I participated in the last ludum dare! I will be using Unity and (depending on the theme) other tools such as Aseprite, Tiled, and Tiled2Unity! I’ve been working on a cool platformer so I have been improving my 2D games! Have fun everyone

I might be in!?!

I might be in to Ludum dare 36 compo

I currently am learning java

I might be in if I learn enough to program a game

I have a decent idea that should work with my limited knowledge.

I will be using the following :

my hands.

part of my brain.(The other half just doesn’t wake up!)

eclipse

and skilzzzzzzz

that last one is really gonna come in handy!

This will be my third Ludumdare and I’m looking forward to it.

Tools:

• Unity
• Inkscape
• Gimp
• Bosca Ceoil

Also about to finish the game from the last Ludumdare… here a sneakpeak

PLAY NOW

Theme slaughter is on,so naturally I binge rated and went accross hundreds of themes.Here are a few that made me giggle,and maybe will brighten up your day a bit. In no particular order:

Custard is the sweetest revenge

Sasha Gray

George Bule was true

All your base are belong to HIM!!!

Humanity United Behind Single Lawn Mower

Chipoltle Church hats have no natural predators

This was no boating accident!

Ham and Banananas

In a galaxy far far away,space bears

flaming penguin

breast feeding

I put on my robe and wizard hat

Suddenly,Sushi

Nanobots,Nanobots Everywhere!

Secrets make excellent loft insulation

Your grand parents would be so proud of you

Nietzsche, Bananas & Ham

Make Donald Drumpf again

Shave The Whales

Bryan Cranston plays Matt Damon

Determinism

Shalt thou count to three, no more, no less

Donald Trump with Lasers

For Mini Ludum Dare 69 I wanted to create a simple strategy game about colonizing an unknown continent (inspired by Africa). But in the end I was only able to create a simple continent generator, which would’ve been the first step towards an actual game. At the next Ludum Dare I definitely need to pay attention that I start with actual gameplay and build upon that – but that just as a side-note.

In this post I just want to roughly outline how I went about generating the continent – and maybe it’s helpful for you and/or we can discuss about possible improvements or alternative methods :).

Try out the Continent Generator if you like: Try it out.

The article is below the “Read the rest of this entry”.

Overview

1. Basic Data Structures
2. Continent Shape
3. Generating Areas
4. Filling Areas
5. Conclusion

Basic Data Structures

I use a Hex Grid data structure based on the amazing article Hexagonal Grid article by Redblobgames. Basically the Hex Grid is represented by a 3-dimensional coordinate system describing all three directions of a hexagon (q, r and s, with s being redundant and calculated by s = -(q + r). But it is useful for calculating symmetric shapes).

Continent Shape

For generating the continent shape I merged two symmetric shapes like those shown in the picture above: A big hexagon of radius 8-10 with one big diamond shape with (q,r,s)-radius of either (6,10,6), (7,11,7) or (8,12,8).

Then I chose the offset to attach the diamond shape to the hexagon shape as following: Start with an offset of (q,r)-coordinates (4,5) or (4,6) and then rotate it randomly by 60°, 120°, 180°, 240°, 300°, 360° around the origin. Rotation by 60° is done by shifting the (q,r,s)-coordinates (s being implicitly defined by -(q + r)) to the right or left and flipping the signs. So for (4,6) all rotations would be (10, -4), (6, -10), (-4, -6), (-10, 4) and (-6, 10).

All possible offsets generated by this method are shown by the grey hexes in the image above.

Generating Areas

After generating the landmasses I thought about adding areas to my map – in my case three areas: A desert, a green savannah and a mountain range. They are all generated using the same method with different parameters.

The 5 parameters of my method are:

• length of the basic shape
• radius of the area around the basic shape
• random curve chance which decides how straight or curved the basic shape will be
• curve timeout which specifies how many straight steps must be between curves
• outer layer noise chance which specifies how many of the outer layer hexes will be randomly removed to create a more ragged appeareance.

