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

(EDIT: the consensus here is that you can do whatever you like but for now you need to open source your engine if you want to join the compo, so just have fun and JAM.)

UDK/Unity/GM are closed source but allowed in the compo.
My homegrown game engine is closed source, too.
I respectfully and flamelessly ask: That’s okay, right?
If I post the pre-compiled binaries publicly but do not share the source?
Peace and love, all.

I have a shocking and highly embarrassing question to ask. I fully expect to be ridiculed and berated and will surely feel like a complete ignorant fool.

What does “Ludum Dare” mean?

Where did the term come from? What is the history? What language is it? Is it an acronym? A secret password? Latin?

I’ve heard people prononouce it “Loo-dum Dah-ray” and also “Luh-dum Dair”, so the second part of my question is: how do you pronounce it?

I’m here to spread the love.

I respect you, no matter what game engine or framework you use.

I’d like to publicly declare that I officially regret joining the highly commented upon “from scratch” vs. “engines” debate.

The conclusion after a week of vigorous debate is that this compo is for FUN and we should all be allowed to use whatever tools we like without getting any bad attitude from coder-snobs like me. And you know what, I’ve come to agree with this side whole-heartedly.

Please, let us put this issue aside and simply have some fun.

I am so excited for this weekend. I hope to post a lot of encouragement and positive feedback on people’s game submissions, and I am going to join the JAM.

Woooo hoooo I finished my game. Overall it was a great learning experience and I even got to a point where I ALMOST gave up. I’m really happy that I stuck with it, got past “the wall” and polished it until it was done.

You can view my entry here and I would be grateful for your comments.

Streaming flash video, high score list, downloads and web version here:
http://www.orangeview.net/puzzabomb/

Use the arrow keys to move.

PuzzaBOMB in action!

PuzzaBOMB is a simple action-puzzle game. The objective is to lure the time-bombs toward castles which contain powerups. Collect the glowing powerups to go the to next level.

When a bomb is flashing red, it is about to explode!

Features: Five levels, including a “speed round” where the bombs get really spammy. Hand-painted textures. Music featuring me on electric bass and mandolin. Online high score database using php and mysql. Really damn high framerates. nVidia Physx rigid body physics simulation. And lots of explosions!

Programmed entirely in javascript.

There are three versions available:
– Windows (does not require shockwave: uses directX)
– Mac OSX (does not require shockwave: uses openGL)
– Online (in any browser: uses adobe shockwave)

You can get Adobe Shockwave here:
http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/

Have fun, and thanks for playing! This was a blast to make. Ludum Dare ROCKS.

I have really loved playing everybody’s games and reading your posts. This was a wonderful experience and I’m grateful for PoV’s hard work hosting it.

Kindest regards,

– Breakdance McFunkypants

P.S. Double ZOMBIE Rainbow! =)

Tags: complete, final, postmortem, PuzzaBOMB, screenshot

Here is a photo of my current development workshop.

HO HO HO.  Merry Ludum.

Tags: desk, deskphoto, motivation

LD48 Entry: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-19/?action=rate&uid=2297

Play the flash game here: http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2010/snowboggan/

Snowboggan! is a 3d flash game.  I’ve always wanted to write a toboggan simulator, where you can speed down a snowy hill on a sled, dodging trees and smashing into snowmen.  This weekend’s game jams finally gave me the chance.  Check it out!  I would love to read your comments and warmly encourage you to let me know what you think.

Use the arrow keys to go left and right, and try to take out as many snowmen as you can!

In this game, you are immortal.  It was created for fun, and no matter what happens you can always climb back to the op of the hill and start again.  There is a hint of danger, however: if you smash into a tree or hit the “thin ice” signs, you might get flipped over!  If you do get flipped over, simply hit the “Click to restart” button on the top left.

The objective of the game is to discover gravity, prove that snowmen are not at allimmortal, and avoid the thin ice while gravity is constantly drawing you to the bottom of the hill.  These words are bolded because those were the secret “theme” words for the game jams I participated in.

This game was programmed using FlashDevelop for a pure as3 project, compiled using Flex, and the engines are away3d for graphics, jiglib for physics and Flint for particle effects.  All sounds were created by me using a microphone.  The guitar and snow sounds were done with my hands and mouth, and the sliding snow sound was the microphone rubbing up against my winter jacket.  It was an absolute blast to program and I learned a lot.  Thanks for playing.  Enjoy!

Here are screenshots of the game in action:

Tags: 3D, as3, final, flash, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot

Here is my entry for the “Worst Game I’ve Ever Made” miniLD #25:

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/super-skill-jump/

Behold the majesty of a true gaming classic.  Enjoy!

Tags: McFunkypants, Worst Game Ever

Baby McFunkypants is so in for this weekend’s Ludum Dare!

