I was going to avoid Ludum Dare 31 altogether, but then the hype of it kicked in a bit and I thought I’d see if I could get into a team as a Designer / Blogger only (i.e. I’d come up with a game and do the promo stuff for it while other team members developed the actual game). Nothing came of that but then I got to Tweeting back and forth with @SteffenWittig who I’ve been dev mates with for a while and I got an immediate game idea after the following theme showed up in the theme voting list:

 I guess the vast majority of people saw this as a “Snowman” but my warped brain immediately went in a completely other direction.

I bounced the idea off Steffen and he loved it and after a series of back and forth tweets, we decided to team up to potentially do a game. There’s about 6 themes in the last round of voting that the game could match in with really well, so hopefully one of those is what eventually gets chosen and if so we’ll be taking this weekend off from our other game development stuff to do LD31.

Steffen will be doing all of the art, UI, soundtrack and sound effects and I’ll be doing the design and development. I was a bit reluctant to lose a weekend of my own development time for Blue Thumbs Gaming but the chance to work with such an awesome artist like Wittig, was an opportunity I couldn’t look past. He’s also a developer in his own right and has published two really awesome games “Depri-Horst” and “Explodey BAM!”. He’s also the mastermind / artist behind a very cool comic series, this is one of his most recent works which is highly appropriate:

So we’ll be in with the chaos over the weekend trying to get my crazy game idea built and all of SW’s awesome art and sounds patched in, in time to be entered in the 72hr Jam competition for LD31.

If you want to follow along with the development of our game, we’ll be Tweeting about it under the hastag #PooDeePie That’s assuming we get lucky with an appropriate chosen theme of course.

Good luck everyone!

Really looking forward to playing another huge batch of awesome games.

Cheers,

Ben.

It’s Ludum Dare ☃ Time!

Tips

If you live in Europe, then the compo is split over 2 days. This is generally how I split my work between Saturday and Sunday:

• Day 1 – engine, controls, graphics, music.
• Day 2 – gameplay features, level design, sound effects, menu, particles and other visual effects.

I recommend this schedule to others. My reasoning? Day 2 can be stressful – or rather – you will feel the pressure of time. When you’re under pressure you will rush things, and the engine/controls/graphics/music can’t afford to be rushed!

If you do rush these things, you don’t do them as well or as carefully. So they will be more prone to errors, and you won’t really have time to properly test/debug/fix them.

Engine – Say you rush your engine (that is the game loop and the core physics of your game). If it doesn’t work properly, then you could have a broken game. Nothing else will matter.

Controls – Imagine if the keys/mouse input doesn’t work properly. Imagine if a character can’t make jumps it is supposed to be able to make. Or if the speed/feel of character movement is just wrong/bad. Imagine if an inventory or in-game menu won’t open. Your game could be unplayable.

Graphics – Rush your graphics and spoil them and your game will look bad. Graphics create first impressions. Your screenshot is all that will entice players to click your game, and your game could well be judged after a mere 60 seconds of play. First impressions are everything!

Music – Leave it until day 2 and it’s the sort of thing you’ll keep putting off until it’s too late! And if you rush your music then your game could sound bad. Painful sounds will put player’s in a bad mood, which could be the difference between “I like your game” and “I don’t like your game”. Don’t make them want to turn down the volume.

Day 2 – If you’re finding things too stressful, then try not to worry. Don’t worry about making a big game with many levels and a zillion different items. Short games are often preferred anyway! Everybody cuts corners on day 2, so let it happen. And always have fun, and let that fun show in your work.

Good Luck. See you on the other side 😛

I will be using :

Coding And Stuff : Javascript, crafty.js

IDE: Notepad++

Graphics : Paint.net

Sounds : http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/

This is my first Ludum Dare, so I thought I would just do the jam rather than stress out and end up not doing it at all.

