-art, and MineCraft was a smash hit as far as indie games go.

Those examples are a bit narrow, but they kind of illustrate what I’m talking about.

An indie game doesn’t have to sell nearly as many copies as a AAA game, even at the much lower prices indie games sell for. AAA games selling for $60 USD have to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to break even. (That is, to make as much money as was spent on making them.) Indie games, not so much. I don’t have numbers for it since it varies so much between projects, but it’s nowhere near as much as the multi-million dollar budgets common for big developers.

Some times we get caught up in trying to do things that AAA developers usuallly do. I don’t think that’s always the best option. In fact, it’s almost never the right option.

We get to make weird stuff that big developers don’t.

We get to make niche games (there’s a Star Trek-style starship bridge simulator that requires six players, six computers, and a freaking projector, though I forget the title of it), extremely difficult games (Super Meat Boy, anyone), games with unusual stories (Offspring Fling is about a woodland creature gathering her scatted children after a run-in with a big dinosaur thing), and games that are unconventional in their mechanics (AirMech is a hybrid of RTS and arena shooter). We can make games that vary in other ways that I can’t even think of.

And, well, we have to.

Trying to make a game that would take a team of dozens of people multiple years to make isn’t going to work for a small team with little/no budget, much less for us solo indies. We just can’t do it like they can.

But we can do weirder, more unconventional, more risky things that they can’t. We can afford to.

These developers (as pointed out by another post from someone else) have huge costs to cover. Indies, for the most part, have little to no budget. We don’t have the kind of expenses that Activision, Treyarch, or Ubisoft have.

I guess the point is this: We indies get to make games that are unusual, niche, or just plain silly because we don’t have the same standard for a financial success as the major developers.

So…

Keep in mind that indies get to do more “out there” kinds of games. To my indie brothers and sisters, indulge yourself in a fun, silly, or just unconventional project now and then. That’s kind of one of the best parts of being indie.

Peace, love, and a little something nice,

– Henry

I can’t very well pass up an opportunity to participate in another Ludum Dare; I look forward to these immensely!

• Code: Actionscript
• IDE: Flash Builder
• Graphics: Photoshop
• Music: Sunvox (if I can learn the basics in time)
• SFX: BFXR

Hello Everyone!

I have finally decided to participate in the competition and what better way to start than to write the famous “I’m in” post. I am pretty excited about it and hope to learn a lot from the experience. I don’t know if I’ll be busy during the weekend so my main objective is to finish something that is playable, with some luck it’ll also be fun.

My tools:

• Construct2
• Paint.Net
• GraphicsGale
• SFXR
• Audacity
• Tea, tea, more tea, some snacks and whatever there is in the cafeteria

I’m a bit nervous about the theme but I guess everyone else feels like me, there’s nothing we can do about but wait and hope for the best .

After reading some survival guides and tips I’ve made my own list with some important notes that I believe are easy to forget:

• Don’t panic after the theme is revealed
• Aim low
• Remember to take breaks, specially between finding out the theme and starting the actual work
• It’s all about having fun

I guess that’s all for now, good luck to everyone! Can’t wait to see what people make for #LD26.

Ludipe

My blog (Spanish)

Programs Being Used
BFXR (Sound Effects)
Possibly FLstudio (Music)
ASEsprite (Graphics)
Photoshop (Graphic Editing)
Gamemaker 8 Pro

This is my first Ludum Dare, I may not complete if school interferes.
Thanks! (:

I’ve tried in the past, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

I’m excited and ready for this time around and I hope that I will be a little more prepared for it.  I always tend to get overzealous, and I end up attempting something that I am unable to pull off.  If I can reel myself in and stick to something a little simpler, I think I can be successful in my attempt.
I’ll be employing some kind of C#, maybe Unity, maybe XNA – depends on how I feel at the time.

Good luck everyone!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 8th, 2013 at 11:34 am and is filed under LD #26. 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.

That was the catchiest fucking title I could come up with, shut up.

