I’ve been with the LD community for almost 10 years now, entered about 15 times and finished 2 games (and made one joke entry). My track record is further away from “good” than ISS is right now from me

There is a silver lining though: I have a lot of experience with failure and the last two times I’ve entered I managed to finish games I was happy with.

This is all to say that no matter if it’s your first time and you’re nervous about failure, or your 15th time and haven’t managed to finish a game yet, we’re all in this for fun and learning, and not finishing anything doesn’t mean you didn’t learn anything, and it doesn’t have to mean it wasn’t fun.

Here are a couple of things I’ve learned from my failures over the years and from actually finishing the games:

1. Eat healthy: Junk food and energy drinks might sound like the programmer’s food but in reality the healthier you eat on those days (as well as the preceding ones) the better you feel during the compo/jam, and feeling good is extremely important during such a strenuous activity.
2. Sleep enough: Also might seem contradictory to sleep a lot, but do not sacrifice sleep on the first two days as it counts to how you’ll feel during the compo. On the last day you can cut back on your sleep.
3. Clean yourself: Also very important and adds to the good feeling. I know that you’re probably not gonna meet other people during this period, but your body feels healthier when you’re clean and that is important during LudumDare.
4. Think small…. smaller…. smaller!.. Still too large! You have to think so small that quantum tunneling becomes a serious issue when developing your game! (oh wait, I’m thinking of electronics, but it still counts!) You’d be surprised how small you have to make your game to actually be able to make it, and if you’re making it in your own engine or an engine that you don’t use almost every single day then you have to think smaller yet!
5. Do not expect a theme: in fact, expect that the theme you will least like is gonna be chosen. This might sound pessimistic but after so many failures I’ve realized that imagining a game for a specific theme I liked would later on put me in a worse mood when a theme I didn’t fancy as much was announced.
6. Free your mind: Before the compo start: clean up your desk, your room, your house, do the laundry, wash the dishes, say goodbye to relatives and friends. Having a mind free of the daily responsibilities is very important, and having a clean workplace helps a lot.
7. Don’t spend too much time in social activities. I know it’s tempting and jumping onto the ludumdare IRC channel can give you an inspiration boost, but it’s very easy to lose a lot of time there, It also breaks your concentration and trains of thought.
8. When stuck, leave your pc and go for a walk: I have a personal theory: our brains have the consciousness and subconsciousness, and while it seems that it’s the consciousness is the one doing all the hard lifting, in reality it’s your subconscious that’s the real problem solver, and after it finishes processing it simply gives your conscious a solution in easily digestible chunks of info. When you’re stuck and start thinking of other stuff you stop feeding it new questions and so it has time to process your current problems. This is what, I think, the reason behind the common “after I left and came back all the solutions simply fall into place”.
9. Prepare your tools: You can use this weekend for preparation and making a small game. Being able to make a game mechanic and putting in some placeholder art is completely different from making an entire game. There’s a lot of things that you usually think take very little time but end up taking up almost entire day.  Practice making animations, make a game without any gameplay  but walking around. Even this simple concept grows greatly when you start adding the main menu, the credits, the internal level logic for starting and finishing the “game”, playing sounds on cue, playing the right music and fixing those small bugs in your game engine which might end up costing you many hours during ludum dare. <<<Prepare everything before>>>; This weekend, go, now, go!
10. Before you go: Remember why you joined this compo, it will help you keeping your eyes on the target. Now, have fun and I hope you learn lots!

All that said: i’m in!

My weapons of choice:

• Photoshop and Graphicsgale for art and animations
• My mouth, cutlery, bfxr and Audacity for sound.
• If I got time: Modplug tracker for music
• My own C++ game engine/libs to make the game (as well as some third party ones).

Hope to see you guys finish and have tons of fun

Hello!

This will be the first time I participate in the Ludum Dare compo (and in Ludum Dare in general). I will be creating a 2D game in Java, using my own engine “JangoDare” which can be found on GitHub.
It is still in development, although it is already possible to create simple games with it. The engine currently supports tiled levels, but will also support a few other level types soon (and of course you can also add own level types without modifying the library’s code, that’s no problem). It has full support for entities, and physics as well as particles (and maybe shaders/shadows) are also planned.
If you’re interested, make sure to follow the development because I will be implementing these (+ possibly more) features over time, hopefully I can finish it all until the weekend we’re all awaiting is reached.

Have fun and good luck,
JangoBrick

Of course I’m in. I’ll take part in the compo.

Depending on the theme I’ll probably use unity or flashpunk.

Other tools for me will most likely be FL studio, Photoshop and sfxr.

Best of luck to everyone! Remember to have fun 😉

I was wondering…

The mechanics of the theme slaughter works by clicking links..

How does the algorithm prevent scripts that would repeatedly vote UP for specific themes in loop?

Does anyone know if there are any abuse prevention mechanisms in the algorithm?

Just curious…

Looks like I’ll be doing Ludum Dare again. Tools:

Language: Haxe

Framework: HaxeFlixel

Images: GIMP

Sound: BFXR

Music: Who knows?

Hello everyone,

Can’t wait for next week, I’m actually excited!

This will be my second Ludum entry, last year I made an extremely simple game and was very happy with my ability to actually get something finished. However this year I hope to step it up a notch and submit something a little more fleshed out.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the warm up during the weekend, but I’ll spend the week toying with (and working on) the graphics engine I’ve been making over the last month or so in preparation. A little warm up of my own if you will.

I plan to broadcast the whole thing via my twitch account (twitch.tv/noomnahor). I’ll also be doing live broadcasts during the compo itself, and intend to make a time lapse to post onto my youtube channel.

