So I’ve added octaves into the piano. You can cycle through 5 octaves of keys (60 notes in total). The dragging mouse left and right or pressing up and down arrows on the keyboard work. All of the sounds still playback at the end of the level.

http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/28475

Next step for the flight demo is updating the enemies list/spawns. I also want to add extra routes that you can take so the game is not as linear. I will wait to put the new version on newgrounds and android until I have enemies updated. I’m also trying to figure out the apple development process to produce an iOS version.

Hey folks! 😀 For those that don’t follow me on Twitter, I thought I’d put together a list of changes, improvements, and things I’ve been working on these past 2 weeks.

Click for the headlines, or read for the nitty gritty details.

Related: The Future of Ludum Dare Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Suggestion Thread.

Initial Cloudflare Setup – Cloudflare is popular (and free) CDN that speeds up websites by hosting static files closer to you, wherever you are in the world. It’s now installed and working. This is just one of many things that will speed up the website for everyone, especially those outside North America. We’re still bound by how fast the server can fullfill PHP requests, which is next on the list.

Enabling Cloudflare is just the first step towards speeding up the website. Right now we are not optimized at all for CDN (well, not really). It handles those several megabyte animated GIFs people have been uploading great, but we’re wasting a lot of time in PHP and SQL queries, especially on static dynamic stuff. So like I said, next will be speeding up the PHP (OpCache, APCu), and doing various optimizations and updates to better utilize the CDN.

No more www in URLs – ‘www’ is so 1994. All www.ludumdare.com URLs will now resolve to their www-less counterparts. Hello ludumdare.com/everything.

(PS: I’m saving the migration from ludumdare.com/compo/ to ludumdare.com for later. If I was to just do it, it would break a lot of the internet (links). So LD in its current form (WordPress) will continue to live in the /compo/ folder. We’ll be free once we’ve obsoleted it)

Fixes to the Donation Widget – The donation widget is some pretty old code. It’s based on an abandoned WordPress plugin named Donate Plus, that I had to ‘improve’ some years ago. In a sense, it has almost never actually worked correctly. It was supposed to talk with Paypal and sync transactions back and forth, but that stopped working after a month. Fortunately there was a way to manually add donations, which I’ve been doing ever since. No more! The plugin is now fixed. I still instinctively go to the control panel when I get donation e-mails, but now it’s just to admire that it’s done. Ahh the wonders of automation. 😀

There were more bugs, such as only supporting dollar amounts without decimals, fixed. I’m also now saving useful information like Paypal fees and actual Paypal e-mail addresses (wow).

All that’s left is making it correctly record who (what user account on ludumdare.com) donated. This is where I left off. I had made a fix, but it apparently does not work. I’ve written a script to match e-mail addresses with user accounts, but it seems many folks have multiple e-mail addresses. I’ll eventually add a way to claim a donation.

Added “Pre-Donation Widget” contributions – There were a few-dozen contributions to Ludum Dare before I set up the widget. These contributions are now part of the database. We now have a complete record of everyone that has ever contribution to Ludum Dare by Paypal. This will be useful. 😀

Post Previews Bug – Apparently only me and the other admins ever saw this. Anyways, post previews (drafts) now work for everyone again.

Updated Twitch Embed – Twitch finally updated their embed code from a Flash ‘object’ to an HTML ‘iframe’, and I’ve made the change. This means that Mobile and Tablet browsers can watch Live Streams from the website too!

The new embed also supports the Chromecast, which if you have one is pretty sweet.

Broadcast Tracking (and hello LDtv) – LDtv you say? Well it is 2014 (soon to be 2015), and video is kind-of a thing. I want us to better support video throughout the website, and I don’t just mean the Twitch widget. I mean all video. From lets plays on YouTube, to alternative streaming services like Hitbox. I want video to become a bigger part of LD, so much, that I’ve given this advocacy project a name: LDtv.

As for broadcast tracking, this started when I noticed something kind-of amazing the other day.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, just after Lunch, and there it was: The Twitch Widget, full of Live Streams. Again, this was a Tuesday afternoon. Aside from the October Challenge, there was no Game Jam going on. It wasn’t even a weekend! It’s a weekday, and there are 7 people streaming development to ~60 viewers!

What!

