Hey everybody,

I just thought I’d pass on a little note.

MiniLD #14 takes place next weekend (November 13th-15th weekend). Terry, the host of MiniLD #14 has let us know than it’s going to be a team competition. So find a friend or two and join in.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/11/02/mini-ludum-dare-14-find-a-partner/

Now, normally we don’t do voting during MiniLD’s, but it’s been suggested that maybe we should this time. Phil and I are both OK with the idea, but I’m going to add a little stipulation. The voting system currently only allows people that enter to vote, so if we get 20 some team entries in this MiniLD, we’ll enable voting. That’s why I’m sending this e-mail, to drum up more support. It’s still a MiniLD, so start and end times will be slightly more lax (from when Terry announces the theme until we think the weekend is over).

So grab a friend or stop by IRC and form a team for next weekend.

Regards,

Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Well the results are in. We polled 150 people, and well… I think “wow” about sums up the results. Lets have a look!

Availability wise, we're split down the middle.

Well, you can’t really ask for much more of an even split here. No matter which weekend we choose, 72% of those surveyed are available to enter. Yikes!

On to the next chart.

Preferences are... also the same

As far as preferences go, the 18th slips by the 11th by a mere single vote. Double yikes!

So what do these charts tell us? Well, they say we can pretty much choose either weekend for Ludum Dare #16.

As for the for the voting.

A majority want 3 weeks

Well if we do the 11th, 59% want more voting time (3 weeks+). If we do the 18th, only 47% do. Personally I’m still leaning towards 3 weeks myself, but it’s good to know.

So when will Ludum Dare #16 happen? We’ll get back to you. The charts are split down the middle, so us moderators will have to debate OTHER reasons to pick one weekend over the other.

We’ll let you know our decision in the next couple days.

– Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

Hi everybody,

I just wanted to let you guys know I’m going to be a little busy over the next few weeks. I’ll be around to make sure the compo starts and all that great stuff, but you may or may not see me much in IRC. Crunch time about sums up what’s going on.

You’ll be able to follow along on my blog, as I’m keeping semi-regular updates going there (though expect a delay on the next one), but it’s nose to the grindstone time for me. My schedule for Smiles PC puts me shooting for a release candidate by the middle of December. Distribution plans to follow.

Following that, there’s something else I want to sneak in between now and GDC (March 9th-13th). That’s a little more than 3 months from now. And no, it’s not Towlr for iPhone (though that’d be awesome). So, time is tight.

As always, if there’s a site maintenance emergency, and if Phil’s not around, fire me an e-mail. mike at sykhronics dot com. Alternatively, you can message me on twitter, mikekasprzak. Both will get my attention relatively quickly.

Thanks, and I look forward to showing you what’s up.

Mike Kasprzak (PoV)

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.

Courtesy of Critical Distance, Gamasutra presents the best 99 free games of 2009.

http://www.gamasutra.com/…/The_99_Best_Free_Games_Of_2009

Numerous Ludum Dare entries and regulars make up a respectable share of the list, which is something we’re always proud to see. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under LD - Misc. 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.

Bonjour!

Play these, they need more votes.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/1447 (I uploaded a working version of this)
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/728
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/43 (requires browser plugin)
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/507 (python source) ***

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 10:30 pm and is filed under LD #16 - Exploration - 2009. 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.

I get these in the mail every so often. Seeing how this one relates to the community, I thought I’d share. My apologies, it seems my scanner is dead, so I had to photograph instead.

A suspicious letter showed up in the mail today.

Wow, "THE" Domain registry of Canada... I didn't realize we had a domain registry

It seems very professional.

How considerate! A return envelope!

I guess it’s time to renew our website…

Wow! We can save $40 by renewing for 5 years!

In case you didn’t know, we also own ludumdare.org as a backup site, in case something crazy happens and we lose the dot com to domain thieves.

If lawsuits are threatened...

Alternatively, you could use a registrar like Godaddy, then google for coupons. I usually spend less than $10 a year myself. Get hosting elsewhere though.

Have a nice day.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 11:01 am and is filed under LD - Misc. 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.

Thanks everyone for coming out and making the meet-up such a huge success. We had more than 20 people show up, 19 of which stuck around for a gathering where we brought disorder to the Moscone food court. Hit the jump for pictures and video.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 12:15 am and is filed under LD - Misc. 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.