The basic algorithm is like this

1. Basic shape generation
   1. Start with Hex (0, 0) and choose a random direction (one of the sides of the hex) as current direction.
   2. For 1 to length:
      1. Add the neighboring hex in the current direction to the shape
      2. If there is at least a number of curve timeout steps since the last direction change:
         1. With a random chance of random curve chance change the current direction to one of the neighboring directions (turning left or right)
2. Area generation
   1. Add the basic shape to the area.
   2. For 1 to radius (the current layer):
      1. For all directly neighboring hexes of the area:
         1. If it is not yet the outermost layer:
            1. Add that hex to the area
         2. Else:
            1. Don’t add the hex with a random chance of outer layer noise chance

So in order to generate the three areas in my example I used following parameters:

• Desert:
  • length: randomly chosen between continent width /2 and continent width
  • radius: Randomly chosen between 3 and 4
  • curve chance: 50%
  • curve timeout: 1
  • outer layer noise: 50%
• Green Savannah:
  • length: randomly chosen between continent width /2 and continent width
  • radius: Randomly chosen between 5 and 6
  • curve chance: 30%
  • curve timeout: 2
  • outer layer noise: 50%
• Mountain Range:
  • length: randomly chosen between continent width /2 and continent width
  • radius: 0 (only the basic shape)
  • curve chance: 80%
  • curve timeout: 0
  • outer layer noise: 0%

After generating the areas, they are placed on the continent: The desert in the upper third, the jungle and mountain range in the lower third. Hexes that fall outside the continent or are already occupied by another area (except when placing the mountain range, which is placed on top) are ignored when placing.

Since the directions were not limited in any way and the areas were placed in relation to their center, some of the areas reach sometimes quite a bit outside of their designed area.

Filling Areas

Finally a few words about filling the areas. Basically I use a weighted random choice between all of the tiles of the particular area. Everything not filled by an non-mountain area was filled with the grassland tiles (second row). In my case those were (always in order from left to right on the tileset above):

• Desert: 4 : 1 (only few cacti)
• Green Savannah: 2 : 2 : 2 : 1 (rather more than less trees)
• Grassland: 3 : 3 : 3 : 1  (Not wanting too many Zebras)

Conclusion

That’s all about my simple continent generator. It’s still very simplistic and there are many things that could be improved – first and foremost giving the continent shape a more realistic ragged appearance.
And while writing this article I felt it would be nice to have something like a node based editor to just plug together several components to easily create different kinds of complex generators from simple parts – well maybe on another day 😉

Thank you for your interest and reading this far and I hope it was helpful to you in any way.

Feel free to leave a comment and if you are interested in my game developing endeavours (and 8 bit pixelart which I retweet quite a lot :D) then follow me on Twitter:

Tags: hex grid, procedural content generation

I’m Not Quite Sure What the Game will Be Called But I will Update You Guys When i Figure it out.

This is going to be my first ludumdare.

The tools i am going to use are:

• Unity
• Photoshop
• Blender
• BFXR
• LMMS
• C#
• inkScape

Tags: Ludum Dare

I will be using Clickteam Fusion.

Tags: First Ludum dare

We are excited to join the fray (…two of us)!
Just for the heck of it, here’s a survival game project (in progress of course :P)

Added some glorious Gibzzzzz! pic.twitter.com/3m2p4ChCyK

— Cory Mollenhour (@wr4th) March 5, 2016

i tried so many times to finish a game in 72hours but always i quit by the work…

but this time… THIS TIME!!!…. i´m going to make it… i swear!!..

I´m in.

Hopefully I’ll finish in time this will be my first time. Although I’m soloing the game I’ll go the jam route. 72 hours=more time

It will be my first time participating, plus I’m still quite the novice in the field.

I’ll be using: Blender, Audacity and maybe Gimp depends on the theme.

Good luck to everyone.

