Man, this was a while back. Magnificent Gunbright is a totally sweet faux-Japanese abstract minimalist shoot-em-up (complete with terrible Engrish) where your ammunition is also your armour. Your blobs swarm around you, you can fire them at your opponent, and you can also collect blobs that rain constantly from the sky.

At the time, I thought that having graphics consisting only of black and white circles was strong graphic design, but the game is completely unparseable from a screenshot and it’s not much better in motion. The sound effects are awesome, though, and no one can tell me different. Bloop-bloop-shinngg!

The game itself? It’s pretty okay. It’s mostly a matter of always moving, and getting lots of shots off at the computer when he’s fishing for ammo. I liked that if you got far enough in, eventually the computer would start with a huge swarm and you’d start with nothing — when you’re on defense, the game is pretty enjoyable. It’s just that when you’re on the offense, there’s no interesting strategy; you either hit your opponent or you don’t.

The best feedback I received was from my friend Patrick Alexander, who draws funny pictures for some gaming website or other, who summed it up thusly: “It’s like Ikaruga, only… only not as good. By quite a lot.” If Magnificent Gunbright had a box, this quote would be on it.

Before MG, I’d tried Ludum Dare once before — LD4, apparently, when the theme was Infection. My entry was to be a puzzle game called Hachoo!, where you were a bacterium who could only move by causing the host you were currently infecting to sneeze on another person. Unfortunately, I made one really stupid mistake which caused me to not finish — I used unfamiliar tools. I was a cocky C programmer at the time, and I worked mainly in embedded systems. When I played with writing games, I used SDL.  So of course the natural choice was C++ on Windows using Allegro. I chose Windows for obvious reasons, C++ because I thought the STL would save me time, and Allegro because I’d remembered being annoyed at the lack of batteries included with SDL in comparison when I was 16. Well, I had major issues with the MingW debugger, the STL doesn’t save you time when you’re unused to fighting with obtuse template-based compiler errors, and it turned out that what was simple and elegant when I was a dumbass teenager rubbed the more experienced me the wrong way. (Not to mention that I made a bunch of stupid rookie mistakes because I forgot key things about the API.)

So for Magnificent Gunbright, I decided to learn from my mistakes, stop worrying about stray pointers and just use Pygame. It worked great! I highly recommend it.  The only downside was that when there are a large number of blobs on the screen, there’s some significant flickery slowdown; I say it’s just an unintentional homage to the NES.

You can download Magnificent Gunbright from my website. It’s built for Windows, but it’ll run on Linux, assuming you have pygame, because all the source code is included.

Tags: final

And so it began…  bluescrn’s first LD48 entry. And probably the best…

It was the start of some recurring themes in my LD entries… 2D tilemaps, too much time spent on particle effects, and a rather loose interpretation of the theme… guarding a collection of arbitrary floating crates from a rapidly spreading fire, by covering them in dripping green goo from a blob character controlled by rotating the world…  Yes, I’d decided very early on I wanted to do some sort of rotating-screen platformy thing, and it gradually evolved into something that very loosely fit the theme…

This is definitely my most fun LD entry to go back and play again – and probably the most complete

The thing I did right was to keep it simple. The level was a simple grid (trivial collision detection), the character was a blob (minimal art effort), simple textures + repeating patterns elsewhere. And fairly simple game logic – which left me time to mess about with effects. And recording some audio, including that most memorable ‘awwww b****cks!’

Here’s an old one – the winning(ish?) entry from the 4th LD48. The theme was Infection, here interpreted by a cheeky wave of communism spreading through cute icon-based conversations! From the readme:

In a quiet, foreign country, all hell is about to break loose.

The populace are being infected by a deadly evil – communism, spreading through the country like a tide of blood. Enemy agents are on the prowl, converting civilians to their cause by rational argument and quiet discussion. This propaganda operation MUST be stopped. As a responsible and patriotic American soldier, it is your duty to protect these innocents from themselves. Should they side with the communists, annihilate them immediately. For as long as they do not – keep them safe and friendly.

— IN SOVIET RUSSIA, COMMUNISM BELIEVES IN YOU.

(NB. In the interests of exploring both sides of every issue, a Soviet Campaign has been included – whereby you, as a responsible and patriotic Russian soldier, are charged with keeping a neutral country free of the influence of the imperialist pig dogs.)

Commies took home a couple of Pellies – gold for Overall and Sound, silver for Humor and bronze for Completion, so I guess people liked it! Mostly, though, it was just a blast to make. I’m not really sure why I’ve missed all the LDs since… probably laziness. Still, I’m usually lurking in the wings to check out whatever people make.

Go download it!

Tags: final

Here’s a green box.

Here’s a red box.

Here’s a yellow box!

Here’s George Clooney.

Here’s George Clooney in a yellow box!

