So because of jovoc’s post I started looking into Voxel modeling because I don’t have a Mac to use Sproxel. There are little to no free voxel programs out there. So after several hours of digging into it I found this solution, all free, and best of all, they’re all portable apps.

• Cube Kingdom Version 2.0
• Metasequoia (LE R2.4 Freeware)
• Blender 2.4x

So the first step is to download Cube Kingdom Version 2.0. With this you can create your own Voxel models, the menu is in Japanese but you can get the jist of it. Once you’ve created your model, save it as the Metasequoia file type (mqo).

Next start up Metasequoia and import the model. Then save the file as a DirectX .X file, make sure to select Vertex Colors if you want to maintain your colors.

Next start up Blender 2.4x (2.5 no longer has a .X importer) and import your .X file. Now you can export as .fbx, .blend, or anything else.

You can also use Milkshape3D but Blender imports the faces as quads whereas Milkshape3D imports the faces as triangles.

This is gonna be my first LD. I’ve heard about it, but never participated. I will probably use Game Maker, with the GMBed library to make them accesible for a bigger crowd. I will actually use the Game Maker Instant Play feature, since this seem to be more stable. I’ve never really finished a game, so I hope this will be a great incentive to finally do so

I want this time to do a decent game  😀

So I’m in!

My tools:

• flashpunk
• flashdevelop
• flash player 10

Ideas? Wait for final theme 😀

Good luck to everyone!

Back for my fourth Ludum Dare… Back with the same old.

C# .Net

XNA Framework 4.0

Skintscript – Links soon

SuperNova Game Engine for XNA Framework. – Links soon

sfxr

Paint.Net

Gunna bash out another crappy game over the course of 2 days…. The things I do for science.

Hopefully I’ll get some time over this weekend to participate and make a small entry. I’ve stacked up on food and snacks.. just in case.

Libraries: Flashpunk + some basecode (just a bit of collission detection and WAV-decoding/playback)

Graphics: GraphicsGale + GIMP + MyPaint

Sfx: Bfxr + Audacity

Music: Might try to make something in Musagi if I feel adventurous. Or I might try WolframTones.. But probably my game will be without music.

Timelapse: Chronolapse

Also the Keynote this time was awesome! To whoever did the panda; rofl.

ok, I was putting off posting my in, but that awesome keynote did it for me. IM IN. I don’t have the support network I did the last time (my partner is in a far away land :((((), so I think I am going to have to make my own food and stuff. boo hoo. Also, as of the last ludum dare I did, I am making games full time now, so this is not like a break for me at all. I also have a fallback game that I want to make already, so I might be breaking the theme a little bit and just rolling with that one. Maybe not.

Enuff!

I am going to use as3 / flixel / flex SDK this time around, my lua thing was fun to write in last time but I got jealous of all the people that could just throw up their games on the web. What I would really like is to do something with lua alchemy so that I could just repub my game directly to iphone with no porting, but I don’t think that is going to be happening this weekend. Maybe for next time.

Probably renoise for music / sfx again, and photoshop / wacom for art.

Woo, sophomore  LD for me! LETS ROLL, IM IN11!!!

Hi everybody,

This is my first LD and I was wondering whether we could use sound assets from free CC sources, like Jamendo. This is the license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

My concern is related to the rules of the Compo.

Can be use the music from places like this?

Cheers

Continuing on from what I wrote last year, I’ve “improved” upon the old version and came up with this:

Its moved away from MEncoder, and now users FFmpeg to do the encoding (Which results in a better image quality).
It currently only converts the images at the highest quality possible, and doesn’t scale them down. It’s also quite slow when you have lots of photos…

If you want to have a look at it, you can download it from here (Use at your own risk!).

If you have any ideas or suggestions about this, let me know 😛

I have greatly enjoyed the fruits of LDs in the past… I have a bunch of friends who have been doing this for years and everytime they say, “Go OOOON, you can do it!!!” So I think I will have a go this time. Although, I must be able to make a game with proper SEXY TIMES based on the theme, the only thing I’m good at making is eyecandy. Besides, it’s not sexist having gratuitous images of barely-legal anime babes plastered all over the screen if they are drawn by girl, right? Right? … (^.^);; 

My tools: Ren ‘Py (Yeah I know, right? :P), PaintTool SAI, Photoshop CS3, Wacom Intuos3, Sibelius First (because I can only compose music/sound effects classically, not with sequencers ♪), husband (for making me tea, if he’s not too busy working on his entry XD)

I look forward to finally sharing in your pain, everyone! *(^w^)* ♥

Duckfin here, I’m in and I’m pumped!!

I’ve got a paper to write before tomorrow, as well as an LC-3 programming project due Sunday, and yet I’m STILL going to be going all out for LD. I haven’t actually finished an LD submission yet, and the only long-term game I’ve written is PPTD. I’m hoping I can coax myself into pushing through this time!

I’ll likely be using Python 2.6 and Pygame (as usual). I’ll be targeting all computer platforms, and may even branch out to Android! I’ve been wanting to get my feet wet there 😉

By the way, Keynote was awesome. “I’m a fucking ninja, and I’m in.”

Hello Ludum Dare!

I will be participating for the 2nd time.
This time I will not make an XNA game. I am going for a web playable flash game.

So my tools will include:

– FlashDevelop + Flashpunk

– Paint.NET for the graphics

– SFXR & Cubase for the sound

– Brains for the idea’s

I have just decided to go for a flash game so that means that I have 1.5 day to learn as3 & flashpunk.

See you in the IRC channel!

Hi. I’m Clyde. This is gonna be my first LD! The compo starts just as my final assignments are due. I’m pretty psyched to start, work on, and finish something since my schoolwork has been preempting my game development, thus preempting my portfolio-building, in turn preempting my EPIC WALK OF GAME DESIGN DESTINY. Also it’ll be neat to work on something other than the one huge project I’ve been slowly cooking up over the past year and a half.

I’m gonna be using either Unity or Flixel, depending on what I think of for the theme. I’m partial to working in 3D but I do play around in 2D from time to time.

Best of luck to everybody. We so excited.

Out of curiosity I started making a spreadsheet listing the technologies the participants has announced that they are intending to use for the upcoming Ludum Dare #20. I wanted to see what programming language most people were using as well as what tools were popular. I thought I might as well share it here, as it might be that others would be interested in these statistics as well. Please note that this document is not intended to be a perfect list.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Aqy7UlRVC35zdHlLRUJBejNfUll0VnZIa1J3OWJ5cXc&hl=no&authkey=CO_itvIL

I read through a lot of posts to make this list, and it made me be even more geared up to this weekend.

Seriously.

It starts at like 4 o’clock in the cold, oh so cold morning.

-Matthew

I’ll be entering this Ludum Dare for sure, and hopefully I’ll get a game done in time.

This time I’ll be using:

• Java + Slick2D
• Blender and GIMP for graphics
• sfxr + LMMS for audio, and
• Caffeine to stay awake…

Good luck to all participating.

It’s been well over a year since I last did a LD competition, so I’m looking forward to getting far too little sleep over the next few days.

My last entry was Bulldozer Blitz for LD13’s Roads theme.

I like to set goals for each competition, so I can come back afterwards and laugh at how hilariously I managed to not hit them. So, goals!

I’ll be attempting to make:

• Something playable, hopefully fun.
• Something quirky.
• Something pretty.

Things I’ll be ignoring:

• Sound. Who cares!
• High scores.
• Menus.
• My general state of health.

Things I’ll be attempting to do:

• Finish the actual game in decent time to allow for last minute polishing and tweeking.
• Take a better sequence of progress pictures as the competition progresses.
• Post more blog entries during the competition.
• Get early gameplay feedback on the first day rather than waiting until the competition is over.

Things I’ll be attempting to avoid:

• Spending too long on tools (like level editors).
• Spending ages tweeking the same couple of sprites.
• Working really late on the first day, then getting up at midday and wasting the morning.

Previously I’ve focused on getting complete, polished games made, at the expense of complexity. Bulldozer Blitz being possibly the best example, which has proper menus, high scores and legend text but the actual gameplay is quite minimal. This time I’d like to focus more on interesting game mechanics and leave out some of the ‘meta’ game.

I’m looking forward to this LD48.  I have a birthday party to attend Friday night, but otherwise my weekend is open.  It’s been a while since I’ve participated, and I missed out on the montage fun last year, so I decided to do one now.

My history with the LD48:

Good luck everyone.

Tags: declaration, montage

Hello! My name is Quick Fingers and this will be my first Ludum Dare!

Very excited to be working alongside all the developers in the comp, let’s make some games!
So who the hell am I?

I’m :

• A Unity lover and enthusiast.
• An ex professional dev with about 6 years industry experience, I left EA in March this year to become an independent (and poor) developer.
• Currently working on iOS games but I wanted to do something different for LD so I’m going PC based for this one.
• A musician of sorts

Just before I left my full time job I saved up some months paychecks to buy me some tools! So.. these are my weapons of choice…

• Unity Pro 3.3

• Photoshop CS5
• Modo501
• Visual Studio 2010
• Cubase 4
• Shit ton of Pepsi Max

Can’t wait to see the final themes and get started! See you all soon! Much love from your robotic friend

A few years ago I wrote a timelapse program for myself so I could take LD timelapses. I wrote something that would only output sequential images, could do picture-in-picture webcam image and ran from console only.

It broke spectacularly a long time ago.

But I just spent the last few hours fixing it ready for this weekend. So if you fancy giving it a go then you can get the source from github: https://github.com/Fiona/pycatcher

One day I’ll package it properly, I promise.

Tags: app, timelapse, useful

Hey guys!

I just wanted to let people know that, depending on the theme chosen, I may use a substantial portion of the code written for my LD19 entry as basecode. Specifically, I’m thinking of the map handling, player movement and collision detection code. Obviously, all the art assets will be done from scratch, as will the game text and the map designs and such.

I had originally intended to go in a very different direction with LD20, but if It Is Dangerous To Go Alone, Take This wins, there’s no way I’m not doing another zelda parody.

Hallo LDers!

This is my first BigLD, I’ve taken part in a couple of miniLDs over the last few months, which has been fun. This is slightly more intimidating as it looks like more than 14 people take part in these ones

I’ll be using FlashDevelop & Flixel for the coding,
Photoshop CS4 and a wacom pad for the graphics,
Music and sound effects are going to be recorded and messed around with in Audacity, with any actual music created on either TonePad Pro on the iPhone, or possibly my voice and some instruments out here in meatspace. It mainly depends on what style of game is to be created.

Hello! Ludum Dare has been good to us. Our little two-man team has done two jams now, and we’re very pleased with our initial game-making efforts. Our last one in particular, The Wager, initially made for LD19 has just been released for Windows in an updated form with plenty of new features and content on our new website: http://www.surprisedman.co.uk

Anyway, aside from that ulterior motive, the purpose of this was to state our intent to take part in the Jam once more. Our tools of choice are most likely:

• Programming: Delphi, using a DDraw library
• Graphics: ProMotion 6
• Sound: Bfxr, Audacity
• Music: Famitracker

The themes are sounding interesting and we have very little idea of what direction we’ll be taking things this time, except that we are both keen on making something less top-down and more side-scrolly this time. Of course nothing is certain at this stage. Have fun, everyone!

I’m in!

I look forward to:

• Working with a common theme
• Competing with others from across the world
• Keeping within the judged criteria

I will be working with LÖVE (cross-platform 2D engine) using Notepad++

Just recently heard about this competition and thought I’d give it a shot. This will be my first time participating in a competition of this sort, and I am extremely excited!

My tools of choice:

Programming: Game Maker

Sound: SFXR

Music: Anvil Studio

Art: MS Paint

Good luck everyone! 😀

Aaahlo, would like to participate in Ludum Dare 20.  Just so happens to run into GMC Jam #2 which I’m also in, so I’ll probably make a game that fits both themes.  Wonder how well that’d work.

This is my second LD, participated once in LD19 and it was a blast.  Looking forward to doing it again.

Tools of the Trade:

>> Progging: Game Maker or Adobe Flash CS4
>> Graphics: Adobe Photoshop, Blender
>> Music: SFXR, FL Studio
>> Other: Chronolapse, Livestream, shit loads o’ granola bars

Themes are looking pretty good this time around.  Good luck to ‘erryone!

I’m in? I’m a lost child from NZ, now in NY trying to be a big star! I make games and stuff, check out my blog or endure my twitter feed. First LD, although I did the Global Game Jam this year which has made me an expert on absolutely everything. I am working on Saturday so will have to do my best to scare off customers who interrupt my coding.

I shall be using Unity Indie/iOS, Photoshop CS4, Pixen, cfxr, iPad Garageband, Audacity, and SHEER WILLPOWER.

I may harvest scripts from other projects of mine, but nothing major. If anyone in NYC has a supply of amphetamines to share they may be used as well. Kidding. For now.

Tags: intro

I’m still not sure if I’m really in or not :D. Got a few other projects I wanted to finish, and then I realized last monday: oh noes! LD is on! Can’t…resist….must….participate…but…other…projects…

So if I’m really gonna participate, I’ll go with this:

– FLASH (for the first time. Sorry @gosu 😉 ), also probably Flixel

– SFXR, maybe wolframtones

– Photoshop

Awesome keynote @Sos btw ;). Didn’t see my name though, but those of other good friends.

HAVE FUN EVERYONE

I was reading through my old diary entries; and three years ago I said I probably wouldn’t take part again until I was 15. I’m not sure if I was serious or not when I said that but to cut a long story short I completely forgot about Ludumdare for the next three years 😉

Anyways, I got my age for when I would next compete just right so yay for precognition!

Development: DrPython/Geany/Eclipse depending if I’m going Python, Java or C++, but chances are that unless something really weird happens I’m going Python.

Art: Gimp or Inkscape

Sound:sfxr/bfxr and rosegarden should I use music

Turns out updating my framework to work with SFML 2 wasn’t that much work after all. And I like SFML 2 so far.

So for the record: I will probably use my WIP game framework (or engine?) for my Ludum Dare entry. Amongst others, it

• glues together SFML, PhysicsFS and Lua
• has a console with console variables (“cvars”) and commands
• provides a high-level input system, or will do that one day – it’s not exactly finished and I will probably not use it.

Wow, that’s not much. Well, I’m not done yet, I plan to expand it and use it on future projects. So far it’s mostly SFML in Lua. Or parts of SFML, for example it’s still lacking sfml-audio. Which, come to think about it, sounds like a somewhat serious flaw. I might add that tomorrow so I could use it, should I need to. Maybe.

So long,

Mr. Wonko

So, this will be the first LD I participate. I think not able to start until Sunday, but I’ll try to get something done. No idea what type of game it’ll be, depends on the theme I guess. This is so exciting!

Programming: CoolBasic
Graphics: Photoshop
Sound: sfxr, wolframtones

Only one day left! I wish good luck to all the participants!

Hi everyone, I’m in for LD48 #20! This will be my fourth time entering (after bombing out twice previously, due to illness and running out of time). I’ve definitely learned the importance of getting tools and materials prepared prior to the event. Here’s what I’ll be using in my development environment as planned:
platform   : Debian Linux x86/32-bit
language   : C++
editor     : emacs
libraries  : SFML, minimal code template & vector library, and possibly Box2D.
graphics   : Gimp, Blender, maybe some ImageMagick
sound FX   : csound, maybe Wolfram Tones
music      : Renoise
game title : http://www.norefuge.net/vgng/vgng.html

I’m looking forward to a fun time coding my head off and chatting with other LDers in IRC!

Yeah, this is my first time in a contest such as LD… I honestly don’t know what I’m doing using Game Maker… But I really wanna do it this once, to get used to it and all.

Don’t plan on seeing “Game Maker” connected with my username next time I enter… I AM learning C++, and will use it if I know enough of it… Yeah… Don’t plan on doing great really.

Platform: GML

IDE: Game Maker

Libraries: Uhhh… Supersound?

Graphics: Paint/Built-in sprite editor

Audio: SFXR

I’ve been aspiring to be a game developer for 5 years now, and uhh… Don’t plan on doing the best this first time around.

Pre declared source code. Check

Soap. Check.

Shampoo. Check.

Chips. Check.

Candy. No.

Creamer. No.

Soda. Almost out!

Coffee. Check.

Looks like a trip to walmart is in order.

So… it’s my first time in a game contest. Let’s see what I get.

platform   : Windows(maybe linux)
language   : C++
editor         : Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition
libraries    : allegro, libpng, loadpng, zlib,  maybe Box2D
graphics    : Paint.NET
sound         : sfxr

me and my friends are in !! this time will give a try with :

• Unity3D
• Cheeta
• GarageBand

Tags: cheeta, garageband, In statement, techs, toys, unity

I have a good feeling about this LD. I missed the last one so I’m going to make up for it this time with extra awesomeness. It’s a 4-day weekend here in the UK, thanks to some guy getting married or something, so I’ll have extra time to get my environment, tools and libraries ready beforehand, maybe get some food in the fridge in preparation, etc. And on the Monday I’ll be able to do that jam thing that all the cool kids are doing these days. It’ll be fun to see how far the momentum takes me, post-deadline.

My toolset:

• nano – yeah I code in nano. Shut up.
• Myrmidon – a PyOpenGL-based 2D framework by Fiona
• pythonutils – a small collection of miscellaneous util functions I wrote
• py2exe – creates standalone Windows exe from a python program.
• Graphics Gale – still my favourite pixel editor for animation. Luckily it works reasonably in Wine
• The GIMP – open-source paint program
• Rosegarden – an open-source sequencer I’m still getting to grips with
• sfxr – MSPaint for sound
• Audacity – sound editor for cleaning up stuff
• PyCatcher – for making a timelapse. Fiona fixed it!
• Lots of paper – for brainstorming

And some rules I’m laying down for myself, to help avoid the mistakes of previous attempts at this:

• Prepare – I’m going to make sure I get enough sleep beforehand
• Keep it simple – I’m going to pick an idea that I believe I could make in half a day, and if I really have it done by then, I’ll give it some serious polish
• Don’t be clever – I’m not going to try too hard to be clever with the theme or to invent a whole new genre
• Suppress desire for clean code – I decided after the last competition that I would put less focus on code quality
• Make it fun – I’m going to put more focus on tweaking my gameplay until it plays well
• Make time for audio – I never get any sounds or music done. But this time will be different!

Tags: im in, LD20, preparation, tools

Language: Java

IDE: Eclipse

Libraries: Libgdx

Graphics: Inkscape, Gimp, wacom tablet

Sounds: CFXR

Why?: ’cause Mario (libgdx) asked to

I am a rookie, I have never made a game worth playing in my life, yet I am entering this round. I am planing on using an outdated version of the free game maker (7.0 lite). I am royally screwed :).

Tags: I am Truly fucked

Once again, I’m in. My last LD turned out allright and I look forward to seriously ramping it up for this one. I’m getting pretty quick with java and lwjgl for simple games so I’m going to stick to that. My audio was terrible last time so I will try to improve on that. Just reformatted my machine just for this event. Windows slows me down enough. Also I’m dual booting into fedora 14 just to test my java in linux myself this time. If the colony game theme gets picked we are going to have some drunken dwarfs in spacesuits on an asteroid.

Tools I use: Eclipse, 3d studio max, photoshop, sfxr, and whatever I code during the competition.

Good luck to you all!

Language: C++

IDE: Depends on the operating system. I’ll primarily be using Windows (which means VS 2010 Express), but in the last hour or so I’ll probably port it to OS X (XCode).

Libraries: SFML and possibly Box2D depending on the theme that gets picked. I would be using DirectX, which I’m more familiar with, but DX doesn’t port well to OS X.

Graphics: MsPaint && Paint.NET

Sounds: Sfxr, maybe Audacity to record whistling as music in the game.

The formatting is borked, but this is the “base code” I’m going to be using.

#include <SFML/System.hpp>
#include <SFML/Window.hpp>
#include <SFML/Graphics.hpp>

#pragma comment(lib,”sfml-system-s.lib”)
#pragma comment(lib,”sfml-window-s.lib”)
#pragma comment(lib,”sfml-graphics-s.lib”)

sf::RenderWindow App;

int PASCAL WinMain(HINSTANCE hInst, HINSTANCE hPrev, LPSTR szCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
bool exitgame = false;
bool isWindowActive = false;
App.Create(sf::VideoMode(640,480,2), “Title”, sf::Style::Close);
while(!exitgame)
{
sf::Event event;
while (App.GetEvent(event))
{
if ((event.Type == sf::Event::Closed) || ((event.Type == sf::Event::KeyPressed) && (event.Key.Code == sf::Key::Escape)))
{
exitgame = true;
break;
}
if (event.Type == sf::Event::GainedFocus)
isWindowActive = true;
if (event.Type == sf::Event::LostFocus)
isWindowActive = false;
}
App.Clear(sf::Color(192,192,192));
App.Display();
}
App.Close();
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This is my second ludum dare now, and I’m definitely a lot more prepared this time.

The last one I did, I only had a few hours of the first day spare to participate. This time though, I will have to entire weekend

What I’ll be using:

Visual studio 2010 professional editiion.

XNA 4.0 framework.

Paint.NET.

If any other XNA’ers out there are doing a stream this weekend, link me please

This will be my first Ludum Dare and I just hope that something comes out at the other side. My tools are:

• Löve
• Hump + HardonCollider
• Pixen
• LFXR/Supercollider/Milkytracker

My tentative plan is to make a prototype for the game jam, and then make a finished iPhone app for 1MonthGame.com. I’m doing the jam instead of the competition because I’ve already made a bit of generic 2d platformer code, and I’d like a little bit more than 48 hours to make a kick ass prototype. My goal will be to shoehorn the theme into some type of 2(.5?)D platformer, which shouldn’t be too hard. I also want to focus on getting the gameplay right first this time, instead of the graphics.  I spent almost the entire first day last time making the bear model for BEARoNAUT.

Tools:
Development: Unity, MonoDevelop, C#
Art: Blender, Photoshop Elements, Inkscape, ZBrush
Sound: CFXR, iSequence(iPad app for chiptune goodness)

I’ll be posting progress updates here,
on my blog: http://www.uncade.com/blog
and twitter: http://www.twitter.com/UncadeGames

I’m gonna try to do this Ludum Dare 48 hour compo using C and SDL. My editor will be vi(m) and I will be developing on Arch Linux.

I’m ready to write some (probably obfuscated) code! We’ll see how this goes.

About three months ago I bumped into Breaking the Tower. It was love at first sight. With the game and with Ludum Dare. I knew at once I have to take part in the next compo. And I also knew I wouldn’t stand a chance.

And what comes in the next 48 hours? My GF spending the weekend at my place, a wedding (not mine!) and some work to do. And Ludum Dare! Ehh… I know, it sounds like a great excuse for an awful game. So please don’t let me use it.

Anyway my tools will be Flex SDK, Flixel, Notepad++, Paint.NET, sfxr. And probably some base code I wrote for a Reddit compo. You can download it from here.

Good luck to us all!

So, I’m in, despite the majority of the themes I like not making it to the final round. This will be my third LD; my last was 17 and I failed to produce a single thing. Hopefully this time goes better.

I figure I’ll be using Flash and Flixel. My other option looks like C++ with SDL.

Terrible GIMP made graphics are probably the order of the day, since drawing by hand takes too bloody long. If I get around to doing any sound I’ll be recording stuff with my microphone. Might do some music on a thumb piano I acquired recently (fuck yes).

There is a chance I’ll be able to make something this weekend, in between the very important university work I should really be focusing on. Really a case of whether I’m struck by inspiration once the theme is selected. To anyone bothering to read this, the best of luck to you! You’re wonderful for reading this, you deserve lots of fortune.

‘quipment: FlashDevelop, Flixel (which version I don’t know), Paint.NET, Bfxr (http://www.bfxr.net/) maybe, and blind optimism.

This will be my first LD. I have no idea what I’ll be able to do in 48 hours, and there’s only one way to find out!

I’ll be using C#/XNA, paint.NET and Sfxr. There probably won’t be any music or fancy graphics, but we’ll see.

I hope I can get a working game done in time, which will be my main goal.

Edit: I might add music after all. I completely forgot about audiotool and inudge, and if I have time I’ll use one of these for music.

So… I don’t know what to do, and am looking for some advice from the LD community.  My original plan was to compete this weekend using a little SDL-based framework I’d been working on… it still needs some work to get things like sound going, though, and is a little clunky.  After looking at what a few other people were using, though, I found out about SFML and got really excited about using it instead of SDL, and went ahead and re-wrote most of my framework using SFML… only to realize that I was using an obsolete version (1.6), which doesn’t support a couple key things I want to be able to do.  I’ve tried for several days now to get cmake to run on my machine to be able to instal SFML 2.0, but it hasn’t worked for me at all, and I’m completely burned out on it:  I wanted to spend this week coding and warming up for the LD, but instead I wasted it on trying to install a dang library!  Now I don’t know what to do at all… I feel tired of dealing with these libraries… I could go back to my old framework, but I still haven’t added sound support to it, and at this point will probably not have time to do so.  Are there any other good options that I am just missing?  Is there an easier way to get SGML2 working?  Is there another C++ library I could quickly adapt to?  Or is Pygame simple enough that I can pick it up on the fly?  Any ideas are welcome!

Tags: help, journal

I’m actually going to start from the beginning this time.

Tags: FIGHT

Hello! This will be my third Ludum Dare. Been looking forward to it for a while now.

That’s pretty much all there is to say haha. Roll on Friday evening!

I haven’t seen many “here’s my cave where I’ll be spending the next 48 hours” snapshots, so here’s one to get things going.

Tags: desktop

as you probably have known, (or lack thereof) I have never sucessfully made a game in LD.

BUT TODAY IT SHALL HAPPEN
My goal for this LD is to get a working game going- no matter how broken it is. I will attempt to fix and iron bugs but no promises. Of course this means a lot of drag-and-dropping will occur, and I have never had a chance to experience game maker to the full extent of it’s capabilities (not much), only Flash.

This will be interesting.

Apparently this is obligatory (see tinyurl.com/LDobligatory) So here I am lining up for LD20. I will be using flash and as3 for the game. Flash IDE for the very crappy graphics that will inevitably wind up in my game, and Musagi and sfxr for sounds (which considering my complete lack of proficience with those tools means that there will probably be no sound – and if there is, you should probably mute your computer).

Also I pronounce Ludum Dare as luh dum dayre where dum is exactly like the sound of the word dumb. It’s probably wrong. So sue me (please don’t)

—
Mikhail Rudoy

• Code: XNA or Unity
• Graphics: Paint.NET, Blender
• Audio: bfxr for effects and inudge for music (if I have time)
• Misc: cooktimer (to combat my perfectionist tendencies)

I have done about ten ludumdares. I always try to do something new in each contest, to push myself in some unique way. Sometimes it might be learning a new programming language or utility or other times it might be trying a new game genre. One of my favorites was when I did a text adventure using inform 7.

This time I know exactly what kind of game I want to make. I only need to know the theme.

The game is going to be a cross between a ‘choose your own adventure’ (remember those old books?), an old time radio broadcast, and a podcast of a dark science fiction story (something in the realm of Scott Sigler’s Infected).

The game is going to have little or no graphics. Instead all work will go into the sounds of the game. I have had a difficult time choosing a platform. I want it to run on the web so people will actually play it. But the platform has to support sound really really well. I have chosen Unity Pro even though it is way overkill since it supports sound well and then I can run it on my iPad/iPhone eventually.

The first night I am going to spend the entire time writing the story.

In the morning I’ll do a redraft and then I expect to spend at least 3 hours recording all the narration. My attempt is to make this recording as professional as possible, and from my tests I think it will sound great, like broadcast quality great. I will use Logic Pro 9 to record with a Mac mini (to minimize background noise I can’t use my pc). Then it will go to cubase 6.0.2 for a ton of processing and I will come up with a custom musical score for each narration. (I expect probably 20+). This I expect will take all of sat day and night.

Sunday morning I’ll put together a quick program in unity that will play the narrations and offer the users choices. It will be about as simple a program as there could be. Hopefully I’ll get it finished in time to test properly and give it some polish.

That’s what I’m doing. Good luck to all entrants!

Surprise, surprise, it looks like audio output in Allegro 4.x, along with UT, Wolfenstein ET and probably a bunch of other stuff is completely hosed on recent Ubuntu versions (thanks, Canonical, for wrecking backwards compatibility so we could hear your stupid bongos everywhere and thanks, PulseAudio for gratuitously breaking ALSA compatibility).  I’ve tried a few things to fix it, but it’s too close to contest time to be doing IT stuff.

Anyone out there have any suggestions for alternate distros that

• have NVidia ION drivers either in their repositories or don’t die horribly with the ones from NVidia’s website?
• don’t use PulseAudio (do NOT want), or have some kind of OSS emulation layer?
• are likely to work with NForce ethernet?
• are likely to work with RealTek 8192SE wifi?

Will be my first LD, my second game dev competition and be assured the second competition that I win. To everyone without a country-sized ego: go home and play with your legos.

Using Python, Myrmidon and Pythonutils for code, again.

Gimp and probably Graphics Gale for graphics, again.

Propellerhead’s Reason/Record for sound and music, again.

Pycatcher for timelapse, again. (I got it working.)

Same old, same old.

Seriously, just use it. (Thanks to whoever linked it here.)

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do LD20 (I might do a video mode 13h DOS entry using DJGPP), so I’ll offer my advice here.

Steer clear of Rhode Bass. It’s crap. Avatar provides a better bass.

The notes are: A, B, D, E, F#, and then they loop up each octave. If you want a minor scale, use the B as your base note. If you want a major scale, use D as your base note. This is basically music theory, though… the minor scale is a bit easier to work with and often sounds nicer. Note, this is not fundamental, but it is nice to know.

Some of the drums are crap. HC2 makes a nicer open hihat than HO. BD1 is good, BD2 is crap. CL(ap) is nice. SN1 and SN2 are fine, though SN3 is if you want to have a woodblock sound. TH isn’t worth using; just use TM1/TM2/TL.

Here’s an easy drumbeat to do: Put a kickdrum (BD1) immediately after every marker, and put a clap (CL) or a snare (SN1/SN2/both) immediately after every second marker (skipping the first). Put a hihat (HC1) on every column, though on every “3” you put an HC2 instead. It’s OK to not do the HC2 thing and just use HC1 on each column. It’s also OK to only do it on every “1” and “3”, and usually gives you a slightly punchier beat.

The rest is up to your experimentation.

EDIT: ARGH. Apparently you can’t export it. So if you don’t have stereo mix, ask someone nicely. Or of course you could always use this.

I’m going to be doing something a bit different this time around. I’m doing a collaborative game with a friend of mine.

I’m not sure what tools we’ll be using. There’s a good possibility we’ll be making this with Flash, however.

Didn’t finish up my last entry but that won’t stop me from joining in this time.

My previous mistake was using a language I was unfamiliar with, but hey, I’ll do it again!

Language: actionscript 3

Tools: photoshop, sfxr, musagi

This will be first LD, after years of making half-finished games I decided it was time to finally get something complete out; let’s hope it happens! Here’s what I’ll be using:

Language: Java
Framework: jMonkeyEngine (awesome java game framework built on lwjgl)
Tools: sfxr, paint (ya herd!), Sunvox (if I can learn it in time)

Totally pumped and can’t wait to get started! (also, c’mon, Girl Games, you know you wanna)

Hey all,

This is my first Ludam Dare.  It’s a great excuse to spend all weekend hashing out this game I’ve been working on for fun.   The idea is Quest64+Oblivion+Map/level/quest editor.   It doesn’t exactly fit with the theme so that’s why i’m in the jam.

I’ve already thought up a mod for this game in which you are all powerful (sort of), the people of the planet hate you (because your’re evil [sort of]) so they all try to kill you.   But since you’re all powerful (sort of) this isn’t much of a problem.  But the ones that survive make babies who come at you even harder.  You’ve got to beat the genetic algorithm SNAP!!!!

I’m hosting the code on launchpad, using python and pygame.  Here’s a link: https://launchpad.net/generalchaos

Cheers

I was planning on doing a screen capture timelapse of my attempt at LD20, and rather than use notepad like I’ve seen so many others do to post their ‘SLEEP’, or ‘EATING FUD’ messages, I thought I’d whip up a quick one in flash.

Figured there might be someone else out there who would want to use it, so I thought I’d post it here.

You can find a copy of the .swf here : http://tenfiftyfour.com/ludumdare/LudumDareTimer.swf It has a text entry area at the top ( where the | pipe is ), so you can write whatever it is you are doing. and it will display the current time, as well as how long you have been away for.

It’s kind of ominous, but for us Australians, ( on the east coast anyway ), LD20 starts at High Noon on Saturday! I can feel the tumbleweeds already.  Best of luck to you all.

Flixel + Dame, bfxr, Musagi, Paint.net.  I might fall back on MuseScore if I can’t bend Musagi to my will.  Nescafe and microwave at the ready.  Warming up cloning pacman and galaga.

48 hours- thats like a workweek, right? 😉  Even 8 hours to sleep in there.

First Ludum Dare for me.

Tools:

• code: java with libgdx (targetting windows/linux and android) plus python for tools
• gfx: fireworks
• sound: fruityloops, audacity and sfxr

Here’s what I’ll be working on for the competition:

Chronolapse is all ready to go and I’ve updated SFML to the latest version. Only 16 hours to go!

Good luck everyone!

This final round has so many themes that I have ‘inspiration’ for that I’m really confident I’ll get something made this weekend. Cheers everyone!

I was kinda boring/reclusive last LD, so I’m going to try to post arbitrarily large amounts of stuff this time around. We get rated on community after all, right? Gotta put on a show for the folks at home ^^. Not super entertaining cause we’re still 16 hours away from the start, but here’s a shot of what I’m going to be staring at for two days:

Note the mini-fridge within arm’s reach. It is loaded with mountain dew, as it always is. I might be a stereotype, but at least I am a caffeinated stereotype.

Also note the “OpenGL Library” box on the computer… it has my trusty red book and orange book. I will be using neither of these during the compo, because HOLY SHIT raw OpenGL is way too hard for me to do on this timeframe ^^;;. I keep them there for other projects. Maybe they will bring me good luck.

HI guyz,

just getting ready to Jam with my good mate Abe.

It’s been a very long time we wanted to make a game together.

Can’t wait.

I’m a strange maths student.  My hobby is writing odd computer games.

This is my first Ludum Dare.

I’m not so worried about winning:  if I can write an awesome game in 48 hours and show it to my  friends it shall be cool.

I’m going to write in C, with SDL, targeting Linux and Windows.  I’m going to try to keep it simple, but some special effects can be fun

Hi everybody !

I’m going in, along with a few friends here in Bordeaux We will gather in Motion Twin office and spend the whole weekend. My setup :

I will use :

– photoshop for gfx
– the traditional sfxr for the sound,
– i may give a try to Bfxr (we love you, increpare !),
– nespresso coffee, but I may also give a try to drugs on Sunday,
– FlashDevelop 3as my IDE,
– sushi or pizza or nothing, mostly depending on which is available at 3am,
– haxe for the language (www.haxe.org).

I will post my dev libs soon.

This will be my first LD. 48 hours of game making sounds like fun (but also a little bit intimidating). My tools will be:

• LÖVE, the awesome cross platform game framework,
• vim, the awesome text editor,
• gimp, the awesome image editor,
• hump, my toolset for LÖVE,
• HardonCollider: collision detection for LÖVE and
• Club Mate, Coffee, Pizza and chocolate.

This will be my first Ludum Dare, can’t wait, I’m not too sure how the community updates will be working during the actual competition, I’ll have to look them up during, but I’ll be doing a time-lapse as well as posting updates on my game, loving the themes, here’s my workspace:

So, this is my first LD. Im worried. Im gonna be trying to use a horror genre with most of the themes. I am going to use Game maker. Not sure about music though, but i am probs gonna use bfxr for sound effects.
Lets hope its an easy theme i can work a horror around!

So I wish luck to everyone!

Nothing special here. Except the BIT.TRIP wallpaper. Hell yeah BIT.TRIP.
I’ll be working on my freshly updated Ubuntu 11.04. Unity is awesome.

I think that if I were to do this, I’d have to participate in the Jam with someone. So, who’s desperate for a musician?

Conditions.

• I will not provide music for a game that I cannot play w/o Wine. This includes Game Maker, Unity, DirectX-based stuff, and XNA, the latter which does not work at all. Flash is fine.
• With regards to the above, I will happily code for an old platform provided I can “legally” get an emulator to work (sorry Amiga devs). I have a system running FreeDOS w/ an SB16 if you’re doing any DOS stuff and want some actual hardware to test it on. NES may be a pain.
• You must open the source code under a “free software” licence. It does not have to be GPL.

Platforms I can do my own mixing for.

• C. If you’re coding in C++, it MUST compile on something that is NOT MSVC++, otherwise odds are I will NOT BE ABLE TO PLAY IT w/o Wine. Also, NO DIRECTX. My code will be written in C if you wish to take this route.
• J2SE. I have a mod player for J2ME but it requires a lot of hackery.
• Python, though I must use a hack to get it to work nicely on Windows, and it won’t work on a Mac w/o an external library.

Platforms which have mod/s3m/xm/it stuff.

• As expected, C. libdumb is highly recommended. Don’t use libbassmod; it’s closed source.
• Python/pygame, and probably a bunch of other things. These use SDL_mixer. Which uses Mikmod. UGH. I can work around its bugs, though; unfortunately, my build of Mikmod is brutally hacked, so I’ll end up testing stuff in Timidity++. It also means I can’t use resonant filters in .it.
• Ruby/gosu, though the s3xmodit backend varies among platforms (FMOD for Windows, SDL_mixer for Linux, OpenAL for Mac(?)). So if you’re using a Mac, all I can say is: =P
• Megazeux, though it uses libmodplug, which is also pretty spewy, but despite the code being completely hopelessly screwed up it’s generally better than Mikmod. If you use this I’ll be a really happy man (it’s just so good for when you need to pull an entry out of poospace in an hour).

Platforms where I’d have to search poospace for some playroutines because these really aren’t appropriate for PCM.

• ZX Spectrum… Actually, please don’t, it requires cycle-exact timing. Unless you’re coding for 128k. In which case I can just use the AY chip, and it’ll be all good.
• Sega Master System ^_^ (I can just use a generic .vgm playroutine if necessary)
• NES (s3m2nsf should hopefully do if you can get it to link nicely). I will not do much meddling with this, though, because I don’t know any of the schemes for the over 9000 banking chips for this system.
• Game Boy. I will need to code my own driver for this. This has a WAV channel so I think I might be happy =)
• Atari 2600… oh hell. I have a “cycle-exact” way of extending the period to 8 bits but I don’t think I’ll bother to be quite frank (unless you want to shove that in yourself). IT2TIA is totally not going to cut it as it really chews ROM space (plus it’s inaccurate & stuff like that).

Platforms which call for PCM.

• ECMAScript for HTML5.
• Adoobie Flush.
• Blender Game Engine.
• I’m really not sure what else… Löve? Or is that SDL_mixer stuff?

So yeah, here’s my offer. It’d be a way to get my mind of the stress of my assignments @_@

.. minimalistic one, but maybe i’ll move home later time.

[Prepared two days ago]
Finally an LD without a timing collision: no milestones, no birthdays, no festivals.

Tools: gimp/acorn, sfxr, milkytracker (if I really find the time for some music), omni[stuff]
Framework: libOM (omni-mad internal game lib. Does resource management, render abstraction and UI stuff.)
Hardware: Late 2007 MacBook, getting a bit old.
Extra: Textmate, LLVM+clang, Ruby (for converters and build system), SVN
Target: Mac + Linux, maybe a windows crossbuild.

Will spend a lot of time offline, so no frequent updates.
(Coding on a train is just so relaxing…)

[Added just now]
Special handicap: Right arm in a cast and filled up to the brim with painkillers.
Will see how that works out.

Need to cheat and might use an artist for help (no pixeling with left hand only).
Add me to the Jam.

Fine-tuning the strings and plugging the amps! This will be awesome!

This will be my second LD, last time I tried my luck making a game using javascript, but the poor performance and the time I lost were a show stopper. Some time after I tried flixel and it completely blow my mind, so I’ll be using it this time unless I want some kind of 3D, which is unlikely.

So, g’luck everyone, and see you in the compo!

I know I won’t get round it tomorrow before I get started, so I figured I’d get it up now. Only difference is tomorrow there will be a lot more cans of energy drink.

I will be going 2D rather than 3D (again), using Bfxr for sound effects, GIMP for graphics, Xcode for code, and TextWrangler for all the scripting (GameMonkey). Hoping to get it ported to Windows before it’s all over.

>> LD21 edition

Am I the only one listening to music while coding? I hope no, because else everyone will think I’m crazy.

Aaaaaanyways I’m mainly listening to chiptune (mostly BIT.TRIP) and videogame music (Super Meat Boy Soundtrack, Still Alive etc.). If anyone has some good tracks, feel free to throw me a suggestion in the comments or on last.fm.

So what are you listening to?

I will use :

– haXe

– GFX :  Adobe Flash CS5 and/or GraphicsGale

– SFX : Bfxr

– my sprite manager

– MUSIC : Milky Tracker ( I will try… :-/ )

Good luck to everyone !

I was thinking of entering the Ludum Dare compo for the first time, but I’ve instead decided to contribute by offering my time as a composer! I love doing retro/chip stuff, but I’m open to a wide variety of genres. I’m also quick, so I can do quite a bit for your games soundtrack in the 48 hours we’ve got. You can visit my portfolio online at www.wonthelp.info

If you’re interested, send me an E-Mail at superjoebob@hotmail.com!

Tags: composer chiptune musician sound audio

… because you cannot do anything less than AWESOME with a Three wolf moon shirt:

I also got some food and my workspace ready:

I have decided to take a little side-quest: to make an entry that could be controlled using a gamepad. A bit unusual for a flash game, but not to hard to stick to, since I’ll be using the Flixel engine (that emphasizes key controls).

Tags: deskphoto, foodphoto

Here is an image of my workspace for this weekend. The coaster is Civ 5. I keep the hookah on the table as I will knock it over with my chair if it is on the floor next to me. It is actually much safer up there 😛

This weekend I will be jamming to bands like T.O.Y., Rotersand, Edge of Dawn, Covenant, and a probably a lot of similar stuff. I will be sitting here with a malign smile coding like a freak.

See you in IRC!

Just got a new monitor, so this time i’ll be programming in HD

Wahta.

I thought I should make this official:
I’m in.
Also I’ll finish the game. And then I’ll win every trophy and first place in all of the categories in voting. Then pigs will fly.

Wish me luck!

I’ll be participating again, aiming for a 3D game.

Tools:

• Scala
• JMonkeyEngine
• My basecode (mostly just buildfiles at the moment)
• JBullet maybe
• My beans & propeties library for scala
• My physical units library if needed
• Gimp, audacity and similar for graphics and sound effects
• Maybe some other open source libraries I forgot about

I’m also working on a node-based texture generator tool, I’ll post more about it if I get it into usable shape during the weekend.

Cheers, and good luck all!

It’s time for an other ludum dare! I really enjoyed the other two ludum dare I participated in, and now I’m looking forward for the next one and hope it’s will be even better. Due to many school dead lines I’ve decided to make a shorter entry of about 9 hours only, it’s will be another challenge for me.

So my tools are:

• Java – eclipse, I will use a simple java 2d graphics
• sfxr – for sound
• Paint and GIMP

Good luck to everyone!!

Tags: im in

Greetings!

All preparations complete, schedule cleared for the next 50 hours, ready to go. Toolbox consists of Flex Builder 3 and ProMotion 4.7. Hope to learn flixel as I have been looking at it quite some time now. If time allows I assume I will throw together some sound to using sfxr like everybody else.

Obligatory screens showing LD website and irc...

Haven’t done an LD since #4 so I’m extremely excited about this one. Good luck to all!

OK, so everyone that was going to help me this weekend got other plans, so I will enter the compo and create everything from scratch. Tonight I will upload a picture of my den, stock food and set up emergency numbers on my phone.

BEHOLD!

Some people might say my desk is small. I say it's the right size.

Planning is all done. I’ll come up with the idea first, implement the core mechanics and draw the stuff for the core mechanics, then add anything else that seems like it’ll work and draw stuff for that, then add sounds and (time permitting) music.

It’s a very rough plan because hey, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Especially if the enemy is an abstract concept like time.

Still, here’s hoping it all goes well!

Heading for a small 2d game.

Tools:

Scirra Construct.

Photoshop.

After Effects.

sfxr.

Cure ‘Em Up!

This will not be my first ld, but it might be the first one I actually finish something for.

In my toolbox, you’ll find C++, my basecode, boost, direct2d, box2d, freeimage, stk, gimp & inkscape. However, I might be updating my basecode up to compo starts because I had an idea for a fancy rendering scheme.

I suppose I should mention the tools I’ll be using. It’s my first LD, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get something done on time, but it should be fun to try!

Tools:

Code: Flash Develop + AS3 + Flixel
Graphics: Photoshop
Sounds/Music: Sfxr, Audacity, Musagi or FL Studio