Really looking forward to seeing what people can come up with this year, I think my favourite part of Ludum Dare is playing all the amazing games that come out of it.

Hope you all have a great Easter weekend, see you next week!

Will Notch participate in this Ludum Dare? Does anybody know? I am just curious about that.

Hey guys! Ready for round 3 of the Ludum Dare! This time I’ll be using LynxJS as my game library and photoshop CC for graphics!

I might be entering with a team this round, depending on everyone’s availability. If not, I’ll see you all in the competition!

I everyone  this is my second time on LD Hopefully I have more free time then last one

I’ll be in the team LD with Java and probably will be using Cherno engine available on github (https://github.com/TheCherno/Cherno) with some changes that I will make during the LD.

Wish everyone a good LD and lots of fun!

Hey guys!

I can’t wait for this to start. I hope I can live up the the standard set by my last game 😛

Tools i’ll be using:

• LANGUAGE: C#
• FRAMEWORK: UNITY
• SOUND: BFXR, AUDACITY
• ART: GIMP, Paint.NET

Happy Jammin~

Last LD, I finished a game for the first time (Woo!). This LD, I hope to up my game and do even better! This time around, I’m going to attempt to enter the main event (Note: Attempt).

Either way, it promises to be a fun weekend!

My tools this time around:
-LWJGL and Eclipse

-Paint.NET (For obligatory crappy artwork)

-sfxr (For generating last minute sound effects)

Happy Ludum Dare, and may the theme be ever in your favor!

Last time I didn’t manage to get anything in – I had a real block in creativity and ended up feeling sorry for myself for the rest of the competition.

However, this time I vow to get SOMETHING submitted, and I’m going to try my damn best to make it decent. Here’s hoping.

• LANGUAGE: Javascript
  
• FRAMEWORK: Quintus
  
• SOUND: BFXR, Audacity, Incompetech music, http://soundation.com/studio
  
• ART: PyxelEdit
  

This year I’ll be doing 2D, using the Quintus framework. I was thinking about using Phaser, but I don’t think I’ll be able to effectively get used to using it and optimize how I do things with it well enough before Ludum Dare roles around. Quintus also allows me to actually get the game up and running quickly, which is a huge plus especially for prototyping and quick game jams like this.

This’ll be my first time making a game in 2D, though I’m hoping I can get something done for the warmup jam this weekend. I’ve also literally learned how to draw very basic pixel art in about the past two days, so we’ll see how that goes. Hopefully 2D is easier to develop in than a 3D game in Unity…We’ll see.

Happy jamming everyone!

Now that I have declared that I have no way to back out right? This will be my first Daring adventure and I am very excited.

I will be using these tools.

Dev Tool: Construct 2

Sound: BFXR and Audacity maybe

Scripting: Notepad++

Art: Photoshop

Hope every one finds success in it’s many forms this Ludum Dare.  Now to go do some prep.

Unity? Check.
Better practices than last time? Check.
Better knowledge of shaders? Check.
Terribly sick like last time? … Well, so far it’s a no!

It’s only my second Ludum Dare to take part in, but I’ve followed ’em for years! I’m in it to win i- wait, no. That other thing… I’m in it for the fun!

I can’t wait for it to start! I’ll be ready and waiting and then it’ll begin and I’ll see the theme and panic and freak out and then it’ll be Sunday and it’ll be over and we’ll all have our games done. It’s gonna be fun on a bun!

Pretty excited/scared! Finished a few games before but none in two days!

Gonna be using my usual as i know nothing else…

Game maker studio – code

Photoshop/Illustrator – graphics

Famitracker/FL studio – sound

This was going to be my second Ludum dare- however I feel I should delay it until I explore the wonderful language of C++ a little bit more. Just to perfect my skills. I will Probably participate in the next Ludum dare though 😀

I’ve been wanting to join LD for so long now but it never matched with my family calendar. But this time I am in! And although I’m terribly excited I hope I’ll finish the weekend with a playable something that I can call a game

My tools will be

• for Code: Game Maker:Studio
• for Graphics: Real Draw PRO and/or Pyxeledit and/or Game Maker’s builtin Sprite editor
• for Sound: any of those SFXR things or a microphone, no idea yet for any music

Good luck to all participants,

Thomas

After Minimum Friction on Ludum Dare 26, and 10 Seconds Warning on Ludum Dare 27, I’m back for more programming fun. hopefully real life won’ t get in the way and I’ll make it as expected. My tools of the trade:

• Arch Linux
• g++ and Netbeans
• Gimp
• SFML 2
• The menu, splash, joystick and credits code I used for 10 Seconds Warning.
• Audacity, sfxr, Otomata and Punk-o-matic. Or whatever I can use to make sounds and irritate people.
• Mingw32 to cross compile my game for Windows.
• An Epson scanner if I ever feel the need to scan something into bits.

As usual, I’ll try to get a beta out by Saturday, but most likely will do a final build 5 minutes before the final deadline on Sunday. LOL!

Hi!I’m new here.I found this event in my familiar’s facebook posts.This is really interesting!

My programs that is use:

-Game Maker:Studio (Early Access)

-If (graphics==”HIGH”) {

use(“Gimp”);

} else {

use(“Game Maker built-in image editor”);

}

Sound: I can’t handle any sfx sound maker (Like Audacity and etc.)  

I hope i’ll make a game that will be enjoyable.

(Sorry for my bad english:I’m a 14 years old children from Hungary)

This will be our fourth Ludum Dare (mini included) since December 2013 😀

And we just opened our site : http://schizokoa.com/ our blog and all our games are there, come and say hi!