Hiya =] well I didn’t really post anything here for LD10.5 although I was working on something. The theme was kittensweird/unexpected/surprise, and for that I came up with a cat&mouse game where you would play as a kitty stalking mice using line of sight and keeping quiet. There would also be a movable cheese to bait the mouse. I set out to make the game in a side view with 3 axis of movement, which is far too many axii for a .5 compo =/ To save time I was drawing sprites by hand and taking photos of rooms to use as backgrounds, but putting 3 dimensional objects to do line of sight with was a daunting task, it would need a level editor and would be better presented in 3d at that point, too much for one weekend. Oh yeah, and I was fighting off the sickness. pwnd. Here’s as far as I got:

Also, I won’t be doing the LD11. I’m going to be racing my mountain bike on the cross country course at the sea otter classic in monterey, ca. My laptop bike mount is a little heavy for racing joo know?

Tags: LD #10.5 - Unexpected/Surprise - 2008, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008

Ludum Dare 11 is coming! Ludum Dare is a regular community driven game development competition. The goal is, given a theme and 48 hours, to develop a game from scratch. Ludum Dare aims to encourage game design experimentation, and provide a platform to develop and practice rapid game prototyping.

• Website: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/
• Rules & Stuff: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wiki/start
• IRC : #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org
• April 11-18th – Registration and Theme Voting*
• April 18 at 7pm PST and runs until the 20th at 7pm PST

Hope to see you there!

-Phil

*the theme voting will be done in batches almost every day that week. So keep checking back. The final round of voting will be during the 48 hours prior to the compo. If you want to influence what is in those batches, edit http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wiki/ld11:themes and if you think there are themes in that list that are so awful people shouldn’t be force to bother voting on them, join the irc channel and get some folks to agree with you and you can remove them. Lousy and redundant themes will be removed by the ThemeMaster.

Hello world!

I’m really excited to announce the first release of IndieLib game engine. It has been a lot of hard work for several years in which I have been working in this project. What started like a hobby has become in a quite robust 2d engine that I think can be useful for the gamming community, specially for the indie game developers. Because of that I want to offer it to all you for free, hopefully it will be useful for some of you.

The main purpose of IndieLib is to make the things easier for the game developer, specially for those of you that love trying new game mechanics and fast game prototyping. I was really shocked for that brave guys of the Experimental Gameplay Project and the things that I see everyday in TigSource. After seeing what these developers were able to do in just one week, I decided to start working again in and old project called LooverLib and to try to pack in the same engine lot of useful features for being able to make games really quickly using c++. What I wanted was that anybody that know a little of programming would be able to give expression to their ideas faster and easily. I know this first release hasn’t accomplished completly this purpose, but I hope to be in the correct way.

IndieLib is a c++ 2.5d engine for game development and fast game prototyping in a really easy way. Internally it uses Direct3d for hardware acceleration, but doesn’t use DirectDraw or ID3DXSprite, it directly draws textures on polygons. The engine is focused in fast 2d rendering, but also allows you to use 3d models. You can read the main features of IndieLib in the FAQ.

Do you want to see the engine in action? Well, you can just check some screenshots or to download the IndieLib_1.0_SDK and to run the tutorials that are already compiled and ready to try.

But an engine is nothing without documentation. For that, I spent lot, lot of hours documenting all the methods and making some tutorials (more will come along these months):
– Api Reference
– Wiki tutorials

I really hope that the engine will be useful for some of you and that you will make incredible games using it. I invite all you to join our forum, and I would be really happy if some of you want to contribute helping me.

Just click and download the IndieLib_1.0_SDK and start making games!

Regards,
Javier López

I might want to use this for my entry, so I’m putting it up for free download to avoid cheating.

Just some loader code for PSD images, you can retrieve image data for each layer in the image through pointers to regular 32-bit ARGB  pixel buffers (with individual bounding boxes and positions in the image). Haven’t tested it extensively, and it will probably crash for some images… but if it works for you then go ahead and use it. My idea is to do level layout and similar stuff in Photoshop to remove the need for a level editor. Being able to draw scenery (and collider geometry?) in multiple layers should be enough to make something interesting, and do it conveniently.

Get: psdimage.zip

Tags: code, preparation, psd

I might want to use this for my entry, so I’m putting it up for free download to avoid cheating.

Just some loader code for PSD images, you can retrieve image data for each layer in the image through pointers to regular 32-bit ARGB  pixel buffers (with individual bounding boxes and positions in the image). Haven’t tested it extensively, and it will probably crash for some images… but if it works for you then go ahead and use it. My idea is to do level layout and similar stuff in Photoshop to remove the need for a level editor. Being able to draw scenery (and collider geometry?) in multiple layers should be enough to make something interesting, and do it conveniently.

Get: psdimage.zip

Tags: code, preparation, psd

little-lib is a library for quickly writing small games or OpenGL applications in mzscheme (v372). It relies on OpenGL, SDL, SDL_image, and SDL_mixer to process graphics output, key and mouse input, and playing sound effects. A sample program (demo.ss) illustrates the use of little-lib in these three respects.

little-lib is released under the MIT license. I plan to use this library for my Ludum Dare 11 entry.