In the grand scheme of Live Streaming, yes that’s a small number, but it tells me something: Game Dev Live Streaming is catching on. I always assumed streaming was going to be one of the ways LD would be relevant in the ‘off season’, but here it was, happening right before my eyes.

I started asking questions: How long has this been going on? Why hadn’t I noticed this? What can I do to help it thrive even more? And like most of my Twitter ramblings, I said what I had to say and moved on to the next thing.

Are we at 24 hours of constant streaming yet?

A couple days later I wrote a PHP script to start tracking this. A cron job, every 5 minutes, hit Twitch and see whose online. Left it overnight to see how that would go.

And the scary thing: Yes, some days, we are at 24 hours of streaming!

We are talking 1 person carrying the night shift, but it happened. The first night I started tracking the data, there it was. I’ve also learned Sunday nights and Holiday nights have a lull where us Canadians and Americans sleep. But when I wake up tomorrow morning, there will be streaming, and it’s great.

I’ve put together a special page where you can find additional live stream data. In a sense, this is the beginnings of the larger LDtv project. Generally, we need to start caring more about the video content people are creating, and in this case, the people putting a lot of hours in to streaming. Figuring out who those people are. I’ll have more stats, charts and things to share soon.

Hitbox.tv Live Streaming Support (LDtv page only) – It’s not yet available on the front-page Widget, but the stream tracking is also tracking Hitbox.tv streams. For those not in the know, Hitbox is a lot like Twitch, but they’re not owned by Amazon (for better or worse). A number of folks have been asking for Hitbox support, and we now have it. Coming soon to a Widget near you!

YouTube Live Streaming Support (LDtv page only) – Like Hitbox, this isn’t available on the Widget yet. Long term, I want LDtv and the Website to do something with YouTube videos, so I began doing some research in to Google’s APIs. One thing lead to another, and we now have YouTube Live Stream Support!

YouTube streaming supports both Google+ style “Hangouts On Air” and proper YouTube Live broadcasts. Curious about YouTube streaming? You may have to go to your YouTube account settings and enable it. To compare, Twitch and Hitbox work essentially the same, but YouTube has a built-in DVR. This means as a viewer, you can rewind and fast forward through a Live event, or hit the LIVE button to resume watching Live. It’s pretty cool. That said, YouTube Live is a bit like an aircraft with lots of buttons and switches. Powerful, but complicated.

Header and Sidebar Declutter – One of the ugliest parts of the website is the madness that goes on in the page header and the sidebar. I’m often asked where to find things, many are right in the sidebar or header. Obviously, what we have isn’t working, so I’m going to try to fix it. The Mailing List, IRC, and Reddit now have big icons on the sidebar. I’m told they act funny in some older browsers, so I’ll continue to tweak the code. This is just the start. I plan to continue tweaking and improving the layout as we go.

Steam Widget (Curator and Group) – Ludum Dare has a Steam presence. Originally we had a small Steam Group of 200-some members, and it was okay. But then Steam Curators happened, and with some effort, we managed to become a Top-50 curator. Unfortunately we have slipped, down to the Top-60, but that’s still good! That’s nearly 2600 people, LD’ers and Gamers, that will now hear about your Ludum Dare games as they cross over in to PC’s biggest game market. And the higher we go, the more people we can share your games with. 😀

We also used to have a ‘Featured Post-LD Games’ list that, to be honest, in recent years was just a Steam Games list. There’s just too much volume on iOS and Android, that I had to limit it to places with less volume. That said, of the 14 Ludum Dare games on Steam, 8 have come out this year, with the another coming next month, and 1 more scheduled for 2015. Steam is growing fast too thanks to Greenlight, and Valve has now made it easy for us to collect games.

Rarely talked about, we’ve had a Ludum Dare Steam Group for years too. A good 200 people found it organically, but now seems like a good time to open the floodgates.

So I’ve combined these 3 Steam things together in to a single custom Steam-like widget. Visit the website and scroll down; It’s hard to miss. The Featured games list is now a random 3 Ludum Dare games available on Steam. Currently, the stats update ever 10 minutes (I may bump this). It still needs some work, but check it out! I’m pleased with the results.