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD20/

Tags: baby, cute, McFunkypants

Here is a little screenshot of some work-in-progress for my Ludum Dare jam game. It features Molehill (Flash 11) hardware accelerated 3d graphics and is using only about 20,000 polies. The terrain is generated on the fly using a heightmap jpeg image and is textured using the “splatting” techniques for detailed textures that fade from one kind to another depending on altitude. The car physics “works” but is rather floaty and (so far) extremely unstable. You can drive around the terrain and perform some crazy huge jumps and stunts, though right now you tend to flip over very easily and can’t die. I’m getting fabulous performance: it never dips below 55fps and runs fullscreen on my HD 1920×1080 monitor plus the CPU usage stays below 25%. Not bad for Flash, overall. Hopefully I can put in some actual gameplay (eg. enemies? weapons? score? gameover?) after I take a little break.  Wish me luck!

Tags: as3, flash, McFunkypants, Molehill, screenshot, wip

Asteroid Explorer by McFunkypants

A Molehill tech demo programmed in 48 hours for the LD48 game jam.

Featuring high-poly Flash 3d hardware acceleration, .obj file parsing, heightmap terrain generation, terrain “splatting” multi-texturing, cube-mapped skybox, mp3 engine sound with pitch-shifting, rigid-body car physics simulation, flash sprite 2d overlays, and Molehill (AGAL) vertex and fragment programs.

This game requires Flash 11 or the incubator beta version which can be downloaded here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplatformruntimes_incubator.html

Please visit my blog: www.mcfunkypants.com for more games, music, art and code.

I warmly invite you to follow @McFunkypants on twitter (I *only* tweet about game development)

Play the game here:
http://www.mcfunkypants.com/LD20/

I would LOVE your comments and feedback:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=2297

Tags: 3D, as3, baby, cute, final, flash, McFunkypants, Molehill

Asteroid Explorer video on youtube:

Tags: 3D, McFunkypants, Molehill, video

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The secret phrase is...

MiniLD #27 is officially a go!

The SECRET PHRASE is:
“I think we can work something out…”

All games that include this phrase will be awarded a golden Ludum Dare achievement trophy that will appear on their profile page. Good luck and have fun!

Happy summer vacation, everyone!  Are you ready for June’s Ludum Dare miniLD game jam? This month’s mini will be held on the weekend of the 25th. I think you will love the theme. It is sure to get people talking… due to popular request I’m releasing the theme early so people on vacation can dive right in and get started early.

The theme is: ALL TALK – conversation trees and dialogue choices.

On Friday June 24 at 4pm PST (midnight GMT) a secret phrase will be announced. Your entry must contain this phrase in the dialogue!

This month’s MiniLD #27 is designed to be fun, low-stress, and relaxed. Perfect for vacationers. The rules this time are going to be very chill: you can use any game engine you like, premade art, and people are welcome to form teams. Instead of crunch-time cramming, you are allowed to start now and work up to midnight on Sunday June 26th. There will be no disqualifications whatsoever. The only rule is that there are no rules. Take your time – use whatever tools you like – just have fun!

Crimson Gem Saga

Ren'Py

June’s “all talk” theme is perfect for plot-heavy, deep philosophical discussions between the player and a cast of NPCs.

Ideal for z-machine text adventures using Inform7, ultra modern HTML5 literary gaming powered by engines such as Undum or the Choice of Games engine. There’s also RPGmaker and Doglion’s RPG engine.

I recommend the ever fantastic Ren’Py visual novel engine.  A complete sample Ren’Py game source code is available here to help you learn.

If you are using Flashpunk, I recommend using Draknek’s upgrade which has an amazing text engine.

Another fantastic engine you might enjoy working with is Jake Elliot’s Visual Novel engine from this game that uses Flixel.

I’ll be creating my own HTML engine for this, using pre-rendered 3d avatars. Since we don’t have to care about tech or rendering performance, HTML5 is the perfect choice since it is great for low-power mobile devices. Heck, you could write your game using youtube, regular html4 or even hypercard.

L.A. Noire

Fire Emblem

Think NPCs, CYOA, multiple choice, text, plot, voiceovers, speech synthesis, prose, humour, conflict, debate, love.

Make a murder mystery or a political scandal. A dating simulator or a talk show. A news report or a bedtime story. A love story or a heart-wrenching breakup. Beat poetry or freestyle hip-hop. Whispers or screams. Secret school flirtations or code-words between spies.  Hardcore RPG, Ren-py visual novel or pure text IF (interactive fiction), the choice is yours.

No matter what the genre – from AAA rpgs and shooters to puzzle games and everything in between, virtually every videogame ever made uses dialogue to progress the plot. Repetitive battles and grinding are sometimes seen as mere filler between the NPC dialogue and missions.  Which is more exciting? Killing your thousandth giant rat or encountering the next major NPC who gives you a quest?

Fallout 3

Alpha Protocol

This low-stress, relaxed rules MiniLD is a fun way to get away from worrying about framerate, animation or incredible 3d graphics and instead focus on the plot. The characters. The story. The soul.

Perhaps you will invent an epic storyline and a cast of interesting characters that are so cool they make it into your next action title! For now, just remember: focus on dialogue and characterization. On personal conflict, emotions and tough decisions.

Valkyria Chronicles

Final Fantasy II

Will this be a fun breather between more intense programming projects? Will your game be easier to program than something more graphics-heavy? Will it be deeper than your last brainless shooter? More artistic? Less work? More original? Discuss.

Read this wonderful article for ideas: [part1] [part2] [part3]

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Tags: Conversation, dialogue, Discussion, McFunkypants, MiniLD, MiniLD #27, NPC, Talk

I warmly encourage anyone working on a dialogue system for the MiniLD this month to check out this interesting article series:

Designing a Dialogue System From Scratch

Part One:
http://tom-jubert.blogspot.com/2011/06/designing-dialogue-system-from-scratch.html

Part Two:
http://tom-jubert.blogspot.com/2011/06/designing-dialogue-system-from-scratch_08.html

Part Three:
http://tom-jubert.blogspot.com/2011/06/designing-dialogue-system-from-scratch_14.html

If you know of other similar articles, I’d love to hear about them!

Voicebox is a very simple HTML example for RPG games that require voiceover dialogue. Instead of carefully recording all of your game’s speech, certain characters can be assigned an “alien tongue” that is made up of simple nonsense sounds. Much like in the original KOTOR adventure game by Bioware, important characters can be given proper English voiceovers while secondary characters or those you don’t have time to record dialogue for can simply play random snippets of silly “fake” speech like these. Believe it or not I recorded these myself using a microphone (in between bouts of laughter). Feel free to use these recordings in your game. Enjoy!

http://www.mcfunkypants.com/2011/voicebox-mp3/

Tags: dialogue, McFunkypants, mp3, NPC, sound, voicebox, voiceovers

Ren'Py rocks.

The author of Ren’Py (the best visual novel engine and the tool I recommend most enthusiastically for this weekend’s miniLD #27) has expressed support for Ludum Dare!  He is frantically working on bugfixes for a fresh new version of Ren’Py for you all to enjoy this weekend.

Be sure to check it out: this is a master work and a labour of love that has been constantly updated for over two years. http://www.renpy.org/why.html

I warmly encourage everyone to follow him on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/renpytom

Tags: Ren'Py

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 8:10 am and is filed under MiniLD #27. 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.

For this miniLD I plan to program an RPG-style NPC dialogue system for my touch-screen Android phone as well as web and windows executable.

I already have a very basic proof-of-concept running on all three platforms.

For the art, I’ve prepared several Poser 2010 characters that I can render with various facial expressions.

I have a fighter, a cleric, a retired army general and a wise old alchemist, along with their “familiars” (magical talking animals).  You can see a screenshot of the cast in a previous post.

I think the animals will be more entertaining than the people, so the story will be seen from the perspective of a sarcastic orange shorthair exotic cat named Prince Charlemainge Powerpaws III (prince Charlie for short).

Tools:
– written in HTML and javascript
– windows .exe is just a wrapper for a xulrunner chromeless web browser
– web version is naturally just the HTML file itself
– android version is built using Phonegap (with a WebKit window)

Wish me luck!

Tags: screenshot

This weekend’s miniLD will be officially over at Midnight tonight.  That said, there would be no problem if you post an entry a few hours late.  We will close the submission form on Monday around lunchtime.

Remember: you do NOT have to finish your game – we warmly welcome all submissions including failed projects.  Post whatever you have – just for fun – bugs and all!  Ludum Dare is great for learning new things and the short 48 hours format doesn’t leave time for polish.  A simple prototype, demo or even just a title screen is still an accomplishment.  =)  We don’t mind a few rough edges.

Good luck finishing your games today!  Enjoy the process and don’t stress about the final product.  Whatever you end up with, even if it is a broken piece of junk is worthy of submission.  We promise to be kind with our comments!

Tags: motivation, spreadingthelove, youcandoit

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2011 at 8:19 am and is filed under MiniLD #27. 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.

The June miniLD #27 (theme: ALL TALK) has officially ended with a bang! The results are in!

View all the stats for each of the 30 games here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-27/?more=1

The gold medal for fun goes to Zed with his zombie/bacon adventure, Adventures in the Public Domain. Gold for gameplay goes to 31eee384 for his IRC hacker simulation, Secretnet. Gold for presentation goes to Jake Elliot for Last Tuesday, his eerie visual novel about a world devoid of people.

Other standouts include Zillix’s Acquiescence, Reltair’s Project Eidolon, Radiatoryang’s Polonius and smalldeadinsect’s Leaks.  There were 30 games created in all, and many not mentioned above that were truly awesome.  Check them out!

As one of the most active mini dares in recent memory and one filled with enthusiasm and positivity, I just want to thank you all for being such a creative, energetic and kind-hearted bunch of gamedevs. You rock.

Viva Ludum Dare!

Tags: All Talk, McFunkypants, rankings, results, voting, wrapup

Hello Ludum Dare friends, I am writing a book on game jams.  As part of the research I wanted to ask you if you had any anecdotes or advice you’d like to share for achieving game jam success!  In particular, funny stuff is what I’d like to hear most. =)  One liners, haiku, yoda-like wisdom… you name it. Update: I’m loving all the haiku (5-7-5 syllable poems) please submit more!

McFunkypants
blog: www.mcfunkypants.com
twitter: @McFunkypants
google+: http://gplus.to/gamedev

Tags: advice, Book