Download the source code.

Tags: scheme

Well I’m not new, and know I wont have a chance to enter. I’m here for the free booze.

Bottoms up!

Hi, this is Viridian.  I am simply writing this post to stake my claim as a participant in Ludum Dare 11.  This will be my first Ludum Dare, though I’ve spectated on several others.  Wish me luck!

I’m planning on trying to participate in LD 11 this year.  I just started using PyGame and programming in general in January and have yet to finish anything, so maybe this will force me to at least make something playable and simple.  We’ll see!

 Devon

I’m going to give the LD48 a shot this time around.  It’s been years since I have actually attempted any kind of game coding, and I yanked out my old Killer Game Programming in Java book this week and started going through the chapters again.  The personal challenge with this compo is that there is a baseball game (KC at Oakland) on Saturday that I’m going to attend.  That’s a huge chunk of hours out of the 48.  Perhaps I can come up with a way to make them useful.  Design? Sketches? We’ll see.

At least I don’t have to plant my tomatoes this weekend.  I did that yesterday.  I turned some half-barrels into self-watering planters.  If anyone cares, I’ll have pictures on my home blog, www.lonestranger.net, later this week. 

So I’ll probably use the design patterns from the aforementioned coding book and code in Java.  I’m using Eclipse as an IDE.  I have used Eclipse for some of my work coding in J2EE, but I didn’t know about it the last time I was messing around with game coding.  It’s nice to be able to get the method completion and object browsing that you can do in VS, only not using VS. 

The last LD48 that I did enter was way back in late ’01 or so, for LD48_2: Construction/Deconstruction with a minor in Sheep.  I’ll have to dig out that old fossil if a game that I submitted.  It sucked.  In short, all you did was huck sheep from one side of the screen to the other, knocking over bales of wool.  But I guess the real success was that I completed something in 48 hours.  It’s a challenge in itself.

Anyway.  Good luck to all!

Tags: baseball, java, ld48_11, ld48_2, tomatoes

Hey all-  I’m also going to be attempting my first LD and thought I’d make a quick post to test out this here blog system and say ‘Howdy’ to everyone here while I was at it.  I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a few weeks since I found out about it a month or two ago.  I plan on using Ruby/Gosu and perhaps Chipmunk if the theme warrants some hardcore physics fun. 

This will be my 3rd ld I will enter in. I plan on using the torque engine this time around. Hopefully that will result in something that is actually fun to play this time AND have good graphics. I decided I wanted to concentrate on creating pure game play and making the game pretty instead of screwing around with just getting stuff to work like physics libraries (grrr pyode). Hopefully my 2 weeks of learning torque is enough :D.

GL all

…So it’s time to clean the cobwebs off the old OpenGL+SDL base code, so I’m not wasting valuable time setting up lib/include paths, and fighting with MSVC’s desire to inflict Unicode pain on anything you try to build…

Here’s what I’m planning to use, should be acceptable under the ‘custom libraries’ rule (except for the font texture, which will have to be replaced during the 48hrs)

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48Base.zip

Contains OpenGL+SDL init code (now featuring resolution switching), Texture loading, simple 2D blitting, a basic font renderer, and some pretty incomplete/untested vector maths code. Linked with FMOD and Chipmunk in case I get a chance to put some audio in, or want to use physics…  Somebody should have added ‘Chipmunk’ as a theme!

Somehow, the timing of these LD competitions is always bad for me (except for LD #6 so far). On Saturday I have a rehearsal day with an orchestra and on Sunday there is this yearly neighborhood fair (or whatever that’s called) and then I have a concert with a different orchestra. I still do plan to participate, I’ll probably have about 8 hours and perhaps some more if I can stay awake long enough.

Maybe some day we can also have date voting (like we have theme voting).

It looks like I won’t have much time to develop something during the 48 hours, but I have finally decided to give it a try. I am aiming at something really simple and hopefully not too boring or buggy. I am planning to base my game on the splush-package created by hectigo and as far as I understand, that is not against the rules. So hopefully, I see ya at Friday!

Tags: motivation

So, just to be sure nobody missed it, I posted my basecode some time ago (based on my last LD entry, cleaned up and improved along with some other projects, like http://atanua.org) – http://iki.fi/sol/zip/sol2dglbasecode20.zip – OpenGL + SDL, pretty basic stuff, except maybe for some IMGUI widgets which come handy.

I’d also like to remind folks (esp new folks or others who haven’t been able to finish an entry in some older LD) of my Ludum Dare survival guide: http://iki.fi/sol/ldsurvival.html – be warned that it’s quite serious, unlike some other survival guides you may encounter =)

Tags: LD11 basecode survival

So I’m planning on entering LD for the first time. I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but awkward times (for those of us in New Zealand) have put a dampener on the last few. Not this time though!

