Well we’re always looking to try something new, so here’s a voting round for the participants of MiniLD #14, the team competition.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-14/

I plan to leave it up for about a week, so act now. If you entered MiniLD #14, please give your fellow entries a spin. We need a majority of you to vote on everything to get some decent statistics.

Good luck!

EDIT: Aaaaand switched off. See link above for results.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 4:10 am and is filed under MiniLD #14. 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 took forever to compile and get online ok, anyhoo, its a timelapse of both me and Logan making ‘Delusional’

Tags: timelapse

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 am and is filed under MiniLD #14. 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.

My college has finally released its grip on my spare time. I have very few assignments to complete, and most of them are from a professor who is very laid-back about due dates. (She’s good with herding cats)

I have two exams, one is effectively open-book, and the other is a UNIX/Linux exam where we can use the man/info pages as much as we want. Which may as well be open-book.

I’m looking forward to this coming LD.

—-

My plans for the compo are still up in the air, but I’ve decided on the following for sure:

• I’m using C++ and SDL
• I’m building with make
• I’m using GIMP to make the sprites
• I will use a plain file-hosting service, because making new GoogleCode pages just feels dumb.
• I will use SFXR again, because it’s awesome

I liked my idea of holding myself to multiple themes last time around, so I’m going to do that again.

I have some thoughts about what I’m going to do with my concept. I like the thought of a game about an animal hunting prey. It’s something that I haven’t seen done, and I think it’d be a fun game to play. Creating a fighting game would be fun if I could get the assets done in time. Casual games are an interesting idea, and would be a nice change of pace for me.

My favorite idea out of those is having an animal as a protagonist, which will definitely be a major idea in my game.

The idea of a virtual pet kinda appeals to me. It would be really tricky to do well, though, and I don’t think I’ll pursue it.

I dunno. I’ll probably post again once I have some certainty.

Peace,
Mr. Dude

I didn’t do caverns due to family obligations, but I’ve just realised what a dramatic increase in quality the competition eventually produced.

Terrifying!

Doing this one though, wild animals wouldn’t stop me. (Hey, theme idea.) Gonna need to serously up my game this time. . .

See you all in a week and a half. :O

Guess who’s back for another round of LD? That’s right, the one and only brandonman! So, i plan to be less unachievably ambitious this time around. The 3d cavern was just too ambitious to get done AND have AI in the time alotted. Maybe this time I could still stay 3D, but have no AI? We’ll see. Also, I’m going to put a bit more time into music. Maybe it can get me charting. Also, last game, the player moved WAAAAY too slowly. That wont happen this time. Woot Woot, competitions getting fierce with me here! xD

I’ve decided to do a “Warm-up” game this weekend.  The theme is Art Game À la Experimental Game Project I’ll be using the Flixel Flash Game Engine, my first foray into Flash.

Just thought I’d share in case anyone else wanted to join me.

Rules?  We don’t need no stinking rules.

Tags: warm-up

Like a broken record, my Java basecode for the Ludum Dare 48 Hour Game Programming Competition #16 is largely the same as the past two three four five competitions. I haven’t made any changes to it since the last compo, despite saying that I wanted to. Recently I have been dabbling with C++ again, though I don’t feel that I’d manage very well using it in a compo at this time.

Download it here.

• Goals are pretty much repeating what I said last time:
• Keep the same art style as last time.  I sketched things out on paper and scanned them in so I could colorize. Keeping with bold colors and gradients is probably what I’ll do.
• KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid! Making something too complex is just a recipe for a headache at 1pm on Sunday afternoon.
• Make useful additions to the basecode that can be used in later competitions. The screenshot stuff is an example of something I did previously that helps out a lot.
• Finish most of the work by Saturday night so I can spend Sunday polishing.
• Don’t run into dumb problems that eat up eight hours.

Tools in use:

• Java 6 SDK (though last time I included a version for JDK 5)
• Eclipse IDE
• Photoshop, maybe some Illustrator
• DrPetter’s sfxr for sound effects
• Audition, if I can get it to play well with my sound card
• HP OfficeJet 6450 All-In-One for scanning doodles
• No Fear Energy Drink Sugar Free (Hopefully Boris Said and Carter Racing will run some Sprint Cup this year)
• Everlasting Gobstoppers
• mIRC for chattery
• Killer Game Programming in Java and the base code I mentioned above.

Can’t wait to see what the theme is.  Hope it’s a fun one!

Tags: basecode, ld48_16

So, I just now took a look at the LudumDare site, and see the counter…

7 days left!

Naturally, I flipped out and started to hyperventilate. I soon realized that it was the same weekend I had to leave on saturday to participate in a competition elsewhere.

I knew I should’ve looked sooner! I could’ve tied the vote! XD

Anyhow, despite these problems, I’ll still try and get something in. So, that’s all.