This will be the fourth time participating for me. And hopefully the third time finishing and submitting.

I’m disappointed because I recently found out that the ratings/voting system for this Ludum Dare will not be used, I personally find the week after the jam to be the most exciting playing other peoples game and rating them and then getting comments back from other people! It might be silly but I don’t find much incentive to play others game or even participate and crunch a weekend without the ratings system. So I hope it’s back for the next event.

Other than that this is the tools I plan on using for this event, Unity is the game engine I will most likely use and then probably use the 2D mode in Unity since I make mostly 2D games. For making art/sprites I will use Gimp because It’s easy and fast to setup and just sketching out something simple. Lastly I will use BFXR for sound.

*Just re-read the post about the jam and I think the comments are still on even though there’s no voting so that’s good.

I will be entering LD 36. This will be my first full LD. I entered an unfinished game to MiniLD 69 to try out game development. I will be using python 3 with the pygame library.

Tags: LD36

Maybe gonna participate, but as of yet, not 100% sure.

Gonna be bringing my HTML5 game library ( https://github.com/Brian151/UnNamed-html5-Game-Library ), again, with some new features currently being developed in derivative projects, or even entirely off to the side. Hopefully some bug fixes will also be implemented, because I’ve found some big ones.

Using Paint Dot Net for graphics, it’s my image editor of preference.

CreateJS may be utilized for some sprite-related stuff, mainly because the sprite classes in my library are presently very bad.

There may or may not be a sound engine, and in any case, I don’t think I can do very much music or sfx composition.

I may use a modified version of the following for my tilemap editing, assuming that it gets finished in time, and that I even use tilemaps:  https://github.com/Brian151/spongebobzelda/tree/master/utils/SBZBuilder (One of the snags my previous/first LD hit was that tilemaps are a pain to manually edit.) Before I get complaints or something about this : purely the code parts of the application will be copied, SBLK assets/refs will be purged

Anyways, I still am not guaranteeing I will participate in this. IRL has me very busy, and I’m working quite extensively on my many other projects right now.

Follow-up post will be made after I’ve confirmed whether or not I shall participate or not.

Im new to unity tho but I will try. This is also my first time in ld.

Heya. First real Ludum Dare, I am really excited to participate. I have made entries for Mini LD 67 and 68, but this will be even more intense I guess. I’ll be using Game Maker Studio for programming, PyxelEdit for graphics and sfxr for sounds. I also plan to livestream. Good luck in advance to everyone!

Hi… I was wondering how the hole thing with the game having its own site where you can post upgrades and such works??? Or do I just post those like this one and they get organised… can somebody clearify please…

I’m pretty new to Ludum Dare. I just recently got into game development, but I’ve been programming for years. I’ve been using python 3 with the pygame library for game development. Around the website, I’ve seen a few people using python as well. I’ve heard python isn’t the best for game development, and I’m using it currently because that’s the main language I’ve been coding in. I have a few questions about python and game development:

Is python good for game development? Why or why not?

Are there any tools or libraries you would recommend?

Have you used python for game development in the past, and do you currently?

Right now my impression is that, as python is a high level language, it is slower for memory intensive games. If I continue with game development, I would probably switch to another language. So far I haven’t had any problems with it, because I’ve been programming pretty simplistic 2D games.

Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

Tags: game development, pygame, pygame python, python

Hey Guys,

I am hoping to be able to participate in Ludum Dare #36, but I will be in school until 3:15 on the starting day, and will start when I get home…

Tools Using:

Unity 5

Agisoft PhotoScan Professional

Photoshop CS6

Blender

I’m in for the 7th time, just like last time I will be using!

Language and Library: Java Swing

Graphics: Paint.NET,  Piskel, maybe Inkscape and Synfig

Music: LMMS, maybe  Abundant Music. Depends on how much time I have left

SFX: Might use SFXR if I have time or just Audacity.

Cannot wait!