I’m going to use C++ & OpenSceneGraph, and probably openAL for sound. My previous games were developed in VisualBasic & DirectX, so things may be a little interesting. Experience wise, I’m studying my final year of Engineering, and have been programming for ages. I rarely manage to finish anything I start, but with any luck I’ll contain feature creep enough to write something playable during the competition. LD11 here we come.

I’m excited to have the chance to join this time. I’ve completely cleared the weekend and should be able to spend 100% of my weekend sleeping and gamedev-ing. Might even have a couple nights this week to do some warm-up!

This will be my second Ludum. Last time was a few back; I think the theme was Growth, so that would make it LD 7. I wasn’t able to finish that one because I got hopelessly mired in my graphics code. This time around I’m going to use IndieLib and be able to focus on game play. I really want to walk away from this experience with something visible and modestly fun. I’ve been working a long time on game development without something visible to show off. It’d be nice to finally get something out there I can point to with pride!

Good Luck,
Mr. Phil
Mr. Phil Games

I just wanted to say hi, as a way of obligating myself to participation and not slacking off. I haven’t done LD before, although I have successfully participated in PyWeek a few times. I’ll probably use Python with Pyglet for my entry.

Also, what’s with all the people who hated on kittens on the first round of voting? That’s just mean.

Thats my moto for the upcomming competition. That and enthusiasm will have to push me up a steap hill, to finish the game. But for now, all i can do is vote and hope for a good theme.

Good luck to all

😀

I, too, will be making somethign this weekend. Hopefully something good!

Also, my wife has already ‘thrown down’ in the food compo, having made a meal plan for the whole weekend.

Tags: intro

Hi.

First timer here from NZ.

With next to no game. or graphics programming experience this should be a blast

Tags: doofer introduction

Yay! LD11!

Now I’m in a bit of a dilemma if you can help out…Pygame really eats upmy time coding so I don’t have loads of time, but I haven’t quite got to grips with pyglet, what should I use? Something I only half know how to use or not?

Tags: LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008

Hello all … I’m a LD first-timer, intending to give it a shot this time around. I suspect I’ll only really get ~24 hours of actual LD-time, due to inconvenient timezones clashing with the “Day Job”(tm) … but I’m prepared to give it a red hot go. I’ll almost certainly be using Pygame (1.8) and Rabbyt (0.8.1) … unless for some reason the theme makes me want to write a text adventure

Since I typically develop on Linux, I’ve done some preparation by making sure I can actually produce Windows executables (the catch: still requires a Windows installation somewhere). My personal py2exe and cx_Freeze ‘tutorial’ is here … it’s actually painfully detailed for something that turned out much simpler than I expected. It would be great to compare notes on crossplatform Python/Pygame experiences/successes/pitfalls with any other Ludumdarers that code on Linux.

Tags: cx_Freeze, intro, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008, linux, py2exe

Again, I’m probably not going to officially enter this time. I’ve busily been working on a tool that’d be very helpful in rapid prototyping/Ludum Dare, but I’m almost 100% sure it wont be ready for use by Friday night.

But just in case, here’s the latest version of my C++ Library. All kinds of crap to be found inside, including:

• Serialization library with compression, endian features, and MD5/SHA1 hash support.
• Directory tree caching, stream framework.
• Vector and Matrix math classes.
• Point vs. Sphere, Rectangle, Polygon tests and analysis
• Some string functions.
• Whitespace delimited text file tokenizer.
• Various Grid/Tile Map operations and analysis.
• A couple functions for drawing Allegro geometry transformed by a Matrix.
• The “useful” headers & source files from boost, BZip, LZMA, MD5, SHA1, ZLib
• Extra crap that I’ve just not got around to refactoring yet.

This is my first game competition. I plan on using pygame, blender, imagemagick, reason, and audacity.

Tags: intro, introduction

Hi kids,

I’m nfirvine.  I haven’t really done one of these before, but whe I saw that it was this weekend, I got really excited.  So here we go.  We’ll see if I actually submit anything or not.

By the way, there’s a couple of custom libraries I might be using.  Check out the index at http://www.nfirvine.com/wiki/projects . The only one I’ve got up at the moment is some binding for Python that allow you to use multiple mice.

Hi all,

I’m not exactly new to LD, but it’s been quite a while. I’m planning to enter LD11, and I have some interesting ideas up my sleeve I’ll be writing all my code completely from scratch, using Win32 -I have a lot of experience doing this though, so I don’t think it’ll be a handicap.

I’ll also be recording a time lapse video of my progress, which might be amusing to watch afterwards – Good luck everyone (you’re going to need it :P)

Tags: code, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008, omgtags, timelapse, win32

There are loads of categories you can win in LD11:

Overall, Fun, Innovation, Theme, Polish, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Technical, Food, Journal, TimeLapse

Good luck!

-Phil

There are loads of categories you can win in LD11:

Overall, Fun, Innovation, Theme, Polish, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Technical, Food, Journal, TimeLapse

Good luck!