Unfinished: Patreon and Donation Goals Widget – It figures. The important thing as I saw it going in to this Ludum Dare update plan was to highlight how much money we’ve taken in, and how I’m doing towards my goal. Some of the first code I wrote 2 nearly weeks ago was a parser for the CSV file that Patreon spits out. Alas, this got back-burnered, to hopefully pick up and finish today (Monday). Nope, but I did get close.

To say I’m rusty with PHP would be an understatement. I’ve been spending a lot of time in recent months doing JavaScript gamedev, but unless I was going to rewrite the site with node.js, this doesn’t do me a lot of good. Part of me wanted to take on some less-scary code first (i.e. not Money), and the other part wanted to do things that sounded fun (like reverse engineering Steam’s website a bit to get curator data, data without APIs), which is how we got here. And now that my initial LDtv data gathering and Steam widget are working, I’m ready to finish what I started.

Wrap up – I think that covers all the big things. I’ve been doing some general research on other Web APIs (Reddit (OMG EASY), Twitter, Facebook) as well as some work on the rewrite plan for next year (LD2015), mockups, and lots of note-taking.

I have a video I may do this week, this time about something I’d like to change (the hashtag). Stats always tell us that half of all participants in an Ludum Dare event haven’t done one before, so the simpler we can make it, the better. And given that we’re up to our 31st event, of 48 or 72 hours in length, #LD48 or specifically “48” is about as vague as you could get (I’m thinking: #LDJAM or #LDjam). Anyways, this is a rabbit hole, so lets save this discussion for later.

You made it to the end! I’m finished my long ramble-rant! Hooray for you!

FYI: I’ll be kicking off our ‘5 week countdown’ to Ludum Dare 31 with a bunch of stuff on October 31st. Theme Suggestions will open, but I’ve got a extra special thing for the artists. Stay tuned!

That’s it! We’re done. Until next time!

* * *

PS: I thought about calling this the Ludum Daregest (Digest), which lead me to Ludum Daregeist, and to Ludum Der Geist, but that was too spooky. 😉

The 2nd week is over and I am proud to announce I managed to work on WoCS everyday since the end of september. That’s a little achievment for me 😀

Now onto the actual wrap up of the week.

UI, UI and more UI

Yes I wanted to be done with the UI by the end of week 2, but as it happens I’m not. Most of the functionality is done though. I still need to change the visuals for all the menus but this shouldn’t be too big of a problem. After that I would say the UI is done, until I have played with it a little and have a feel for the new UI.

I already have a small concern that I will need a new station UI because as it is now it might not work well on mobile devices. And as stated by a comment in the orignial LD entry this screen is taking you away from the action.

There are still some little tweaks here and there that need to be implemented. I need to disable the time controls whenever the player shouldn’t be able to use them i.e. when he’s in a menu. Also the time controls are just dummies yet.

Not only UI happened

Because working on the UI got a little boring I decided to throw in some fun work. I played a little with visual feedback. When the player earns money the counter will actually count up or down as seen below.

I also tried to add a trail renderer to the ships, but the result didn’t make me happy so I scrapped that again. I might reiterate over this but I’m not sure about that.

A small gameplay change made it in already aswell. I didn’t like the fact that planets closer to the player station were “better” because your ships would arrive earlier. It felt like I had no choice in the early game but that I had to hope that I don’t fuck up the universe by selling to the closest planet. Now the ships will travel the same time to each planet. This should enable players to control the universe a little better… I hope.

Another little change is that the player can play a 50 days game. Which usually is the point where the player gets full control anyways. The player can still play for 100 days, but to be honest unless you’re trying to get the highest possible score by min maxing and uber timing everything you aren’t getting anything out of it yet. I try to think of a way to change this. Maybe pirates start to show up after 50 day. Maybe the size limit on military ships will increase. I’m not sure yet. If any of you guys has any ideas let me know 😀

Random Thoughts

Again I’ll throw out some of my random thoughts and plans for the future.

Planets should grow over time and not just get huge with a big weapon shipment. This is pretty easy to implement actually but it’s still on my TODO list.

Ships that are waiting at your station can be shown flying in a circle around the station. I like the idea of showing my numbers in different ways. I’ll still keep the number in the header so you don’t have to count manually. I would like to show money and weapons aswell somehow. Like a pile of gold. But in space this seems a little dumb. Do you guys have any ideas for a nice visualization?