Mike “Hamumu” Hommel‘s recent Ludum Dare game “Robot Wants Kitty” is rocking the charts at Kongregate. This post-compo version features music by DrPetter, and numerous enhancements to the original game.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Hamumu/robot-wants-kitty

As of right now he’s #2 on the monthly top games, with well over 350,000 plays! Wow!

Show your support! Go to Kongregate, play it, and give him 5 stars because you love Kitty. You do love Kitty, right?

Special thanks to TenjouUtena, sf17k, and our mystery guest for helping prune the themes. We aggressively cut over 400 themes down to a far more reasonable 99. Thanks!

Be there!

I wonder if they have a vegetarian steak?

Tags: motivation

Here are some tips for getting the most out of Ludum Dare and the website.

Create an Account

Unlike other competitions, you aren’t required to pre-register to join in. You can decide to spontaneously join whenever you feel like it. However the website does require you to make an account to do anything (submit an entry, reply to comments, etc). You can sign up here.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-admin/

Set an Avatar

Ludum Dare, like many sites on the internet, use Gravatars for avatars. So long as you use the same e-mail address on both sites, the avatar will show up. If it doesn’t show up right away, try restarting your browser or clearing your cache.

http://www.gravatar.com

Write a biography

Got a reason to brag? Edit your biography and tell everyone about it. You can do this via the profile page inside wordpress.

Then any time someone clicks on your name, they can learn more about you. Try it, click on me for an example.

Add yourself to the World Map

Ludum Dare is as international as you can get, and it’s interesting to see where people are from. So to get an idea where everyone is, we have a map.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/world-map/

Set up your base code

Once you’ve decided what you’ll be using to make a game, get a simple test program up and running. Create a window/surface, print some text to the screen (“Hello World!”), load a sprite and draw it, load a sound effect and play it. You only have 48 hours, and you don’t know what the theme will be, so be ready for anything.

Once you have that, post it on the site, and talk about what you’ve done. Take the opportunity to introduce yourself too. Ludum Dare is a diverse community of game makers that are always interested in new and interesting ways of making the most of the 48.

Prepare/test your content creation tools

Fire up your software suite, your Photoshop or whatever you use, and make something. Then bring it in to your test app/base code. Verify that the process actually works, and take note of any places you stumbled. See if there’s anything you can do to speed up that process. Writing or downloading a tool, or whatever you need to do. Remember time is short, so you want to spend as much time as possible working on your game, not fighting with exporter bugs.

Arrange file hosting

The Ludum Dare website links to external downloads. Before the competition starts, you should figure out where you plan to host yours.

For download hosting, one suggestion is to create an account on Google Sites. There you can upload and share a zip file (details here).

Images and screenshots are hosted on the Ludum Dare website (details here). You *can* host them elsewhere, but using the built-in WordPress uploader keeps everything nice and responsive.

If you simply can-not host your files, contact me (PoV) in IRC.

Deskphoto, Foodphoto, Motivation

In addition to simply blogging about progress, we encourage you to do more than that. Here’s some common tags for various other activities the community does before and during LD.

deskphoto – Show us your workspace! Your desk, your bookshelves, your fridge, …
foodphoto – Show us your culinary skills, or interesting local cuisine.
motivation – An LD tradition is to create motivational posters. Try Automotivator.

Be sure to tag your posts, so we can use those links to browse them.

Timelapse Video

Timelapse video is another thing members of the community sometimes do (examples here). Using various capture software, grab a screenshot of the desktop (or webcam) every minute or so. Then compile them all together in to a video, and upload to youtube. For tools and details how to do this, check out the Log Tools page on the wiki.

http://www.ludumdare.com/wiki/logtools

You’re shipwrecked on an Island.

But the island just happens to have some super-great treasure on it, and you don’t want to leave.

I think I see a pirate ship in the distance? Oh! What to do?

Throw coconuts at them!

Tags: concept

Sometime Friday night, the good doctor made a clever quip that I’d just do another Smiles port for LD (currently available for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Samsung Omnia II, and Windows Netbooks). If you hadn’t heard, I’ve had some awesome luck lately with ports.

Well, he wasn’t exactly wrong… heh.

So here’s Smiles running on the Palm Pre. I actually finished this up last night, and sent it off for pre-approval (haha, get it, PRE approval!!?!). Fun fun.

And no, I wont be submitting this as an Entry. 😉

I’m supposed to be working, but Sol_HSA’s thread got pretty big pretty fast. This is probably a good time to get an official word out there, to avoid future uncertainty, and to catch up those that missed it.

We had a pretty intense discussion some months back about how we were going to manage Ludum Dare’s growth. Ludum Dare today is a far bigger than any of us imagined it would become, and it wants to keep getting bigger and bigger.

On the one side, it wants to be more and more inclusive. We’ve relaxed the rules to include pretty-much every piece of gaming making middleware available today (even Unreal 3, our old example of what’s “not allowed”). The previous problem of enabling anyone to create sound effects quickly was practically solved by the introduction of sfxr. Aside from allowing outside content, the only thing we haven’t given the thumbs up to was teams (well, other than a slight rules page oversight this compo).

On the other side, we have what’s probably best described as classic Ludum Dare. A strict set of rules, everything from scratch, full source, the cliche “real men write their own compilers with soldiering irons” angle (not to disrespect the ladies, but we are the pig-headed kings of extremes ;)).

Unfortunately it’s not a simple matter of taking one side and growing that way. Or maybe it is, but that’d be like shooting ourselves in the foot. As things become more open, rules start to fade, keeping things fair becomes more and more difficult. We also have our legacy to consider, and we know from experience rules and restrictions keep things focused and produce results. After all, we are the 48 hour competition.

So what’s our solution?

The new Ludum Dare we hope to create in the coming months is something I like to call “The Ludum Dare Competition and Jam“. As expected we’re combining the two camps, but the tricky part was coming up with what we think is the best way to do that.

The Ludum Dare Competition is the same Ludum Dare you all know and love. It’s a competition. We tighten up the rules a bit, specifically, changing them in to eligibility requirements. Solo, include source, all content created in 48 hours, etc. Not much different than what you’re used to, but the emphasis here will be keeping things fair and realistic.

The Ludum Dare (Online) Jam is the new open Ludum Dare. Bring in a friend, keep your source to yourself, take an extra day (but just 1). Ludum Dare is a serious game making event, synonymous with the idea of prototyping a game in a weekend. We exist to be your reason to create something. And if you participated, we want everyone to know. Unlike the competition, there is no voting in the Jam.

So like always, you tune in Friday night for the theme (timezone respected), and you make a game. If you end up breaking the rules (competition eligibility), oh well, you can still submit it for the Jam. If you’re running late but still wanted to make something, again, you can still submit it to the Jam. Or if you regularly work with a friend or team, make it a Ludum Dare weekend! Crunch a playable prototype during the weekend, share it with us via the Jam, and submit it to the App Store a week later.

You could even take steps to create separate Competition and Jam versions of your game. For example, someone that’s both a coder and an artist could submit an eligible version of their game without sound and music, and a Jam version with help from their sound designer friend.

In a nutshell, that’s what we’re thinking the new Ludum Dare should be. Share your thoughts in the comments.

ByteJacker is totally awesome. This week they’ve been digging through Ludum Dare 17′s epic 200+ submissions for their favorites. Keep an eye on their front page for the latest. I’ll try to keep this post updated with links as they post them.

(Terry’s pre-LD game)
http://www.bytejacker.com/blog/terry-cavanaghs-new-game-almost-broke-my-mouse

http://www.bytejacker.com/blog/ludum-dare-17-brave-island-diver
http://www.bytejacker.com/blog/ludum-dare-17-radio-silence
http://www.bytejacker.com/blog/ludum-dare-17-island-rescue
http://www.bytejacker.com/blog/ludum-dare-17-island-hopping *NEW*

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at 11:13 pm and is filed under LD #17 - Islands - 2010. 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.

On Saturday (compo Saturday), Ludum Dare 17 got a not as the headline “Indie Game Links” article on IndieGames.com.

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/04/indie_game_links_its_a_dare_go.html

Historically, IndieGames.com tends to post a few select entries from the LD competitions, so lets start making a list.

(Terry’s pre-LD game again… Stop being so famous you!)
http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/04/freeware_game_pick_sumouse_ter.html

http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/04/freeware_game_pick_brave_islan.html

Random content for MiniLD18.

I’m just gonna draw stuff, and if somebody finds any of it useful, then great.

EDIT: Moved Wormthing below. I’m going to draw a bunch of front-on things, so they can go together in a game.

Cow Head

I don't know what the heck it is, but you're going to drink it.

I-ma star!

Wormthing

Hey Everybody!

A friend of mine is organizing an “art game” exhibit in Toronto called “START”. Here are some details:

START

Sept. 13 – 17
8am – 10pm daily
www.thestartshow.com
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157656320916123

The goal of the event is to promote “art games” created in Toronto and beyond. The plan is to let visitors play a variety of unique games, and let them decide for themselves what is art. This is the first START, and we’re hoping it evolves into a yearly event. START will be held at the Ontario College of Art & Design which is affiliated with The Art Gallery of Ontario.
http://www.ocad.ca
http://www.ago.net

Everything takes place in one very large room, traditionally used to display paintings. In that room we’ll have 5 PC’s projecting games onto the walls for people to play – one projector is HUGE. The room will be impressive. Visitors can drop by anytime (open daily until 10:00pm) including Thursday (the Gala). We’re expecting hundreds of students daily (school will have just resumed), with 2 “gala” nights that will attract an older audience.

Due to budget and time constraints, we will be showing PC indie games only.

I gave him a list of artsy games off the top of my head (with some help from IRC), but LD is so big now, I realize I could be missing some real gems.

So if you know of any Ludum Dare games that meet the criteria of “art game”, ones you created or adore, please nominate them in the comments (one game per post, and give a nod to nominations you agree with). If you can find a link to the competition page, or a blog post here, that would be extremely helpful. Thanks!

I’m in a weird mood today, so I decided to put forth a challenge to members of our #ludumdare IRC channel. Feel free to join us. The challenge is simple:

Make a game — take it to market — sell 1 copy (or license it, or earn $1 in ad rev)

Many of you have done the first part, but let’s go all the way this time. The simplest definition of a professional game developer is someone that has made money developing games. So lets create-us some new “professionals” and get some games out!

Think of this as a race (or a Nanowrimo for games+business). Have something new for sale and in a store by the end of October. And if you can sell a copy (or sign a licensing deal, or earn $1 in ad revenue), you win.

October ends [fergcorp_cdt_single date=”23:59 October 31, 2010″]

NOTE: Start anytime! The clock is ticking! If you’re blogging here, use the “PC #01” Category. I’ll give it a better name later. Come October, the Challenge takes over Ludumdare.com.

Take a compo game and polish it up, something you’re working on now, or start something new. Bottom line, finally make good on that goal to start selling games. Lets do this!

Discuss in the comments, or hit the jump for some store and market suggestions.

* * *

Open Markets

There’s no restriction where or how you should to sell it, but App Stores are pretty popular streamlined ways to sell games today. There’s often some paperwork that needs to be filled out and mailed before you can sell, so I strongly suggest you do that ASAP.

Mobile
– Apple iOS [iPhone, iPod touch, iPad] (Obj C, C/C++, OpenGL ES) – $99 year fee
– Google Android (Java, C/C++, OpenGL ES) – $25 one-time fee
– Palm WebOS (C/C++, SDL and OpenGL ES, or HTML 5) – Free (Paypal payout)

PC
– Intel AppUp [Windows and MeeGo (Linux) Netbooks] – CONTEST – Free (Paypal payout)

Flash and Web
– Flash Game License (Licensors Marketplace) – Free (FGL takes a 10% cut)

Console
– Xbox Live Indie Games – $99 year fee

* * *

Pitch Markets

Some marketplaces require you to pitch and get your game approved before it hits the market. Those are included below.

PC
– Steam
– Big Fish Games

* * *

Events

For completion, a list of general indie game contests with money prizes.

– Independent Games Festival – Due October 18th – $99 Fee
– Indie Game Challenge ($100k top prize) – Due October 1st – $100 Fee

* * *

Payment Services

Perhaps you’d rather sell direct from your website? Here are some tools for that.

– Paypal
– BMT Micro (credit card, cheque, and more)
– Plimus (discussion)
– Amazon
– Google Checkout

If you have anything to add, post them in the comments.