-Phil

Tags: motivation

Tags: motivation

Tags: motivation

Well, I’m here and ready to go. 48 hours seems like a VERY small amount of time, especially since coming off of pyweek earlier this month. This will be my first LD, and I’m quite excited.

I was looking over the food journals from last year, and all you people that have waffles and muffins and whatnot made for you by signifant others are jerks. My girlfriend won’t have anything to do with that kind of thing. If I don’t go shopping in the next two days it’s going to be a frosted mini-wheats filled journal for me…

Well, I should be on the list now that I have a post.  Good luck everyone!

Tags: hi

Tags: motivation

So I told myself I’d lay off the competitions a bit since Pyweek, Pyday, VGNG Tigs, and Ludumdare 10.5 warmup, but they just keep draaaaging me back in. Plus my wife is going to be gone most of friday & saturday, so I got free time! Scratch that, wife does not have dress rehearsal Friday night, AND I am going to her concert now, which I did not know. I’ll still be trying to get a game done and everything, but might not be the polish I like.

I literally just missed the Theme Vote #3, I was filling it out, changed pages, and refreshed, and it was all updated with the final votes before I finished! But all is good, we shall see what I can put together, and I shall vote on Theme Vote #4!

Nine Step Masterplan (as if one of them had ever worked during compos):

1. have EVERYTHING (libs, food, tools…) set up; no figuring out of things during the 48h anymore
2. set alarm clock to 4am (starting time here), ponder about theme in half-sleep
3. get up at 9, don’t worry ONE BIT if idea doesn’t really match the theme, code like a madman
4. 13:37 Yoga break!
5. 18:00 have game technically finished, leave for local ‘Long Night of the Theaters’ (only watching it, not acting!)
6. 0:00 show up at minimal/electro/house party as promised
7. 3:00 sleep
8. wake up in a panic and build content until contest ends
9. after deadline, do a quick Windows port

(I have this feeling telling me that only the house party will happen as planned.) I’ll try to write a readable game using my own library, Gosu. Tools: C++ and Xcode or Ruby and TextMate, Photoshop with Wacom for graphics, maybe GarageBand + The Wiinstrument for music, and of course SFXr

Tags: masterplan

Almost did LD10.5, but time did not permit. I guess my first Ludum Dare will be sexy number 11.

It looks like I’m in! Unfortunately, I have a day job, a hot date and a comedy show to put on during that time.

I make no promises regarding the quality of my entry.

None.

This will be my first time entering this competition, some friends of mine are doing it for the first time as well and they suggested that I joined in with them. Since its the University holidays down here in NZ, I figured why not? Unfortunately its been a while since I did any gaming, so I’ve had to have been doing some practice to get myself into gear. Been using openGL through SDL to use 3D graphics to render 2D, and it seems to be the smoothest looking game I’ve written ever so far. So this could be promising, hopefully I’ll be able to apply this knowledge to make a kickass game for the competition (but like many other people, I shall make no promises of quality).

bit about me: My name’s Michael, I’m in my second professional year (third year) of computer engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Although I consider myself to be quite good at programming, I don’t spend that much spare time on it. Instead I game a ridiculous amount of time.

Tags: canada, canuckistan, motivation

When life gives you lemons, give up!

Tags: motivation

Let’s face it, we’re obsolete.

Tags: motivation, robots

Coming off the fun of Pyweek (i made robosub), i really want to dig in a bit more into pyglet and build something alot more fun (robosub was definitely booooring, i admit it!). That being said, so much going on, so i am doubtful i will get the time to hack, but i figure i might as well join up in the case that i do end up with a big chunk of time and a laptop!

Tags: motivation

Hi there. I’m planning to participate in Ludum Dare 11. I’ll probably be using Perl and SDL on Linux. Hopefully I’ll be able to produce a Windows package too.

I entered LD1, but haven’t entered any since then. Perhaps I’ll post a picture of my entry or maybe even a port to Perl/SDL at some point.

I just made my first giant clock! I am so ready for Ludum Dare now that I have this incredible custom library at my fingertips:

import os, pygame, random, math, pgu
from pygame.locals import *
clock = pygame.time.Clock()
pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((800,480))
timer = 0
seconds = 0
minutes = 0
timertext = str(minutes) + “:” + str(seconds)
background = pygame.Surface(screen.get_size())
background = background.convert()
background.fill((250, 250, 250))
font = pygame.font.Font(None, 500)
text = font.render(timertext, 1, (10, 10, 10))
background.blit(text,(0,0))
screen.blit(background, (0,0))

quit = 0
while not quit:
for e in pygame.event.get():
if e.type is QUIT: quit = 1
if e.type is KEYDOWN and e.key == K_ESCAPE: quit = 1
background.fill((250, 250, 250))
text = font.render(timertext, 1, (10, 10, 10))
background.blit(text,(0,0))
screen.blit(background, (0, 0))
pygame.display.flip()
clock.tick(60)
timer = timer + 1
if timer == 60:
seconds = seconds + 1
timer = 0
if seconds == 60:
minutes = minutes + 1
seconds = 0
if seconds <= 9:
timertext = str(minutes) + “:” + “0” + str(seconds)
else:
timertext = str(minutes) + “:” + str(seconds)

Tags: custom, LD #11 - Minimalist - 2008, library, pygame, python

Hello all, brokenPlatypus here. I’ve been following the LD compos for some time now, but never joined in. Well, I think the time has come! I’m a web/flash/flex developer by trade, but always had a strong interest in game development. Unfortunately I haven’t taken that interest much past my subscription to game developer magazine since high school.

