My apologies for the delay! I did not intend for MiniLD to just stop.

It is time for the entrants to vote!

Voting is now open! Since it was delayed, I hope it can run for a bit more than a week to give people who aren’t paying attention a chance to see that MiniLD voting is happening in the first place.

Delays aside, this MiniLD was off the hook, as I expected! There were 24 submitted entries (is that a record for a MiniLD?)! We had one entry finished in hours! We had games about fishing, games about poop, and games about spaceships. We had 2D games and 3D games. We had artistic games and mindlessly entertaining games. All in all, I’m very pleased with the quantity and quality of games made with the theme Greed and the special rule “Only one of each”.

So get voting, MiniLDers! Celebrate your awesomeness!

EDIT: Voting will end on August 2nd, so make sure you’ve got your votes in!

Tags: greed, only one

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 7:53 pm and is filed under MiniLD #20. 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.

A huge thank you to GBGames for following up on our requests for voting. You are one classy dude and the entire Ludum Dare community gives you a giant group hug.

Gratefully,
- BMcF

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 12:46 pm and is filed under MiniLD #20. 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 first official attempt at making an entry resulted in this flash thing: http://danik.gotdns.org/flash/crystals/index.html The crystals are randomly generated to be unique. The goal of the game I had in mind was to collect the crystals using the mouse as a magnet, but I didn’t have enough time by far this weekend to pull it off, so I just ended up with this little “demo”.

Crystals screenshot

Ok, I decided to invest some time to change my game a little bit. Most important, the guys are now able to drink beer! Therefore I modelled a can with the very uncommen brand: BEER 😀

But it is not only the beer drinking (the ‘punishment’ if you lost all your money) I actually changed the concept around the ‘blackjack’-scenario. Now it is more ongoing. You have money and decide how much you want to bet in a ‘match’ if you win you double, if not you lose it.And so forth…

Beside that I wanted to make the game more ‘game-like’ with an ‘esc’-key popup (resume,restart,exit) and a main-menu with instructions (that are for sure still very confusing), exit, infos etc. Actually I planned to change the mutant-fishes to real ones but I am too lazy now and somehow I feel cofortable now with my friends:’Hungry Eye’,’Hungry Eye’,’Glitshi’,etc (Who knows what kind of new fishes deep water horizion will produce…) . I added some birds that fly around, a wave sound and one nice fish (you can’t grab). Well,…actually as I wrote this down I wonder why this took me another 2 days and it is still such a boring game :D. It was for sure fun and I will upload it to a gaming-platform (the first time since my very first game ) and the people teact! (The first one I showed it was not very nice :D, but I don’t care!)

Here are the links:

WEBSTART WINDOWS .EXE

Ah here a beer-action-scene:

Actually I also planned to have gunshooting towards the opponet’s boat and fightings but first I rigged the models really poor for real animations and 2nd it’s enough now. I still have one game to finish and want to start something new… 😀

It was a pleasure. Looking forward to the next LD,

ToM

Only a few days left to vote and comment on Mini LD #20! Have fun!

It’s time to check out the final tallies at the MiniLD #20 page! Congratulations go to gold medalists ExciteMike for Fun, TimSwast for Game Play, and increpare for Presentation! Also, the gold medals for Coolest entries go to Breakdance McFunkypants, wyverex, and 31eee384!

I’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who participated! It was a fun MiniLD, and I look forward to developing alongside many of you for the major LD coming up in a few weeks.

Just wanted to share this little tool I made for Windows users. It takes your EXE and all its data files (even DLLs) and packages them into one EXE for users to run. Thought it was a perfect fit for Ludum Dare!

Hi Ludum Darers! There’s a game challenge starting tomorrow that I thought some people here might be interested in – RPGDX’s Alternate History RPG Challenge.

Participants have one week to make an RPG that explores the theme Alternate History. It’s very informal; there’s no voting and collaborations are encouraged! More info here.

This is not a game design-related post, nor even a computing-related post, except in a very abstract sense. It is to draw your attention to the fact that a solution to one of the world’s six hardest mathematical problems has been published. It has yet to be checked, and some people believe it may have holes in it, but this is still a very large development in the field.

P!=NP is a statement about the time it would take a computer to solve a certain class of problems: the “NP” class (which stands for “non-deterministic polynomial” if that means anything to you). If it takes a long time to solve a problem from scratch, but a short time to check your solution afterwards, that’s an NP problem. As an analogy, consider a 1,000,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It may take months or years to complete, but if someone claims they have finished it already, it only takes a second to check if they are telling the truth. The question is whether such problems exist (P!=NP), or whether there is always a simple way to solve them from scratch (P=NP). This question may seem very abstract, but it has a lot of important applications – such as optimising computer networks or creating secure encryptions.

Examples of famous NP problems include the Travelling Salesman problem, which is to find the shortest route through a city while passing everyone’s door at least once (this city may have overpasses and tunnels), the Knapsack Problem, which is how to fit the most value into a knapsack when you have a number of objects of known price and size, and solving many popular puzzles like Sudoku or Minesweeper. The paper at www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/Papers/pnp12pt.pdf concerns itself with the Conjunctive Boolean Satisfiability problem, which asks whether a list of logical statements can all be true at once. It asserts that the amount of time it would take a computer to solve such a problem increases very quickly – faster than any polynomial function of the problem’s complexity, in fact. If the proof turns out to be correct, Vinay Deolalikar may just have won a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

A number of blogs and magazines have already published links to this article. I thought you might be interested as well.

For the next Ludum Dare I want to try using a language that I’m actually familiar with for once, so I’m looking at C# libraries.