I like the time controls. They will definetly stay. But what I don’t like is that the game doesn’t auto pause when I am inside the planet menu or any menu except the station upgrade screen. It’s obvious that the player doesn’t want the game to run in the background while he is thinking about how many weapons he should sell to the planet. Also the UI buttons for the time controls should be hidden when I’m not supposed to use them.

The Graphics.

As a graphic designer and front-end developer, the graphics was a part of the game building process I was looking forward to. I’m no stranger to Photoshop and Illustrator or hand-drawing but I had never really designed game sprites before.

I wanted a retro style eighties look to my game and found various references on the internet. There are lots of game graphics sites but nothing really had the specific items I needed. Then I found the website of illustrator Chris Hildenbrand (find him at http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.co.uk/). Not only did he have the exact look of a cityscape that I wanted but he also had tutorials describing how he creates game elements. I bought the cityscape background tutorial and my look for the game was created.

Several game elements were drawn up before I was happy but they then had to be redrawn at the correct scale for the coded sizes of the game elements.

To add a bit of movement I used animated gifs but ran into problems trying to intergrate them into Box2D which didn’t seem to like them, so I had to solve this by positioning them on a layer over the top of the Box2D elements.

Then I came to do the instruction page and realised I needed to write the copy – not only for this – but also for the small preview pages for the Chrome store pages.

Then two major problems turned up that I didn’t expect. More in the next blog.

Just wanted you to know that i have ported my LD24 game Geomelution to Android and it’s free and without ads!

Get it here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johan.game

Here’s a timelapse of my second Ludum Dare game named: AIlocation

Entry page | Play AIlocation

If this embedded video doesn’t quite work here’s a link

Tags: timelapse

I want to compete in the next Ludum Dare but I don’t know how to program. I want to make android games so I should learn JAVA but I need it in 49 days! Please help!!

Tags: java, learn, programing languge

Hi guys,

First off, I’m already getting excited at the prospect of LD31, it seems to have come around so soon!

I’m new to Unity, and have got the latest version installed (as well as Blender) and was wondering if anyone knows any good resources to help me get a bit further in 3D or 2D and learn in a bit more precise way than the (very helpful) video tutorials that Unity provides. I’m not an absolute beginner as I know a tiny bit about C# and the basics of Unity. Any help would be appreciated as I’m hoping to use Unity for LD31 instead of Pygame (which was one of my most painful and long-winded game programming experiences).

Tags: help, learn, unity

This is my first Ludum Dare and super excited.  I had been working on a VR Mobile framework and this gave me the drive to actually make a simple game from it.

I started the game in a 12 hour GameJam at my work which I organise.  The theme was horror so I went with the simple get out of the maze before you get killed by the zombies!

My friends at work said they enjoyed playing the game and some even screamed lol.

Tags: android, Virtual Reality, VR

Just submitted POND to the October-Challenge.

It’s a meditative interactive experience about playing with lights and sounds.

This game is actually free. The plan, in order to qualify, is to
a) get ad-revenue from kongregate
b) divert attention towards by other, paid games

Android (Google Play Store) | Web | LD-Entry

-Matthias

Hey folks! Mike here!

I was going to do a video for this, but it’s a lot faster for me to just write.

I’d like us to change the Hashtag (#LD48). It’s a common source of confusion for new participants (“I thought it was LD 31?”), which is about half of everyone participating in Ludum Dare events. And given all the other Ludum Dare numerics (72 hour jam, 48 hour compo, every past event), it’s helping nobody.

My proposed alternative is:

#LDJAM

When we started Ludum Dare 12 years ago, the term “Game Jam” hadn’t caught on. Instead, we took our inspirations from the Demoscene (i.e. “compo”). Nowadays though, Game Jams are what people call what we do. And even if you don’t know what a Game Jam is, you probably know the music term Jam/Jamming, or the sugary spread you put on your toast (arguably both are accurate descriptors of what we do). 😉

It’s unfortunately to change something we’ve been doing for 12 years (calling Ludum Dare LD48), but it’s a necessary step towards helping more people understand what we do.

This doesn’t solve the confusion between the Jam and Compo, but I think it’s still a better problem to have than having no idea what we do.

PLUS: ldj.am was available. Should make a good URL shortener. 😀

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Took me a while, but here is the post-compo version of my #LD30 entry:

http://gamejolt.com/games/action/linked/33104/

(it has a little bug, but I’m working on it to fix it)

The second beta version is ready for testing. Everything should work now. The music in main menu screen is still missing, but everything else is there. Please test and tell me how you like it and if you think something needs to be improved.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigosaur.gos.android

If you installed the first beta, please remove it from your Android. Due to updated libGDX, the application package name has changed (from com.bigosaur.gos to com.bigosaur.gos.android), so Google is treating this new one as a separate application and won’t update the game if you have already installed. You have to install this one as if it was a completely different game. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Almost a year ago I was posting my “I’m in!” post for the LD #28 (You only get one). That was my sixth Ludum Dare in a row.

I made a game in which you had to play some kind of 1vs1 soccer game and get the ball back when it got out of bounds. It was funny to play with friends, but I just let it sleep on my hard drive. Around February, I decided to give it a chance and started working on the game, changing some (many) mechanics but trying to keep the gameplay. And in the summer I released the game on OUYA ,Gamestick and Amazon’s Fire TV.

Today, I’m posting again to announce that the game is on Steam Greenlight, it’s fully playable and I’m still working on adding more awesoness to it! Like online multiplayer, 4 players, more game modes, etc.

It’d be great if this community could take a look at my game and vote. I’m not asking for a yes, just for your honest opinion.

Here’s the link: Soccertron on Steam Greenlight

Thanks, LD community!

Tags: SuccessStory, unity

I am doing the October Challenge this year! I like it so far.

Arround the middle of september, I came up with an idea for a top-down multiplayer boxing game. I started to work on it a little (with the idea in my head “Maybe October Challenge?”), but then the first day of october I realized it was boring and I wasn’t motivated enough.

Then I came up with a idea for a real-time defense game(when I later realized it’s a little like One Wall), and I started working on it but I couldn’t spend as much time I wanted because of school. I had much motivation thought. I wanted to push out a public beta-crap edition wednesday the 15th, but school and real life came in my way again. I got vacation which you would expect to work more on the game, but I had to go to many places. After the vacation, I had to “refresh” my mind again and it felt really weird to abandon my game for a few days. I felt like I should finish it. I also got the feeling like “how am I going to release this?”

Yeah. I am 15 and I feel like I am not a game-designer-programmer-professional-super-nerd-that-has-awesome-games. My goal was(and still) to release a game and make some money out of it, since I clearly have no job but I still have the urge to buy things.

I am wondering if anyone would buy my game. I don’t know if people like the game because it’s fun, I better hope so even thought I made the graphics in MS Paint and the game isn’t that original. To be honest, I rarely buy games(I rarely buy anything because of the money). I only pay for awesome games.

Now the trouble is to actually release it. I hope halloween will be my date, I only need to make it playable and then choose the humble bundle or itch.io, then it should be done(I am not saying I won’t work on it after it’s release! :D).

A screenshot taken while programming the spawn system for the weird enemys. Yes those are evil hamburgers. (taken October 20th)

I’m a bit late to this. 😮 For a while after LD #30, I was working on trying to get my entry to the point where it was sellable, but I’d ditched that a while ago to work on a different, more in-depth project (a 2D MMO) but I figure I’ll use the October Challenge as an excuse to dig back into it for a while.

Here’s the itch.io page:

http://bytestream.itch.io/invasion

I’m fairly certain that is still the original compo version, however.

Hi guys, I’ve just released a new Android Game called Two Dots, it is an endless addicting casual game and I want you to be part of it! Can you try it and leave a review on the play store! That would be awesome guys!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gikdew.twodots

I have a habit of restarting the same project over and over and over and over and over again. I usually find it easier than trying to fix problems so heavily ingrained into the project. I’ve been restarting this project forever and I’m proud to say that four days ago I started the final version.

For a very long time I’ve wanted to make a 2D re-imagining of the Minecraft Minigame, Spleef as a sort of Tech Demo for an online multiplayer engine. It brings me tremendous pleasure to say that earlier tonight the game finally reached playable status. The game can be won/lost and near everything works flawlessly. The game should see release before the month is out, and I can’t wait.

October Challenge, here I come.