As a professional flash developer it would make sense for me to use flash, but this is a perfect opportunity for me to break into XNA, which I’ve been toying around with off and on for a while now. I’m going to dust off visual studio and give it a go.

I think XNA fits the rules. It runs on windows, but you need the XNA redist, which I believe is about 2 megs. XNA requires directX and .net, but if you’re running an updated windows xp or vista you should have those. Regardless, I’m doing it so I can develop cross platform for windows and XBox 360.

Depending on the idea I come up with I may use the Oops! 3D Physics Library, which I’ve never used before, but looks promising.

I’m looking forward to this weekend. Come what may, I intend to put in a good effort and have a good time. Only 9 hours to go..

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 8:53 am and is filed under LD11 - Minimalist. 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.

Like I said in my entry earlier this week, I’ll be using code from the book Killer Game Programming in Java. I took the example from Chapter 12 and stripped out all the game logic, graphics and sounds, leaving the game loop and the classes related to images and sounds, etc. 

LD48_11_LoneStranger.zip

I’m really looking forward to this compo.  I am going to try to get out of work a little early so I can head on over to the grocery store and pick up a take-and-bake pizza for dinner.  I’m not totally set on the toppings yet, but I may go with some fancy mushrooms and maybe some sausage or something. 

Tags: basecode, ld48_11

Ok… so I can’t resist participating this time. I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for it, I have a brand new one month old daughter! But sometimes she sleeps, so perhaps a game can be made. Best of luck to everyone!

My entry to the motivational poster party.

Tags: motivation, sleep

my lazy attempt at motivation

Tags: motivation

Keep it simple. Thats the plan. All of it. 😛

Been also thinking about making te game in the console, but that will take extra creativity to make it fun. It be something diferent. Just wanna finish this time, doesn’t matter how.

Tags: journal

I’m looking forward to my first time entering LD this weekend. I plan to make something 2D, low res and physics-related if I can.

Let the games begin.

I’m kicking myself. I BBQ’d up this lovely plate of Lamb Skewers, with a side of rice. Halfway through eating, I realized *Oh noes*! Food Photos!

It plate wasn’t pretty no more, so I didn’t bother photographing that. Instead, here’s a photograph of the leftover rice in a plastic container.

The rice has a bit of a yellow hue to it. I added a little bit of chicken soup base to the water, for flavor. Twas tasty.

Ladies and gentlemen. It has begun.

Tags: foodphoto

Tags: foodphoto, motivation, sandwiches

I’m a finn, so the compo starts on early morning hours (4am or 5am or something). I do not intend to wake up for it. I’ll wake up when I’ve slept enough.

The point is, this way I get whole two days of competition time. The competition ends 48 hours later – or 5am on monday! Which means that if I really need to, I can crunch until the night (not that I intend to, mind) – I don’t have a harsh deadline at, say, midnight.

I’m sitting in the kitchen this time. With my laptop. The stationary PC’s monitor is blurry and I cannot look at it more than half an hour or so. Whats up with the toys? Well… I got kids. Oh you mean the Nintendo DS? Thats mine ;P

Want a closer look at the screen? I’ve begun brainstorming on the themes with most votes, those on the left are less likely to win, and those with bold type got more than 10+ votes.

Tags: deskphoto

So, this will be my first Ludum Dare, and I’m totally disorganised and unprepared…maybe it’ll be more fun that way!

I’m going to be using flash to make my game, which I started to learn a few days ago. Last night I figured out how to keyboard events… Yesterday’s major triumph was resizing the dimensions of the game window…

Between now and the start, I’d like to learn how to rotate sprites, make classes, and import art from Inkscpae. My development tools will be the free Flex flash compiler, and VIM, maybe also SVN (to keep the single monolithic text file that will inevitably be my code base in some semblance of control!). I installed Inkscape, Paint.net and Blender in the last few days, and will be relying on sxfr for sound fx.

I’m going in the deep end by using an unfamiliar language without a proper IDE, but I want to learn to make Flash games and this is as good a time as any… I’m a bit concerned that I’ll spend too much time trying to learn how to do basic tasks (ie, manipulate arrays – or is it vectors? – in flash), but we’ll see…

My game will be 2D, simple, probably single screen, and with very simple geometric graphics.

I’ll be delighted if I make something that resembles a coherent game!