So, my second LD48, and I hope my game will be a tad better than my previous entry, because that was rather unfortunate.

And different tools as well. I’ve started preparing a bit earlier than last time, so I can do my development on linux now, without being dependent on fraps for the time lapse. Other than that, I’m currently using my own gaming library for C#, and will probably use my own toolkit for that as well, so that should be interesting. Hopefully I can get some work done on the actual game, rather than focusing on the bugs in those two projects!

Other than that, I’ll be using MonoDevelop/C#, Gimp/Kolourpaint, and SFXR (like everyone else on the friggin’ planet).

What went wrong last time, is that I kind of underestimated what could be done in 48 hours, so my game got a feature underload, something that is rather rare in video games. But this time, I think I’ve got a good estimate. (this will really suck if this game turns out worse than the previous one… but we’ll see…)

And that’s about it, I’ll do a time lapse of it, just like last time, and maybe I will live-stream it, since there’s some interesting stuff going on on the homepage, so yeah.

See ya on April 26th!

I will be in using gamemaker for the third time, I may use some other engine, but I dont know yet. This should be a great experience for me once again as I plan to improve on what I have previously accomplished.

I may add nice animations if i do a 2D game, or i may go for 3D, all depends on the topic!

GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!

Hello all,

That’s my second Ludum Dare, and as I missed the LD #25, I’ll try to make a great game for this one. 😀

So my tools are:

• Language: C++
• IDE: Code::Blocks
• Graphics library: SFML 2.0
• Pixel art: Paint.NET
• SFX: SFXR
• Music (Maybe): Fruity Loops Studio
• Timelapse: Chronolapse

Good luck to everyone !

Hi there, after failing to finish my LD25 game I decided to try again for LD26. Lots of new stuff has happened since that time and I hope I can include all of that jazz in this post.

In the process of making my LD25 game I thought I had mastered C# XNA sufficiently to make a more graphical game, as my LD24 game had been decent in my eyes but the art was kind of lacking. I thought I could implement realtime raycasted shadows and a nice floaty-physics system to boot. However doing this in one weekend was still challenging and I felt the urge to just copy paste code from my other projects growing stronger. Nearing the end of LD25 I figured is was not the graphical fidelity, but rather the color scheme I had to improve.

So for the upcoming LD I will most likely, though I cannot say with full confidence:

Visual Studio 2010

C# OpenTK

milkytracker and FL studio for audio

Notepad++

lots of IRC and Coffee.

Other things that have been happening, my setup has changed to a full tower thanks to my awesome brother finding it for 20 euros

This is a Cooler Master HAF X and I am totally loving this thing ( apart from the fact that it weighs 31 pounds while being empty. I guess you can say HAF: Heavy As F*ck ).

And another thing that has been happening: I am working on my first big project now. And this can be said with certainty. I have almost condemned myself to finish something big for once. so yeah, look forward for any posts on that in the future.

Also if you want any other posts of me talking about random stuff, consider to kick your shoes off, grab a cup of coffee and follow my tumblr: www.metaldemon.tumblr.com

cheers and good luck if you are joining LD26!

-Metal

I’m in this next ludum dare, and now with extensive knowledge of JavaScript and C#, I’ll be using

Unity

AuidoSauna

Blender

Gamemaker (Image editing)

JavaScript

C#

Sketchup8

And i’ll be compiling this donkey doo doo on my shit windows 7 (Better than 8) home premium that runs on a

CPU: 1.6 GHz (3.8 Windows Performance Score Yeah Shit I know)

Ram: 4GB  (5.7)

Bit: 64

Yeah that’s about it.Now you can stop reading this and go back to burning that 12 bit fuse back into your circuit board.

But  guess what, YOU DON’T NEED TO HAVE SHIT, TO BE COOL

MOHAMMAD AWAY

Are you picky when it comes to unzipping archived files? Do you find yourself peeking into every compressed archive to see what is inside before you unzip it? Is it just a directory? Ok then, we’ll just unzip it directly. Is it a bunch of files, well then we’ll need to unzip it into a separate directory. I hate unzipping an archive into a separate directory only to find out that all the files were zipped up inside of a directory.  Then after you unzip, you have a directory inside a directory! Bleh.  This is where SmartUnzip comes in. It does the looking for you and determines if it should unzip the archive into a separate directory or not.  It also supports dragging/dropping multiple archives on the SmartUnzip window. Handy for those Ludum dare review sessions where you’ve downloaded lots of archives.  Sound interesting? Check out SmartUnzip

Tags: archive, utility, Windows, zip

I…guess I’m in. I’m not sure if I’ll have any time, but I’ve been wanting to do this since the day I heard it. First dare, first jam, first game. Yay milestones 😀

… i hope. Oh well. Already have an idea slowly piecing itself together, hope I can pull it off. I have nothing better to do with it I suppose…

• code+ide: processing. booyeah!
• gfx: primitives like rect(), line(), and box(). gimp for emergencies.
• musics: assuming minim will work i’ll try b/sfxr for sfx and maybe CAUSTIC 2 for music. yay android apps!
• timelapse: maybe, just maybe a glapse. say please.
• os: #! linux. or without all the funny characters it’s crunchbang linux. lightweight & perfect for my
• computer: who knows how old? i get 100% cpu from a 500×500 window (but a nice frame rate :P)
• food: sandwiches, preferably peanut butter + cinnamon
• cats: two + laser pointer. are extremley cute & may be distraction.
• pickle: bermuda

what am i listing again? oh, compo stuff.

right. This is all very iffy now. I don’t even know if I’ll have a free weekend and I’ll probably forget the dare anyway. but IF I can remember it’s gonna be grrrrreat!

Tags: im in, java, processing, tools

Its time for the big leagues. I recently started realizing my dream of making games with Twine and have been participating in 1GAM and its jams (work here: http://www.onegameamonth.com/PurpleMFTW ), and I’ve been waiting for my chance to participate in a honest to gosh Ludum Dare.

While my games are the usual Twine fare, I’m hoping to, before the end of this year, get a firm grasp on other engines and type of games from college education!

LETS GO!

So I was just to say “unsure of myself” so I half’ed the challenge I decided to create a quick warm up game in 24hrs believe me it looks worst than any other game I have seen but like I said its a warm up the code is messy but it has its own charm to it anyway you can download the game and try it out @ http://cognizantgames.yolasite.com/downloads.php

If your interested to follow my work check out my tumblr – http://cognizantgamestudios.tumblr.com/

Thank you all

Cake&Code here, we are definitely going to be taking part in the next Ludum Dare! We’ve both been pretty amped about making more games, especially after being at GDC and not only getting to see and play some incredible games but also talking to other developers, artists, and designers. Can’t wait for voting to begin! We’ll be using the following tools…

Photoshop CS6
Illustrator CS6
Sketchbook
Chronolapse
Audacity
Twitch TV

Flashpunk
FlashDevelop
Chronolapse
Audacity
Notepad++

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 1:21 am and is filed under LD #26. 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.

provided i don’t end up jamming with someone else here’s the lowdown

c

sdl, opengl, libsackit

schismtracker

gimp

vim

no fancy asm + weird console crap this time – i’d like to have something a bit better than an exploration game

maybe this time i’ll have a bullet hell shooter ffffffffffffffffffff

also, congrats to the guy at VUW who managed to advertise a meetup by sticking a piece of paper on the roof

Well… I’m in.

It will be my first participation, my first gamejam…

Tools :
– Construct 2 (making)
– PyxelEdit (design)
– PixiTracker (sound)
– Raycasting Game Maker (oldschool making)

For the work :
– Musics : Blind Guardian / 3 Inches of Blood / Ensiferum & Hendrix
– Lot of sodas
– Lot of pizzas
– Some beer

I’ll probably livestream my jam.

See you in April 26th !

Sorry for my english, it’s not my natural langage.