I’m considering three c# libraries at this point:

1) SFML

This one looks very straightforward. Simple class structure. Kind of a SDL done right with lots of organized classes. It was easy to build a simple game with it. Does not have any of the advanced stuff of a game library like physics or collision. The thing is I would want to use the 2.0 version that is in beta and I haven’t got that working with .NET and Visual Studio 2010 (works fine with 2008). I really want to use the latest tools and frameworks for this competition. Maybe I will check the beta soon and see if it is ready for prime time with 2010.

2) SlimDX

This is basically a C# wrapper for DirectX and Direct2D and all of Microsoft’s graphic stuff. New version in June came out and now it supports DirectX 11. I’d really like to play with this. Can probably get some great performance out of it. It has x64 frameworks and .NET 4.0 frameworks and it fully supports Visual Studio 2010. Looks like a good option if I really want to put the petal to the metal (with c#). I am looking at the samples right now. Not very familiar with it though. Need to do more research.

3) FlatRedBall

This is a game framework with advanced stuff like collision and physics. It runs under XNA or MDX. It is updated every month so that is nice. So far I have only got it working with Visual Studio 2008 though. Has a lot of specific formats and tools. For example there is an Animation Editor you use to build animations, and an AI editor for AI. I am looking at this one closely. It is really well structured and I was able to put together a simple asteroids game in about 10-15 minutes. I will probably choose this one if I manage to spend the time to get familiar with it. I really want to do some animations in this game, so it will depend on if I think I can get the tools working though.

Those are the options I’m considering. I have used XNA before and don’t want to use it for this competition.

Have you tried any of these libraries? Have any recommendations or tips?

Thanks.

Hiya, its me again 😀

I realise i hvn’t really been active over the past few months, but i will probably be participating in LD#18 (yay)

I will give final confirmation depending on the amount of homework i have that weekend, but look forward to a wacky GM game from me!

What was supposed to be a quick appstore-cash-in port, kind of dragged on for a couple months. But I’m finally done. I had a serious case of feature creep.

There’s tons of new stuff. Mainly shooting, seeing as how that was the only fun part of the original Oregon Trail. Also, in a cruel twist, you now have to carry the gold from El Dorado back home.

The game’s site is: solongoregon.captain-games.com

Couldn’t have done it without the ridiculous forced brain-explosion that is LD.  So if anyone here would like a promo code, shoot me a message.

Hi everybody!

I finally drafted up the rules for the new Ludum Dare, inclusive of the separate Compo and Jam plans. You can read them here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/rules/

This is your last chance to comment on them, make suggestions, and critique my grammar. I’d like this set in stone for Monday, so act now!

Also, Phil made some big improvements to the submission and voting system. You can help us test it by creating submissions for this fake competition:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/testcompo2/

Some time Sunday afternoon we’ll switch things over to voting, so stay tuned for that.

I’ve been evaluating some new wordpress total conversion plugins, so we’ll be putting off the site redesign for now. We didn’t get much response from our request for a web designer, but a nod to lulzapricot for doing some mockups. We may try some little things here this week, but consider the current layouts days numbered. And just a heads up, we might be breaking the RSS feed URL soon.

Also, we are aware Wiki is being constantly attacked by spambots. One of the wordpress plugins I’m evaluating (a stripped down BuddyPress) should let us gut it entirely, and add some wiki functionality to the site itself. I’m liking it, but the question is how difficult it will be to migrate everything over.

That’s all for now. As always, post your thoughts in the comments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 12:31 am and is filed under LD #18. 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.

This time!

I’ll be using flixel since I know it a bit better now. I’m getting my engines wrote up and basics leveled out. Here’s hoping for a complete game this time around!

well, i submitted a ‘game’ for the test, and i’m running into major issues on the view all entries’ screen

Specs:

Windows 7 x64, running Firefox 4 beta 3

Slightly more prepared this time.. I’ve got a game engine framework at my disposal this time that i’ve written.

Lets hope it goes well.

Good luck to everyone else who’s participating! 😀

In the past Ludum Dares I always had something from real life interfering. Well, not this time xD

I’ll be using Python+Pygame for a 2D game. And I plan to devote my heart and soul to the 48h compo (I need the raw experience of LD)

All I hope it’s a good theme.

The basecode I am using for the Ludum Dare 48 Hour Game Programming Competition #18 is largely the same as the past two three four five six seven competitions. I haven’t made any changes to it since the last compo. It’s Java based and initially came from the Killer Game Programming in Java book that I bought a few years ago. Since then, I’ve added a bit to it that I found I was redoing over and over again.

Download it here.

Goals this time around:

• Hand-drawn art style. I sketch things out on paper and scan them in to colorize. Bold colors and gradients.
• KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid! I’ve had my best luck when I keep my game simple and try not add too much complexity.
• 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
• Audacity on my Mac, plus Rockband USB microphone
• HP OfficeJet 6450 All-In-One for scanning doodles
• Everlasting Gobstoppers
• mIRC for chattery
• Killer Game Programming in Java and the base code I mentioned above.

Looking forward to the compo!

Tags: basecode, declaration, ld48_18

At first, when I read rule #2, I did panic.

Then I read this and calmed down:

“Base code and personal code libraries are allowed, but should be declared and shared with the community prior to beginning your entry. To do this, make a blog post.”

Since I already did declare it, I don’t need to worry. So, that gives me 4 days to make every concievable game engine in Flixel…

I’ll be using Python with my Myrmidon library, which in-turn is backed by PyOpenGL and PyGame. I’ll probably end up using bits from Frimkron’s pythonutils library. (It’sa very nice.)

If I can be arsed to get it working again I’ll be timelapsing with pycatcher.

Any music and sound effects I inevitably end up doing will be created with Propellerhead’s Record as usual.

Here’s hoping i finish this time, I’m thoroughly embarassed by my last escapade.