I’m really not sure how this is going to work from the point of view of sleep strategy, I stayed up much too late last night learning flash, so I’m already wrecked… it’s going to be a fun weekend

so this time, I’ll be taking shots of my desk, of my food, and also theres gonna be a timelapse. seeing as I always miss out on these things, ima do them all at once now 😀

also, I plan on using that gamepad for whatever I make, even if it turns out to be a text adventure >.<

 I’ve been meaning to give Ludum Dare a try for quite some time, but the last three compos were all set in weekend when I was very busy. But this time I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to participate unless something huge earth-shattering happens.

Some quick words about me: 25 yrs young, math student (+ some comp. sci.), swedish, TERRIBLE artist/musician, decent programmer.

I’ll probably use Python + pygame, since that’s what I have most experience with when it comes to graphics, I looked a bit at rubygame as well since I’ve been wanting to try ruby for something bigger for a while, but I realized I didn’t have time to learn a new library before the compo starts.

This’ll be so much fun, I can hardly wait.

Tags: presentation

A few years ago I attempted LD5 with the Random theme, and err… didn’t manage to finish
But now I’m (hopefully) a much better programmer than I was back then, so let’s have another go

Being the crazy person I am, I’m hoping to try and get something with A.I. involved as I’ve an A.I. coursework to write, and this would be nice for it! That said, I need a demo to show off my Honours Project engine anyway, so whatever I make will work for coursework purposes 😉

Speaking of my Honours Project – it’s aiming to be a multi-platform scripted game engine. It’s not finished, but the point of it is to have all game logic run via external scripts ( in this case, Lua ) .. so I shall be finishing this off during LD11 along with making the game. The current engine source which I’ll be using is here -> http://www.stuckiegamez.co.uk/gamez/ludumdare/SGZEngine.7z <- and just to be extra insane, I’ll be writing an OpenGL Renderer into that engine as well this weekend – which I’ll be using rather than the current SDL implementation! ( and you can check my code to make sure at the end of it 😉 )

Default platform is Linux, but I’ll be doing a Windows port shortly afterwards, and possibly porting to any other platform I get my mitts on later.

Now excuse me while I go horde up on food and things, and get set up for the weekend!
Good Luck, Everyone

 Being located in Sweden means more than just meatballs, ABBA and random polar bears in the streets. It also means that for me the competition starts at 04.00 in the middle in the night.  So therefor I wont join in on the fun until around 8 or so, that is 4 h after the competition starts.

I’ll probably wake up in the middle of the night and no be able to not rush to the computer and check the theme.

Ah the joys of photoshop and images.google.com. 

Well, I’ve heard a lot about the contest, figured I should give it a go.  Only problem is I don’t have the time I’d really want to spend on it.  Lots of complications as of late…

I’ll have to wait and see what the category is, and see if I can come up with an interesting idea, but I think this’ll be more of a dry run for me and not something as serious as it should be.

I’ve put quite a few games together in the time span of a day though, so I’m not too worried, just don’t think I’ll have that extra time to spend to spruce anything up.  Of course when using Python, development always seems to go a little faster.  I have my own game engine I’ve been working on, but its no where ready to share, so I’ll forgo it for the competition and just stick to the basics.

Anyway, only time will tell.  Good luck and all the best to everyone.

First time @ LD48, I participated twice in TWL48hr though. Like many others the compo starts at 4 in the morning for me We’ll see how that works out. In the mean time, here is my custom library: http://jbeekman.nl/48hr/48hrLib.rar. It’s basically a framework around SDL and FMOD, nothing high-tech.

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Tonight for dinner we’re having Fajitas. Here’s how PoV makes them.

Acquire and cook chopped chicken breast in a large saucepan. I leave the acquisition up to your imagination.

Add chopped onion, red pepper, and spices.

Wrap in tortillas, and serve hot. To make them extras special, add Tabasco sauce and serve with a cool glass of orange juice.

Bon Appétit!

Tags: foodphoto

To abide by the rules I hereby deliver a link to my work-in-progress library; all it really does is provide a way of binding game behaviors to “entities”, and getting a hold of them again. Oh, and it’s written for .NET3.

Download

Not much different from last year. About the only thing I’ve added was an Intel Mac Mini, and that was yesterday.

And as always, my library. Slightly reorganized. I’ve got a stack of junk books in my closet that have no value. I’ve checked, $2 on Amazon if that.

Finally, the alcove. It’s been a long time since I’ve shown the alcove. Recently I’ve been acquiring some older game consoles I didn’t have. The Commodore 64 you see here is my baby, the one I grew up with. I picked up another recently (not shown) for it’s floppy drives, since my stupid drive mocks me with it’s clickings. New to the picture are a classic toaster style NES, two Sega Genesis (one up top, one beside the SNES), a 32x, a Sega CD (on top), and the dresser is new. The dresser I’ve packed and bagged all kinds of bits. Wires, power supplies, handheld gaming systems, controllers, etc. Maybe a sandwich too. Something sure smells funny in the alcove.

