I posted a little while back about a fixing some bugs in 5 Colors. Codexus was (appropriately) worried that I was fixing non-critical bugs, so I clarified that the bugs I fixed were indeed critical: I haven’t made any additions to my game, or fixed any bugs that were not game-stopping.

However, I do have some questions regarding the rules as they apply to bug fixes, because the LD rules wiki is not entirely clear.

On the one hand it says: “After the deadline, we do allow bugfixes. You’re allowed to fix any bugs that stop a player from playing or finishing your game,” which suggests that non-critical bug fixes are not allowed.

But it then goes on to state: “New content however is outside the scope of what’s considered a bugfix,” which would suggest that bug fixes are allowed, as long as you are not adding new content to the game.

So my question is, what is the LD policy/consensus when it comes to non-critical bug fixes? This seems to be a fairly laid-back community, which I really appreciate, but at the same time, it’s clear from peoples’ posts that everyone wants to “play fair,” so a clarification of rules seems like it would be good.

Personally I don’t see why people should not be encouraged to fix bugs, as bugs really aren’t part of the design of a game, which seems to be what LD is about (and even if bugs are fixed quickly, they will still effect some people, and hurt the game)–but others may feel differently. If bug fixes other than critical are not allowed, I think that a “technical” category should be added for judging the games.

Something to consider is that it may be a bit tricky to distinguish between “critical” and “noncritical” bugs at times: what if you have a bug that doesn’t make the game completely unplayable, but which makes it really frustrating all the way through?

Perhaps this is something to vote on?

I had some connectivity issues at first, but my router is cooperating now. I invite you to check out CollabRL: the multiplayer dungeon! The concept is simple — you can move around, and you can drop letters for others to see. Updates to the map happen in real time.

The map started out as a complete void, but slowly the explorers left goodies and now it is pretty interesting

You can grab the bugfix version (and the freshly compiled Linux version!) at the entry page.

A screenshot of the initial area:

More screenshots after the break.

Some answers for Finding Her’s comments C418 says …I like how the story gets explained through those little boxes

Thanks

I wanted to try how that worked on a game.

SonnyBone says …I just wish I knew what the heck happened at the end.

Check the “memory” icons on the bottom to figure it out

Wiering says …The first time I played I had no idea that you could press Space, since it only saidarrows move.

Yes, I should make every character have a “SPACE” when you move over them.

I thought that doing that just on the grandpa at the start would be enough.

matrin says …Hard to understand the story.

Even though the icons are not that descriptive (have to work on those), I think that the best way to understand it is through imagination.

philomory says …it might be interesting to add some platforming elements, to give the player a challenge as they uncover the story. Just a thought.

I think platforming, with gravity, would be annoying. Flying around hides the fact that the map is quite big 300×300 tiles (9600×9600 pixels!!)

But it could definetly profit from some sort of puzzle elements/mechanics

Cosr says …This was great. I like how the story is really left to the player to figure out, though I admit I’m a little lost on it. I guess I rushed through it to fast without thinking. I’ll definitely sit down with it again sometime and try to find all it has to offer. The protagonist manages to be quite expressive.

Thanks!

Jordan Magnuson says …Nice work. I really like the idea here, though it was a bit hard to figure out exactly what was going on story-wise (even though your little icons are great)… It would be nice to maybe have some indication if someone has new information to offer. I think spicing up the environment a bit wouldn’t hurt, though that’s not a criticism, as I’m well aware of the constraints that 48 hours create :). I liked the visuals, and your soundtrack was nice too. Oh, and so far I’ve played through to one ending. Definitely interested to see where this goes!

Thanks! I need to work on the information thing, I never actually did this indication-with-icons thing so it’s good to have so much feedback

About debris and stuff, it was planned but, as you say, didn’t quite make it in the 2-day limit.

Sos says …I am a nice person You have to pay attention to follow the story, but the story is great

Thanks man!

increpare says …I don’t think I really understood the story at all, if there was a story to be understood. As an experience, I think once I got over resenting you for the amount of backtracking that seemed to be required, I enjoyed it. There were several good moments of tension in it, for me.

There was a story to be understood, but it highly depends on imagination. There’s a premise (“Finding her”, lol), but the story is just whatever you make out of it. If you managed to feel tension then, at least subconciously, you felt the story.

The fun thing is that the story is actually not about the character as in most games, but about his society. It kind of mimics several aspects of the human being (later on, it get’s really harsh). If someone doesn’t feel anything at all after going through the game, he/she’s not living in the real world or not paying attention.

Yeah and sorry about the backtracking, I need to figure out a way to give hints.

Hempuli says …This was really interesting! The distances could be a bit shorter, because there isn’t anyway anything interesting in moving around in a mostly-empty world 😉

It could, but I like it the way it is. It ended up being like a methaphor: We only care about what surrounds us, even with the big world we live in.

Risko says …Great game (as expected 😉 ) — i like the most music, graphics and story (in this order). Have found just one ending, but i didn’t really notice it. Maybe some music, small animation, or some other remarkable thing would make it a bit stronger. But it was still highly valuable time, i think i will play it again, mainly for listening to the main theme music. And the small creatures are very cute (also easy to expect after your last LD game 😉 )

I agree there should be an ending animation (and a different one when you get the “happy” ending). I’m really glad you liked it. Even though I’m not a devoted musician and the notes are not in tempo, I felt great while recording that

2 things that could have been better: Maybe i didn’t understand the story well enought, but i had problem to find out whom to ask to get some clue to go further, doing this a bit cleaner would let me think that i’m the one playing, not just following the order you wanted me to follow.

Yes, as I answered to some questions before, I completly agree this has to be worked out.

Second thing is that you have maybe forgotten to include something like FlxG.followBounds…i didn’t like to see beyond the tiles on the borders of the map.

This was on purpose. You’re on a cave, but the cave is not the universe 😉

TenjouUtena says …Fun, atmospheric. I couldn’t bring myself to finish. I was slightly annoyed at finding out you had to repeatedly ask people about new tokens. Other then that, very fun.

The asking system isn’t it’s strength, I agree… but that’s sort of what the game’s about. I guess not everybody will like it.

Now I have a question for you!

How do you think controlling the player with a mouse would feel like?

Clicking somewhere would move the character in that direction and clicking on a character would start the conversation.

Thanks for your interest and best regards to you all.

Replying to comments posted on 5 Colors: Pandora.

TenjouUtena says …

Hard to figure out. Some hint about what keys to press would have been appreciated. Also I kept getting some sort of bug while playing through the game, and it did eventually make it unplayable. Kind of a fun little puzzler / indie style game.

Thanks for pointing out the potential for confusion Tenjou… I updated the readme and added hints and a walkthrough, which should help. As far as the bug, I think I know what it was (getting stuck on the purple room?), and I think I fixed it.

sdnitrasm_cero says …

Weird puzzle logics, I love it

Got to the part with the gradient colors near the dor but got stuck there and didn’t finish the game. I should play it again when you release the walkthrough
(and I think I found a glitch, the first time I entered through the door it sent me down for some reason).

Released the walkthrough, and I think I fixed that glitch.

C418 says …

The puzzles were sometimes a bit too confusing for me. But I think this is a good game. The visuals remind me of Small Worlds. A bit.

Small Worlds was definitely one of the inspirations I had for going super low-res, though my style ended up being sufficiently different to satisfy my need for “originality” :P.

Sos says …

Astonishing, but I’m too dumb to beat it…

Hope the walkthrough helps

Frimkron says …

I finished it! *bows* . Unique and intriguing, if a little frustrating in places – I was glad of the hints included in the readme.

Thanks for the compliments Frimkron!

ippa says …

cool, ultra retro gfx, odd, good combo

Thanks ippa!

Risko says …

This is the best game i have seen in this competition so far in every aspect (except audio) — the idea is great and greatly done, the graphics are absolutely great — mainly the buildings (great combination with that green background) and it was really fun to play (except the buggy part — see below). And naturaly good audio would make it even better, but i just listend to Coil and it fit the game very well

some criticism, though — the loading screen is awful (mainly in comparation with the beautiful graphics in game. And i’m not sure, if i have overseen some kind of switch, but if not, than you have some strange bug there — i had the whole part from 3:20-4:00 in video + the house in 2:00 white(on every try), so i was trying to find some other keys on keyboard to get colors in, or some new strategy to cope this white level, but after 10 minutes of trying to get through this invisible level i was so frustrated, that i watched the video and played just 2 of the colors and let the other to for some other time.

Thanks for the praise Risko! Yeah, the loading screen is pretty terrible… Game Maker default, which I should have taken 10 seconds to change :(. Regarding the crazy “invisible” bug that you ran into, I posted about that a little while back. Anyway, it’s fixed now :).

philomory says …

A “game about colors, and their consequences.” Absolutely brilliant. This absolutely embodies exploration, like towlr but good.

This game needs only three things to make it absolutely perfect: first, it *cries out* for some sort of ambient soundtrack. Second, I’d have liked it if at the end, after Blue, you made your way back to the Color Room for some final room before the credits. Third, motion could have been smoother. Sometimes it looked a little jerky when you moved around. Those three things aside, this game is still pretty much 5 stars all around (I dinged one graphic point for the jerky motion rendering).

I liked this game so much that, when I accidentally quit the game by hitting escape trying to pause when I got a phone call near the very end, I played it all the way through again just to finish.

EDIT (Beware of spoilers): I have to come back and note, after watching my girlfriend play this game, and watching the video walkthrough… there are a LOT of bugs in this game. In town area, for instance, several of the buildings present in the video walkthough manifested only as invisible walls when we played it. We also occasionally got stuck in walls, and in the last room, where you’re supposed to go through the ceiling, neither of us ever figured that out, but we didn’t have to because if you just exit the room and enter again, it puts you in the top half with the colors.

I’m not going to subtract any points from the score I gave, because these things honestly didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the game… at the time I thought they were intentional, and took them in stride. None-the-less, it does make me wish there was a ‘technical’ category to vote in.

Thank you very much for the compliments philomory! You ran into the same bug that Risko did (a product of a non-dedicated video card), which is now fixed :). I do hope to add a soundtrack to the game, and maybe some sound effects.  I’m a bit puzzled about your comment regarding “jerky motion,” as it seems fairly smooth to me, but maybe we just have different standards. In any case, the resolution would probably have to be bumped up to make the motion any smoother than it is… something to think about.

Maple says …

This is pretty awesome.i like the transform thingy XD and the puzzles were kinda hard for me.

Thanks Maple! Sorry if the puzzles are too hard

SonnyBone says …

This game is deceptively deep. I had no idea what was going on at first, but EXPLORATION brought me knowledge. Great use of theme!

Thanks SonnyBone, for the encouragement, and for understanding my use of theme!

dertom says …

Yeah,…good job! Keep on rocking…

Thanks dertom!

Hempuli says …

The idea was nice, but it was slightly too buggy to be enjoyable; I got stuck several times and pressing N teleported me weirdly around.

Hm… sorry to hear that your experience wasn’t enjoyable Hempuli . Could you maybe provide a bit more detail regarding what bugs you were running into? I think I have fixed all critical bugs in the game, meaning that you should no longer get stuck in such a way that you can no longer continue.  Pressing “N” should just take you to the next level, which is what it seems to do for me… I wasn’t able to reproduce any “weird teleporation.”  Perhaps if you explain the problem a bit more I’ll be able to fix it.

gimblll says …

Nice complete game with a good idea supporting it. The controls were a bit too “fiddly” for my taste though. I didn’t have the patience to continue after I would’ve had to start backtracking the levels. (Thanks for the youtube footage so I could actually see it played through!)

Hm… could you explain what you mean by “fiddly” controls gimblll? Are you referring to moving around with the arrow keys? Or transforming? Or jumping? The controls don’t really seem to give me much trouble, so I’m a bit uncertain what you mean here.

sinoth says …

Thank you for this beautiful entry. I may be a bit biased because I had Sigur Ros – Takk going in the background The slight spin in flying mode is perfect. My favorite entry so far.. if only it had some audio!

Ah, Sigur Ros! Yes! I’ve tried playing with Takk in the background myself, and it seems to fit pretty well — though I’m not sure about the first track. Anyway, thank you very much for the encouragement!

Thank you again to everyone who has played the game, and especially those who have provided feedback! Much appreciated! I hope I can be as helpful when it comes to your entries!

ok, I’m a whole compo behind, but here’s an update for my LD15 entry (Caverns). For that compo I hacked the game out in two 4h sessions, so it was missing a couple of vital elements: sound, and the ability to shoot physhaxey bullets at the attacking circles. There’s also a little bonus tune when you finish the game (thanks to Flash Module Player). Hope you enjoy it!

Also, I should have posted this earlier but the organizers of Sense of Wonder Night (TGS) have uploaded the presentations on youtube. You can see my one on Swarm Racer (LD08) here

I plugged LD in the Q&A section, but they cut that part ):

Hello fellow survivors (or survivors-so-far, where applicable) of various holidays, yule-tide celebrations, mid-winter feasts, and zombie infestations.

Since LD16 I have done some additional work on my entry, “Ruins”. (And thanks to everyone who’s commented on the entry!) A lot of what I’ve done has been technical and a bit behind-the-scenes, but I wanted to share a very short (3 room) demo I’ve put together of both a new mechanic for the player and several smaller features of the engine.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can find it here:

http://www.thewasabiproject.com/flash-games/play/ruins-demo-1220/

(This is more of a tech demo than a “game” — you can “win” by completing all three rooms, but there aren’t any gems to collect or any leaderboards to deal with.)

And here’s a couple of quick screenshots:

From a gameplay point of view, the interesting change in this demo is the addition of a brief (about 6 seconds) period of time after dying during which you can exist as a spirit. During this spirit existence you can still interact with objects like levers and switches, but you are immune to damage and cannot attack. If you’ve created a “Patch of Life” before dying, and you reach it as a spirit before your 6 second time limit expires, you will be restored to life.

Smaller updates include moving to flixel 1.47, adding levers, moving gates and bridges, pressure plates, pushable blocks, and bats (well, a rough of draft of bat AI anyway — they’re still just brown blocks that flap around the room). I also took advantage of the post processing support in flixel to add some very basic lighting effects and some blurring and color effects during “spirit mode”.

I’m experimenting with the tilesets as well: this demo includes tiles either taken directly from, or based on, art assets released by Daniel Cook (http://lostgarden.com) and they’re certainly nicer than what I was able to whip up at the tail end of 48 hours, but for the next Ruins demo I’m planning on trying to put together a couple of more abstract (and simpler) tilesets just to see how that might change the feel of the game. (I’d like that next demo to include a rough cut of the introductory scene for the game, that way it might give you a bit of flavor for the story rather than just a bunch of technical doodads to poke at, but I’m not sure when I’ll have that ready.)

As always, feedback on any part of the demo is more than welcome.

And finally, just for fun, here’s a screenshot of the first draft of the second cave in the demo as it appears in the editor:

Phew. Voting is a lot of work :). Downloading everything, unpack them into folders that include the author name (makes things easier afterwords),  fixing broken entries, maybe even installing extra stuff, playing the game, thinking up fair votes and commenting.

Playing the game

I feel you have to give the game a chance. Even if it looks really boring in the beginning. Sometimes it turns out to be really boring, but I feel more often it stuff can grow on you if you open your mind, try to ignore any irritating bits and concentrate on the mood the developer try to create. I found myself really trying to finish several games (and succeeding) and steering a little grey dot over a paintbrush map for at least 10 minutes (and enjoying it) :).

Voting

Voting is hard. You want to be fair (naturally). After I’ve played about 5+ entries I get a feel for what I consider a music 3.. or a humor 4. I can only decide on ratings by comparing the games.  Is this how everyone does it?

Commeting

Getting positive feedback and comments is probably the most fun, and could be a big part of the motivation to make a game for LD.  Since I enjoy it so much I feel I should write something (sometimes more, sometimes less) to 99% of  the entries I try. I doesn’t need to be much work commenting, just say what’s on your mind and focus on what’s good in the game, or how something could be made even better. If you “force” yourself to comment on every game you get good at it after a while

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.

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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.

dertom says …
Hehe,…nice nice! I really was a big fan of the old c64-textadventure of “The Hobbit”. Would be cool, if you had this effects were the pictures are drawn “realtime” and “real slow” 😀 But the graphics brought me back to that time…
Good job

I’m glad the game had some nostalgic value for you! The graphics were more of a last-minute thing, so I didn’t develop them that much.

SonnyBone says …
Was that a Joker reference in a text adventure game?
I THINK IT WAS!
I enjoyed the twists and turns here, but some of the text was hard to follow as it jumped up the page after a command.

I expirimented with different ways to pop the text up, and this way seemed best, though it does have its imperfections. During the 48 hours I wanted to make a game with an impressive gameplay, so I lost focus on making the text presentable.

C418 says …
Hm, I think it’s okay. I’m not a real sucker for text adventures. I don’t think I’ll rate it as I didn’t play far.

‘Okay’ is still a good thing to hear!

Cosr says …
That was very amusingly written. Takes maybe a few to many tries to find everything when searching.

Yea, I probably should’ve made necessary items come up more frequently.

Hamumu says …
I couldn’t get past the priest… I even went all the way back to see if the servant would give me what he needed, but either no, or I couldn’t word it right (actually yes, but it doesn’t count). I have to say that even once I understood the concept of how it would make you press enter and that the yellow line indicated it was actually command time, I still CONSTANTLY was typing ignored commands to my endless frustration. Some text adventure conventions would’ve been very nice, like the prompt meaning you can type things, and I for inventory, and the NESW movement. Nice artwork behind the text!

Yea, I might have fixed that had I adequate time to give some thought to this. It annoyed me too, but I was so concentrated on bugfinding that it slipped my mind to fix that. As for the priest, if you got the dagger and the King fell out the window, you can find the necessary item by searching in the loud room.

Hempuli says …
I can guess that it’s hard to make a proper parser-based text adventure in 48 hours!

You bet it was 😛

ippa says …
first about your comment: the area you got stuck in was about the only red herring I had in the game, it’s not very hard to jump out of though. Give it another shot, go to the right in the beginning and find the way out from there, it will take 3 minutes of your life and I’ll promise to put a smile on your face in the end :).
Onto your game: I liked the pixely gfx, the whole setup reminded me of early kings quest but without the animated character. I haven’t played many text-based games, and that might be the reason I didn’t get very far. I tried asking the servant for various things, a key and crown being the first ones :).. but he didn’t seem to understand anything I said. I would love some tips there, is it “give me the key”, “get key” or just “key” or any other combination.. nothing seemed to work. While the gfx was nice I got really hard to read on certain backgrounds, maybe putting it in a black box at the bottom would have helped with that. Or even better, in a full-length black box at the right side.
I really wished I could have gotten further on this one since it seemed like you put some serious work into it.

The servant is actually there just for kicks, sort of meant to be a little bonus. No, you can’t actually get anything from her except some backstory. (Ask her about dragons, the king, the queen, who you are, etc.) In order to find items to progress with the game, you’ll need to search for them in a couple of places. Hint: the copper key can be found in the loud room.

I got a lot of positive feedback on this game! Thanks for the comments guys, and I hope you enjoyed playing it as much as I did making it

Now that I think about it, I actually messed around with the source after the compo – the aliens were commented out in preparation for improvements to the strategy side of the gameplay. It shouldn’t be too hard to uncomment the relevant lines.

My compo page with the download link

So when Christmas came around I got my usual cool Gifts, but one particularly stuck out. Mainly because it matched my entry for Ludum Dare. I got a blanket that had moons and stars flooded all across it which is much like my game shoot for the stars.

Christmas Suprise

Alas, Coincidences like this are my life and I love them.

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) ***

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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.

Thanks again for all your comments. Here is my response to them. SonnyBone says …

THIS GAME IS SO HARD!
I like the concept, but it could stand to be more forgiving. Falling from the very top is a saddening experience.

If I ever get around to making my post compo I will be adding a feature to take you to checkpoints.

philomory says …

The game is pretty fun in it’s way, but the controls feel extremely awkward. I did love the music, though.

Thanks, I find that most people liked the music in the game. Of the 5 hours I spent making the game I only spent 20 minutes on it making music. I was surprised by this.

Covenant says …

Couldn’t run it, got a “Unexpected error running game.”

I apologize. As to why it didn’t load I don’t know.

TenjouUtena says …

Audio is kickin’ here. Everything else is kind of meh. It’s a good complete game. The music is awesome, though.

I like the idea of ‘non’ platforms, but I had too hard of a time progressing!

Thanks. I was going to add a sparkily sound effect for bouncing on stars but did not find the time.

Hempuli says …

It was addicting! I enjoyed the first level totally.

My original plan was was to only have 1 level and have it go about 3 times higher into the skies. with checkpoints. having a easy medium and hard mode difficulty based on how many checkpoints you would get. However, Once my player got so high on the screen, gravity reversed! Since I never fixed this bug, instead I made 3 small levels 2 of which were done at last minute. The first one was the start of my original course.

Zecks says …

the game’s so quirky it owns

My personality is quirky so it figures that bleed through my game. Thanks Zecks, you made me smile when I read that.

localcoder says …

Wow, too hard for me. The first row of blue stars is tough, and it just gets tougher. I got up to the orange sky.

It’s nice to stand on stars instead of collecting them for a change.

I’m glad you liked standing on stars, or bouncing on them in this case.

ippa says …

slightly too hard.. I think you suck gamers in better if it’s easy in the beginning and they can feel skilled :P. Cool concept, of all the ratings the highest went to Innovation.

I agree with you completely here. First level is much tougher than the 2 following it. This was a bad move on my part. Next time I enter I will keep this in mind. I don’t feel too bad though, this being my first ludum dare.

sirGustav says …

that is one irritating tune

I  felt bad because I didn’t add an option to turn off the music. Next time I enter there will be a off/on switch for music for those who don’t enjoy the quirky music I do.

The game I submitted to the contest (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=28) wasn’t a game in the sense that you could like.. do anything. Objectives? nah. Plot? nah. What I did was essentially a tech demo- flash space exploration mmo. except more than a couple people turned my crappy vps into a flaming heap, but theoretically it was an mmo . Well, anyone that likes the idea of a cross between Elite and Eve Online, I’m continuing work on it and just finished a large rewrite of the backend:

I am currently aiming at getting something more playable in for TIGSource’s Assemblee contest by the 10th (all the art/music I’m using is generated earlier from their users). I just finished a full rewrite so that everything runs of Python/Django on Google AppEngine . Added bonus- game accounts can attach to google authentication

Play at http://play.drifting.thegup.com

Currently the appengine framework is pretty much complete with datastore models for players,stars,planets,civilizations and npcs. I’m still tweaking the galaxy generation process but will be moving on to solar systems soon, along with multiplayer chat and pilot profiles, and some more ui options .

The game plan is to make it into kind of a multiplayer Elite – civilizations are generated along with the galaxies including homeworlds, npc ships and npc space stations you can interact with. You represent whatever civilization you choose and can later switch civs based on a reputation system. War against other civs and plunder, go freelance pirate, or do missions they give. There will be a limited resource you can use to claim new planets in the name of your civilization and either set up defenses or mining bases.
Each sector will be generated when a neighboring sector is first discovered.. ie a player enters sector 10,10 – the 3 neighboring sectors that haven’t been generated would then be created. There will be randomly placed wormholes or warp gates as well to connect to either other solar systems in the same sector or other sectors, to make exploring less linear.
Eventually I want to make planets explorable as well. They will be procedurally generated with a unique seed combined with the physical traits described by the ACRETE algorithm when generating them. I was looking at Away3D for making planet exploration a separate flash app

Congratulations to everyone who entered LD, there were some great and amusing entries

This has come up in the ‘Should Game Maker (etc. al.) count’ thread, but I thought I would split it off here, so that we can keep the conversations topical, and because I’m interested in what other people think.  Also, I do agree with a few other people in that thread, that coming to an agreement about what LD is about will assist any rules or voting changes that may or may not take place.

What I’m going to write here is a lot my opinion, but is also collected and paraphrased from what I have heard other people said.

Ludum Dare is a community of Independent and Hobbyist Game Programmers

I think the community that surrounds Ludum Dare is one of the most important things about us.   Several of our members have used designs or even experience gained here to launch successful Indie Game Programmer careers.  And everyone here is excited about programming, and willing to talk shop almost all day.  Personally, I think Ludum Dare exceeds places like Gamasutra and Gamedev.net because here you know who can bring the goods, and who’s just pretending.

Ludum Dare provides an experience for learning game programming from many experts; and metering one’s own programming against a vast array of talent.

One of the things I see people often talk about is that Ludum Dare is for learning, for getting better.   I think the sharing of source code, and the encouragement of development journals enhances this a lot.   Also, I know I use it to judge what I can do vs. what others can go.   I also get an opportunity to have people comment on my designs and labor in a constructive way so that I get better.   Finally I do get a score where I can see where I rank in the categories I was concentrating on.  This is a great judge of where I am, and where I can go.

Ludum Dare is about the rush and community of hundreds of game designers working at the same time in a short amount of time to create new games.

It’s fun to know that there’s hundreds of people working at the same goal along side you.  Not only does it force me to put aside a weekend and just work on my programming, I also get the encouragement of my peers once I hit that first wall of ‘I’ll never have anything good!’

This is just what I think and what I’ve observed. Feel free to comment on anything I’ve missed or gotten wrong below.

My entry Asploreheim has been retired – I deleted the database tables and set it to give an error message on login. I have, however, preserved the scores at the scores page.

Blackduck says …
Fun game, kind of laggy because of all the flags at the start. Gets quite repetitive eventually.

I’m glad you thought it was fun at first (and that I fixed the superlag bug). It does get repetitive, I admit, but you’ve gotta keep Exploring!

AtkinsSJ says …
It seems like a good start, but never really feels ‘gamey’, unless I’ve missed something. And yeah, the paths around the middle make it really laggy – perhaps it would work better if hills only drew paths to nearby hills.

Yeah, it’s more of a tech demo than a true game. And I fixed the bug, thankfully.

C418 says …
The game is now pretty much completely… uh… flagged up.
At first I thought the brown stuff was a weird kind of background, but after seeing this screenshots, I realized that it’s actually paths. As there are lot of flags now, I presume the game is a bit popular? 😀

Heh… “completely” was a side effect of the terrible lag thing and the center bias. If you managed to move out, it was pure empty. The idea is you have to just keep going. And it was popular at first, hence the “oh crud I released my game an hour ago and it’s already asploded”

TenjouUtena says …
Every time someone needs to try a MMO, right? Obviously ambitious, but relatively unfinished. You need some sort of scrolling background to indicate that you should walk outside of the paths.

Ambitious and unfinished – that about sums it up. I’ll remember some better UI and polish if I ever revive Asploreheim.

philomory says …
This is such an awesome idea, I wished it had actually worked for me.

The registration and login went ok, and I loaded the game world and heard the music and could walk around, but as soon as I walked onto an unclaimed hill, asploreheim.exe spiked my CPU and never went down. I had to force quit. When I tried to log in again afterwards, the game immediately crashed on login. Alas.

After some testing, the infinite loop on hill get seemed to be a side effect of the client not being able to handle all the server’s data. Oh well

SonnyBone says …
This thing killed my internet connection, I think. I logged in and then 3 minutes later my router went down. lol

All joking aside… this is a neat idea, it just doesn’t work as well as you’d like.

Routers are silly that way :p
And that seems to be the overall consensus… cool but broken.

Covenant says …
It crashes everytime I move the cursor on top of the button to register and/or login…

Clicking if the “too much data” thing occurs, but just moving the cursor over it? I haven’t a clue why that happens.

NiallM says …
I found it very buggy. Most times it would crash as soon as I hit the login button. As others have said, it could use some kind of background to indicate that you’re moving, and it really needs some kind of goal beyond the basic ‘flag as many hills as you can’ goal. Maybe the ability to build your own castle once you’ve flagged enough hills?

Very buggy indeed. Castles are something to remember should I revive the project.

Wiering says …
If I try to register, it says Server not found.

That… is a problem? Did you register from in-game or out? I know I completely forgot to implement the in-game button.

pythong says …
nice idea with the multiplayer

Thanks.

Hempuli says …
Interesting, though shortlived.

True, true indeed.

ippa says …
I want to play without registering, create a test / test account! 😉 Or make use of facebook connect ..ppl hate another reg

I don’t have Facebook myself, but a test account would have been a good idea…

hazman says …
Awesome idea.

Really buggy.

That’s it, essentially – clever but nowhere near complete.

sirGustav says …
unable to register and cursor blinked too fast

Unable to register in-game I bet… button did nothing. Cursor blinking fast? I don’t know of “too fast” but I didn’t framerate-inhibit on the main screen.

In conclusion, Asploreheim was a great idea, but I did a horrible job at it. I forgot to implement in-game register, allowed the data to grow to unhandleable sizes, and generally it was hard to play. Mega-congrats to Moltanem however who got 81 hills! 😀

The 2nd Global Game Jam happens at the end of January, one week after the upcoming MiniLD. I’m curious as to how many LDers will be participating, and where — I’ll be at the Scottish Game Jam in Glasgow. Anybody else feeling up for some slightly more social game dev?

Tags: ggj

My game this time around will be a fighting game.

It will be written in Lua, using an SDL wrapper linked with Alien. (Alien is a Foreign Function Interface binding written for Lua. It’s cross-platform, too!)

Over the course of the next week or so, I’ll be writing out the plans and getting some plans ready.

Excelsior!

—Mr. Dude

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...

Isn’t that great?

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.

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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.

It’s a time honored tradition of the gaming industry.

Take a look at these screenshots and see if you can tell what all of these games have in common.

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Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is after the cut.

EDIT: SUBMIT HERE

Mini LD #15 – Clone

Picture this: You are a designer for a fledgeling video game company in the 80s or 90s. Your options are unlimited. You could create an innovative, amazing experience, with mechanics and graphical technology that has never been seen before.

Or.. you could make a knockoff of something that actually sells.

This is a competition about the latter technique. Your assignment is to remake your favorite game of all time in a kitchy, video-game-clone-style. You’re not allowed to steal graphics or sound.. just ideas. Remodel the game as you see fit. Alter things just enough to avoid an impending lawsuit. Use as many horrible cliches, video game stereotypes, and thinly-veiled stand-in characters as possible. Keep in mind, just because you’re making a clone doesn’t mean you have to stop having original ideas. Galaga was theoretically a Space Invaders clone.. but obviously, the designers didn’t stop there. To take a more modern example, Dead Space certainly had a lot of elements (thematically and game-mechanics-wise) in common with Bioshock…

The game you choose to clone doesn’t need to be well-known. In fact, it would probably be best if it wasn’t – my intention is for this MiniLD to produce some hilarious clones of more obscure games. Your game should be instantly recognized as a clone by people who have played the original. You don’t have to say what it is you’re cloning, and it might be better if you didn’t; part of the fun of this contest is in viewing the entries and saying ‘that looks awfully familiar..’.

Take all the time you need, use any code you want, develop for whatever platform you wish. Again, please don’t just rip graphics or sound from the game you’re cloning.

Good luck.