My friend will be helping me, and I will be using some scripts I wrote for unity last year for the base (renderer, map parser, that ok?), so hopefully I will have plenty of time to get some gameplay done. I had a few sprites I was using for the base, but I will do them all from scratch, because I want my pixeling judged. I also make sort of chiptunes music, but a bit more beat rock… Im calling it erocktronic. I might do tracks from scratch if there is time, but maybe just use some of my existing tracks and opt out of that category.

I will be using:

– Unity

– Tiled Map Editor

– Cosmigo Pro Motion, Pyxel Edit, Sprite Anything (iOS)

– Sublime Text 3

– BFXR or maybe record sound effects

I will try to stream, but if it makes me uncomfortable or slows me down too much,

I will just record it and upload it later.

Tags: 2.5d, 2D, im in, ld31, stream, tools, unity

Hey guys We’re in!

Engine: Unity 4.6

Libraries/Plugins: echologin PostFX & CoreFX, my own game genres library.

Tags: ld #31

If you’re not adverse to the command line on the Mac, you can use simple scripts to put together a timelapse of your LD – no special software needed.

I put together a repo of the scripts I use for this: https://github.com/Udo/timelapse-scripts

Second time up for me.

Graphics / Animation: Mudbox / Maya

Audio Music : Chordbot / Caustic

Engine: Unity 4.6

Personal Codebase:

tps camera + controller + generic ui

https://github.com/marvalgames/ludum-dare

Psyched

That’s gonna be the name of the game I’ll be working on this weekend.

It’s actually based on a real story…

My story :/

As you can guess, I’m a little angry and frustrated right now, since I just arrived here in Reykjavík 3 weeks ago, and now they will be kicking me out at the end of the month. (The weather is all snow and wind right now, so it also snows under the bridge, so that’s not really an option.)

Anyways, besides a cry of frustration this game will also be cry for help. Not help for me, it’s a cry for Iceland because this specific problem is still a remnant of the 2008 crisis combined with current politics in the country. (Look it up, it’s real)

Oh, and what the gameplay will entail will depend on the theme.

Tools: Unity, Photoshop, Garageband, Reaper and/or DMG

☃,

Siewart

Disclaimer: All above only happens if I can convince my Icelandic #gameDev friends, and I won’t calm down before it starts :P. Any pointers to affordable accommodation in 101 Reykjavík are very welcome

Technically, We’re starting a number of hours early, however we won’t have a Sunday to work on this… Australia… Yay…
So I’m going to grab a couple of the voted suggestions and build something I can adapt to what the actual voted topic will be.
Currently I’m going with:

• entire Game on one screen… well I’ll stick a tutorial and title screen in, I don’t count those
• Chaos (as far as level generation is concerned)
• Machines
• Artificial Life
• Generation (Levels)

I’m going to go for a platformer where I generate floors.  On each floor will be sections locked off that you need to travel to other floors to unlock.

The red sections each stand for each “block” which can be linked to another grid space or similar…  Yeah, I’m not good at the explanations, I’ll show more as I go and you’ll get a better idea.  essentially, doors, elevators, 4 floor platformer that will continuously change.

Image of current idea:

We are streaming this, however we can’t garuntee the content of the stream will be family friendly, hense why  we aren’t linking it directly.

I’ll post again once I’ve got something a little more visual.

Tags: LD#31 #early

This will be my fourth LD and having done the jam last time, I’m hoping to finish in time for the compo.

I’ll be using these technologies:

• HTML5 Canvas API
• Sublime Text 3
• GIMP
• Audacity
• https://github.com/JordanFitz/ld31lib

It’s been a year since my last Ludum Dare, and this is probably the only opportunity I’ll have to do a Ludum Dare for another year also so I definitely plan on taking it if possible.

I’ll be using:

• LÖVE (engine)
• Ammo (my own framework)
• Sublime Text 2
• Bfxr
• Logic Pro
• Pixen (most likely)
• Ogmo Editor (most likely)

EDIT:

Will also be using a few extensions libraries that go with Ammo (can be found on my GitHub) and also likely SLAXML (if I’m using Ogmo).

Gearing up for Ludum Dare this weekend.

All going well, it will be my first LD since 2012 (I attempted one last December but didnt finish anything worth submitting)

I’ll be using Unity this time round, since its a much more popular/trusted game engine for posting games online with (rather than the Blender Game Engine – which Ive used for most past LDs). Im feeling like making something space-ish (like usual), or perhaps something a bit out there, like a ‘fake’ isometric in a 3D game setting.  Chaos, Deep Space, Isolation and ‘You Are Not Supposed To Be Here’ are all themes that got my vote in the final round. Any of those would be great!

Software for this round:

GameEngine: Unity [C#]

Programming: Sublime Text 2

3D/Animation/Modelling/Rigging/Texturing: Blender

2D: GIMP

Sound: Audacity

Music: ?? (probably going to opt-out)

Also heres a quick turntable of a robot box-thing I worked on in the week leading up to now, in order to get more used to the workflow between Blender and Unity (especially when it comes to importing animated objects).

The legs fold up into the box itself, in a rough animation thats not quite good enough to show off yet (this wont be used at all for the LD ofc, its just something LD-related I whipped up to get back into the swing of things)

cube bot (not deployed)

cube-bot deployed [unity test]

Tags: blender, ld31, robot, unity

This is my first Ludum Dare, so I am newbie in game dev and hope to learn alot

• Phaser.js / LibGDX
• GIMP
• WebStorm / Intelij IDEA
• BFXR

Tags: 2D, im in, ld31

It’s time to kick bubblegum and chew ass!

I guess I’m in. Probably will just Unity3D it up as usual with a bit of Blender/GIMP thrown in for good measure.

Over 30 celcius predicted this weekend though – so might stick to working at night, being heat-averse. I should just move to Svalbard or something. I hear they have great internet there. 😀

WOO YEA HYPE!

Yup, I’m in again, and once again, I’ll be livetweeting from my twitter (surprise!) @MaddeMichael, as well as tweeting about games I’ll play!

As per usual, I’ll be using:

• GM: Studio – For actual game stuff
• MSPaint (The good XP version) – For all mah pixelly graphics
• BFXR/My Fabulous Voice – For all dat cool SFX
• Famitracker/Anvil Studio – For de music

I’ll do my usual thing of making a HTML export for web players, as well as the downloadable (and usually more stable) Windows version. I’ll host my game on GameJolt and itch.io.

And, like I said last time, REMEMBER TO ADD KEY CONFIG FOR KEYBOARD GAMES! Really, it helps a lot.

Team roktom is ready to battle. Will probably use :

ENGINE : unity or gamemaker (depending on theme)

GRAPHICS : Inkscape, blender.

SOUNDS AND MUSIC : Fruity loops

happy ludum dare guys !

So, I’ll be entering the LD this time around. And when I say ‘I”, I technically mean 3 of us.

• I – The programmer
• Number 2 guy – The algorithm and design helper
• Number 3 girl – The contributory artist and musician

So obviously it’s off the jam section for us. Weapons of choice:

• Java, LIBGDX, and my predefined game framework.
• Eclipse IDE, GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, Winamp and Windows 7.
• A computer, a graphics tablet, and possibly a piano.

See y’all ’round the site!

Step 0: Learn a better definition for the word “finals”.

Step 1: Listen to the Retro Gaming playlist on Spotify, and a little bit of Jim Guthrie. 

Step 2: Watch tons and tons of Blender tutorials. For instance, the one on rigging.

Step 3: Get free Unity Pro key, watch even more tutorials. This time on Intermediate Unity development.

Step 4: Mash random buttons in Sunvox. Make a cool tune.

Step 5: Futurama. ‘Cause nothing inspires more than the incompetent, loveable oaf Dr. John Zoidberg.

Step 6: Wait/watch a relaxing coffee gif while sipping hot coffee. 

Well, on the off-chance you have to post one of these, I am doing it just in case (better be safe than sorry and all that jazz).

Engine: Unity 3D

Art: PyxelEdit/Photoshop for texturing and Blender for 3D art.

… first time!

dont like the snowman though