That’s all for now.

We’re coming up on 2 hours. Hurry up and post yours people!

Tags: deskphoto

Not much to say but hello LD.

I’m entering this one but I guess it’ll be very experimental because I’m a bit busy this weekend and I want to use pygame (and started learning it a week ago, although I have some game programming experience, mostly using SDL and C).

Anyway I hope I will finish something (and if minimalism won it would help I think =D).

See you on the IRC channel at 4:00 am! (for me ;-D)

Tags: introduction

After all the metagame of LD, desk, food, timelapse, etc, will we have enough time to make any games? 😀

The cans are black coffee, a new technique I’m trying for dealing with ‘downtimes’.  Hmm.. we should contact these companies for sponsorship.

Tags: deskphoto

So here’s what my very messy workspace looks like, I took a photo last night to document it.

And a gratuitous food shot (ham and cheese is popular)

I’m getting very excited about this I’ve got some interesting ideas and am eagerly awaiting the compo start!

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Breakfast!  That’s my “science cup”, I can’t start the day without it.

Tags: foodphoto

Tags: motivation

*Fydo participates!*

Tags: deskphoto

*Fydo participates!*

Tags: deskphoto

Tags: deskphoto, zoo

Tags: deskphoto, zoo

Trophies please.  😉

I’m just posting to say that I’ll compete. But don’t get too scared, last time didn’t go that well – I ended up somewhere in the middle. This will be my third LD though, that’s got to count for something.

I’m going to try pyglet this time, the performance can’t possibly be worse than mirra that I used last time. But first, sleep – 4 am is not a good hour for creativity.

Here’s where the magic will happen 😛

Still need to do the grocery shopping !!!

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

This time, I’m also going to send in photos of food and a time lapse video. I may as well concentrate on these categories, since I probably won’t have enough time to write a decent game. Anyway, here is a photo of my desk.

Tags: deskphoto

Here’s my setup!    That’s 1 computer and 1 laptop there.   No cats this year, I just created this stack (Usually the desktop lives elsewhere.)

Tags: deskphoto

My girlfriend offered to cook me dinner for LD #11, and I am really glad she did. Otherwise, I probably would have made a sandwich.

The beautiful and lovely Mandy at work:

The meal. Rice and stir fried chicken, broccoli, zucchini, carrots, garlic, and shitake mushrooms, topped with chopped spring onions and nori strips, washed down with Sapporo beer:

The meal “minimalized”:

Tags: foodphoto

When are these?

Are you showing?

Tags: mockup, screenshot

Okay, so here’s my flickr’d deskshot:

Got sick last night and exchanged the planned house partying for some medicine. Only more reason to focus on some desktop zen and healthy food during the compo.
Timelapse is set in place and I might give the foodcompo a shot

Tags: deskphoto

Everyone ought to have a healthy breakfast, even if it’s at 3pm and it’s Taquitos…

And of course around the two hour mark it’s time for dinner already.

And finally I have my setup just the way I want it.

I hope things go better this time around; though I’m not quite sure what I’ll use my second lappy for at the moment…Both are running Gentoo, so both are all ready for any developing. =P

Looking at these low-quality photos reminds me that I need to get a new camera…Or maybe recharge the batteries…

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

• 5:30 PM EST Nap
• 7:54 PM EST Take picture of desk area
• 8:09 PM EST Post desk photo

Interesting things to note:

• Apple remote for tunes
• Nail clippers and brush for lap cats
• Tums for code burn
• Deluxe Mixed Nuts for emergency brain food
• Shredder for embarrassing ideas

Tags: deskphoto

And the theme is minimalist, like everyone who reads this blog probably knows by now. Bleh. That has no edge to it. Do something that does a little. Some ideas sprung to my mind but nothing .. interesting. Oh well, I guess I’ll think of something eventually.

Akiko decided to make a traditional Japanese lunch. About half the things on display are edible by my standards (stay faaar away from those bean things), so I’m still hungry.

Tags: foodphoto

Here’s my friday night dinner via my lovely wife.   French Onion Soup!

To add to the conglomeration of photos, here’s my workspace for the moment.

Tags: day1, journal

Everyone, don’t forget about drpetter’s amazing sound effect making.. thinger, SFXR! A must-have for any LDer! its over here: http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html GET IT

Tags: sfxr

Creamed Spinach, Herb Potatoes (somewhat smashed,) fish sticks with Tarter sauce and a Fosters.

Tags: foodphoto

Just my workspace photo to get into the spirit of things here..

Just a close-up of my ‘chariot’ for the competition… code in style. 😉

Don’t have any food photos to contribute as I was out to dinner in town and sorta forgot about that aspect. Well, I’ve gotta go get xchat installed now so I can be distracted by IRC too.

Tags: chair, deskphoto, workspace

Food and desk picture at the same time!

… hmm.. maybe I should get some groceries real quick

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto