Hello! A few friends and I will be making a top-down cyberpunk turn-based strategy game for the 2012 October challenge. I’m a game developer myself, although I primarily focus on low-level programming work, and they have no experience with development whatsoever, but they DO play a lot of games ;). Just to be cool I’ll be working in Common Lisp using the Lispbuilder-SDL library. Good luck everyone!

The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machine of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fist of the orc. – Saruman, The Lord of The Rings

That’s right, progress is being made on the newly-named Turing. After a brief attempt at using CL-OPENGL that led to inexplicable heap corruption, I switched back to full SDL. I decided that for ease of development I was just going to be lazy and blit everything to a buffer, and then draw a region of that buffer in order to implement scrolling. Unfortunately, Lispbuilder-SDL doesn’t have support for that like PyGame does. I don’t really see why not: It’s part of the native C SDL. Anyway, after messing with (sdl:cell)’s for a while, I wondered what would happen if I just tried drawing the buffer to a negative index, and lo and behold, it worked. Yay! Ten hours of debugging OpenGL code down the drain, but yay. Screenshot:

Will take a picture of my workspace soon, but software-wise, see if you can guess from the screenshot. All my fellow Lispers saying I need to use Emacs, bah. Old habits never die. Vim is better anyway.

tl;dr: Things got done.

Progress is being made! First, there are now units! And, and, you can select them, and then move them, and attack things with them! YAY! Kinwoop, one of my collaborators on this, made some awesome music, and sprite art is forthcoming from Plague8908. In general, good things are happening. I’m implementing AI now, along with Fog of War and the HUD, so I have enough on my plate. If you wouldn’t mind, I’m taking suggestions for the HUD: Wesnoth-style or Fire Emblem-syle?

I’ve had a lot of experience developing games since I last attempted a Ludum Dare compo, so hopefully this will go well. Going to leave this here: it’s a little library I made in C++, and I’ll be using it as my engine/base code library. Good luck, and have fun everyone.

So yeah. Sometime last year, I made this neat tool called starlow. It’s a simple, text-based thing that lets you make retro-sounding music fairly easily. If you want multiple tracks, feel free to fire up Audacity and run the output files over each other (translation: I’m too lazy to actually blend notes properly).

On a different note, I’ll be using the following tools:

OS – My beloved Arch Linux with customized dwm.
Editor – Vim, with Syntastic, YouCompleteMe, and other nice plugins.
Language/Engine – C++, using my custom squeezebox engine. It uses Box2D for physics, OpenGL 2.1 for graphics, SDL for sounds, providing an OpenGL context and handling events. It can load levels from JSON files.
Art – The GIMP
Music/Sounds – SFXR and starlow

I’m making a retro space shooter. The gimmick? You only get One Direction. That’s right, you can either move upward, or not at all. Also the crew is a boy band. You know you want to play this game. Title screen here.

Well, I finished. Sure as hell took long enough. Game is here. I would appreciate feedback, especially from Windows users. Apparently it crashes ~15% of the time, but works perfectly otherwise? Strange, and I have no way to test this myself. Despite that, I’m altogether very satisfied with the state of the game. This was my first Ludum Dare, and it’s not going to be my last.

See title. My first LD entry, Midnight Memories, now runs 100% of the time, and doesn’t have any known crash bugs. Previously, it only ran ~85% of the time. I’d love it if anyone would take the time to rate it: due to the crashing, I put off rating other games for the past few weeks so as not to draw attention to my own. Now, since I’ve played and rated quite a few games, I have the lowest D score of any entry. By a lot -_-. Might not have been a great decision, but hey, at least I finished. It’s been a wonderful time, and I’ll gladly participate again in the future.

P.S. My high score in Midnight Memories is 14 waves. I’ll be adding a leaderboard post-compo, but in the meantime I’d like to see anyone top that.

Hey folks, I’m in again. Last time (LD28, You Only Get One), I finished at the last minute, but had some minor crash bugs on Windows to fix after I had submitted my entry. I’ve cleaned up my cross compiler toolchain a bit this time around, and I’m hoping for zero problems on all platforms this time. I’ll either be using the same custom C++/SDL/OpenGL engine I went with last time, or possibly even a new 3D engine I’m working on in Chicken Scheme. We’ll see: I’ve never done much of anything with 3D before, but I’ve worked enough with OpenGL to understand how it usually does things so it will probably work out. Cheers, and good luck to everyone!

Going to make a true roguelike (as in topdown turnbased ASCII dungeon crawl) about the horrors of everyday life, using C and an engine I worked on a bit earlier this year. Don’t have much of anything done except level saving and basic ncurses stuff, so time is going to be pretty tight. Repo is at http://github.com/chameco/rogue.

Best wishes and good luck.