To prepare for LudumDare 16, I have made a TODO list.
1.) get back on IRC (it’s not LD without it)
2.) salvage some old code (I have a c++/SDL game framework lying around somewhere, just need to detach it from an older project)
3.) do some prep code, tools
I know exactly what kind of game mechanic I will be going for (probably not :P), so I’m going to try to do some tools, that might come handy. Of course, they will be available to everyone prior to the start of the competition, along with the framework (if I can find it, and patch it up).

Tags: prep

Lately, I’ve been mostly using Unity for my game development needs, but I’m kinda bugged about the various limitations the free version has, so I’m now looking at using the Ogre 3D rendering engine for my graphics. OIS for input, OpenAL for audio, Bullet for physics if I need any. Ogitor for a scene/level editor possibly. Does anybody have experiences with any of these? I suppose I am still missing some sort of unifying “game engine” part here, but I have to do some work, don’t I? 😉
In other news, I just went through some surgery on wednesday, so I’m not quite sure yet whether I’ll be fit to participate in LD16, but so far I’m feeling really good so I think I’ll be able to make something.

Tags: bullet, ld16, ogitor, ogre, openal, unity

Well, last contest I think I bit off more than I could chew.

I tried to use a new language Processing, which I wasn’t that familiar with. That’s extremely hard to do, even though the language is actually really easy to learn. It’s a simple language designed for creating graphics.

My goal in the last contest was to create a game that only used dynamically created graphics. I think the fact that I was unfamiliar with Processing hurt me in trying to do this. Also, dynamically created graphics requires algorithms that take a lot of trial and error. I ran out of time before I really got going.

I have been playing with the UDK and I’ve been considering using that to create something,  but I really am still lost because there is so much there. I think it just feels a little too much like work to mess around with for a fun contest. Playing with UDK has made me realize something: that it is all about content these days, and not so much about programming any more.

So with that I’ve decided I want to focus on “Eye-Candy” this year. Even though I’m not an artist, I think I’ve come up with a way to create great art of the year’s entry. For Christmas this year, I’m getting about a 3K digital camera setup which includes a Canon 7D, an amazing Tamron 60MM f2 Macro lens, a Canon Speedlite 580EX II flash and a ridiculously fast high-capacity CF card.

So Saturday morning, after I already have a game design, I’m going to spend half the day taking pictures for my game. All backgrounds and game objects will be real life objects. The macro lens will let me do close ups of things such as toy cars or tops as objects and water and sand and such for interesting effects and backgrounds. I might even dabble in trying to use the video since the 7d has an amazing 1920x1080x30 video mode.

The RAW pictures I’ll be taking will be a resolution of 5184 x 3456 and they will be extremely high resolution, sharp pictures, so I’m expecting to come up with some amazing graphics. I’ll use photoshop CS4 to process them and the Ez Mask plugin to extract any backgrounds from foreground objects I want in my game. Ultimately, I’ll probably downscale the graphics quite a bit and create JPGs out of the backgrounds and PNGs out of the objects. I still want the game to be hi-res, so I think I might aim at 1920×1080 resolution for the game. This will be interesting and fun, and I look forward to getting my camera next week to try out my ideas.

I want to spend more time on the content and less on the actual programming, so I’ve decided to use something simple, an easy 2d framework preferably. Yet I want high performance because this is going to be a high-resolution game with a ton of huge images. So I’ve decided to use the Community Framework of BlitzMax. I’ve got several game examples and it looks like this should be super easy to code, so I can focus more on the graphics and gameplay. Small amounts of code goes a long way in blitz.

I don’t know what the gameplay is going to be because I don’t know what the theme is, but all I know is I am going for super simple gameplay. Again I want to spend as much time as I can putting “eye-candy” in the game and not writing complex algorithms.

Well, let’s see how it goes this year. I’m sure there will be plenty of challenges as there always is, and things don’t end up as I plan. But it is always fun to try!

I’m probably going to make a game. I’ll probably use some kind of tool to do it, like a programming language or some game-creation program. My game will probably also have some gameplay in it.

This is our first time competing in LD48 (although not our first time competing in a short dev cycle contest). Hopefully, we’ve prepared enough; starting with a mostly-working engine instead of rolling one from scratch on contest day should help.

The obligatory stats:

Tools:

• compilation and linking: GNU toolchain
• graphics: GIMP 2.2
• sound: MilkyTracker, SFXR
• level: Mappy
• engine & framework: preexisting custom 2D
• helper libs: Allegro 4.2, DUMB, fBlend
• target platforms: Win32, x86 Linux, GP2X (maybe)

We’ll see how things go.

More about the internals:

In accordance with contest rules, here’s a note on how the framework and tile engine work.

The game is treated as a series of states – a state for the main menu, a state for gameplay, and so on. There is a state structure that looks like so:

typedef struct
{
unsigned which;
void (*init)(void);
void (*tick)(void);
void (*draw)(void);
void (*load)(void);
void (*unload)(void);
} GAMESTATE;

Before we start executing any game logic, there is an array of gamestate structs that gets populated with the functions from the various states. Each state reads input, advances counters, starts sounds, etc. in tick() and does all its painting in draw(), and these both get called at a regular rate. init() is called to reset any internal variables to their start values, and load() and unload() get or free assets from disk.

Tilemap internals

This is fairly straightforward – a level has several planes, each of which are an array of bytes that control things like what tile should be drawn where, what eyecandy should be applied to it, entity spawn points and the like.

Other

There are functions to do a few graphical tricks like waviness in water tiles, a circular wipe, full-screen blur, etc.

While at the same time studying for the exams :]

Hello! It’s my first time at LD, and I WON’T chicken out at the last moment like I did with the miniLD…

I’m just getting the feel of the posting system for now but my game engine is ready, keyboard cleaned of crumbs, screen polished to a shine and my damn DVD drive still not working.

Anyways, you got any tips for a LD beginner?

[EDIT] DAMN! My engine is still lacking sound and map loading, the keyboard still has crumbs in it and my screen has fingerprints all over it!! This is all going to hell! Well… at least the DVD drive is working…

[EDIT2] It’s  still not working!!

I probably will not know whether I am going to compete in this or not until the Theme is announced. I have an AI project I need to get done for school as it is due the week after the contest. If I get it done before hand or far enough along, I probably will.

If I do this will be the second LD I have entered. For LD15 this past August, I used C++/SDL as a platform. I may pull up that code from before and work with it some more, or I might actually use C#/XNA. I believe this is allowable by the rules? XNA is not open source, but is freely available. I will double check this.

At the moment, I am leaning towards C++/SDL as I would like to keep developing the 2D framework I started in the last LD. My goal with it is to create a game library that facilitates creating 2D games in as easy a manner as possible. I’m taking inspiration here from various other game libraries, Slick, XNA and even Ogre3D among others.  I am doing this in an effort to develop my object oriented design skills as well. I believe that entering the LD contests is a great way to do this development, as I can easily judge how easy it actually is to use.

Regardless if I enter or not, I can’t wait to play some of the games! Good luck everyone!

\m/ Casey

Yo!

I shall partake this time round. Lessons learned from previous attempts were crystal clear; I should stick to what I’m good at. Well, I’m a web developer by trade, so instead of futzing about incompetently with triangles, I shall instead endeavour to create a web game, if I can come up with an appropriate idea for the theme

Tools:

PHP, Javascript, Eclipse PDT, Apache, GD Library, An Image Editor which may begin with the letter P

Pre-existing custom-built libraries:

Simplified MVC framework for PHP, with a single entry point for normal requests, Ajax requests, and scheduled cron tasks. I’ll share the code once the Model portion is not an unreadable mess.

Javascript library for handling Ajax requests.

A few custom JS widgets:

– Debugging console

– Wrapper for Canvas functionality

– Various interface bits and bobs

If realtime multiplayer interaction is appropriate, I may incorporate a Javascript/Flash socket bridge as long-polling over Ajax is a painful misery.

Good luck, everyone 😀

Gonna be using as3/flixel/some of my own collision detection code.

Well will try to participate. Last time went experimenting with some ideas and was not able to finish a game in time. Rather ended up with some toy.

This time I am not shore how much time I will have and how creative my mood will be so probably if I will try making something it will be simple/small with intent to finish something.

As for tools as usual Flash AS3 + my code, probably will not be using any libs except for may be some Box2D in case theme and game idea will need some solid physics.

This is my second LD and I’m ready to throw down.  My goal is to place in a category, and sleep less.  Last compo I scored #6 in audio so this time around I will spend some extra time writing songs.  I also am planning on making a timelapse of my work.

I’ll be making my game with Blender 2.49 (go Blender!)

Other software I plan to use: Photoshop, Reason.

To get ready, I’ve been practicing on my midi keyboard and writing a python GUI class to help handle my interface objects in Blender (will post if i finish).

Ciao!

I was hoping to be able to participate in LD16, and I’ll still try to get something in. Since I’m in the middle of a move, though, it’ll probably be something fairly small. That might be a good thing in any case, though, since my LD15 entry was too ambitious by far and suffered badly for it.

In any case, if I am able to participate, tools will be the same as in LD15; ruby, gosu, pixen, mercurial, and (hopefully) sfxr.

At the moment my computer is in a box, however, so prospects are somewhat dim; I don’t plan to set up a development environment on my girlfriend’s laptop (where I’m typing this), that would be rude.