So we’ve been working on and off for about 12 hours now on our entry. Our team is very organic, people join and leave all the time but I think there are around 5 people who made most of what we currently have.
Here’s a screenshot of our main menu and check out this little gameplay video.
Click to see a gameplay video
The link with the “Evolution” theme might not be very apparent yet, but we’re getting there! Stay tuned 
Hey all,
While we’re all waiting for the next Ludum Dare… Dan Dias will be hosting a CraftStudio-centered game jam on March 22-25 (72h, in team or solo)
Info, sign up and theme voting here:
For those who haven’t heard of it: CraftStudio is a project of mine, it’s a real-time cooperative game-making platform based around 3D boxes and pixel art (it costs 15 € during the alpha, runs on Windows & Mac with Linux coming soon). I’m furiously working on the beta version but the latest alpha works very well already
I used it with a bunch of friends for the last 2 LDs, we made Porté par le Vent (ranked 4th overall FWIW) and Beach, please! (ranked #7 in Fun).
Tags: craftstudio, jam
As I did for the last two editions, I’ll be taking part in the Ludum Dare 72h jam along with my buddies Canardu57, pixelboy, schouillette, bilou84, Xael (and probably some others) using CraftStudio, my coop game-making platform (who -totally not a coincidence- just happens to have hit beta status).
Screenshot from our first try at a game for LD25 (idea ended up scrapped)
Schouillette and I have stocked on food as a bunch of our teammates are coming to jam together in person! I’m looking forward to having great fun designing another wacky game with friends in definitely-not-enough-time! I’ll try to livestream at http://twitch.tv/eliseegw
Others in the CraftStudio community have announced they will join too: Erwan0fil and friends, Adam Clarke, Van Merwan and possibly NexxCR.
If you’d like to try out CraftStudio this LD but are still on the fence and don’t want to shell out the 20 € just yet, I’m running a 5-days long free week-end (yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me either) for the occasion, starting… 15 minutes from now! Just create an account, download it and you’ll get access to all features for the duration of the jam and then some!
CraftStudio comes with a physics engine, Lua or visual scripting, a built-in model & map editor and real-time cooperation support!
You can check out a bunch of games made with it over here: http://store.craftstud.io/games
Here’s our submission: Inspector Badass. It’s a rogue-like made for the jam with CraftStudio in 72h with our team of 7 people!
Special thanks to BaerTaffy for voicing the inspector! Gameplay video over here.
Tags: craftstudio
Over the last 7 years I've been taking part in Ludum Dare (as well as the Global Game Jam) with 5-10 friends using our own real-time collaborative game-making apps CraftStudio (XNA/FNA-based blocky 3D engine with Lua scripting) and then Superpowers (Three.js-based engine with TypeScript scripting). It's been a lot of fun and we made games aplenty! (1)
This time around, I've set out to build Confiture (2), a C# SDL2/OpenGL engine & framework for writing online multiplayer games! I have been and will be streaming my work on it in the weeks leading up to Ludum Dare 41. Mostly commenting in French by default but happy to chat in English too!
After fiddling with Web technologies so much lately, I'm kinda over working so far removed from the machine. It's really cool to have the "no install" experience and Node.js has cool sides but boy, it's just too many layers, tools, compilation steps and workarounds.
I think going forward I'll mostly treat the Web as a compilation target (through WebAssembly). C# / SDL2 / OpenGL are pretty good medium-term candidates for that, so that's good.
In the absolute, I'd love to work with a lower-level, non-GC'ed language than even C#, but I haven't found anything reasonable to work with at the moment (excited for Jonathan Blow's upcoming JAI language though!). I'm not willing to put up with C++'s idiosyncrasies during a game jam, especially not with a whole team and several coders.
The .NET ecosystem has finally gone truly cross-platform with .NET Core, including easy all-dependencies-included deployment. It has fast compilation times, a pretty great IDE, a lot of traction and a language whose evolution is at least taking game developers' needs into account.
Right now I have all the low-level engine stuff done: windowing, input, rendering, packet reading/writing... The main tasks left are:
So that's a lot of work haha, though I have experience with all of those so hopefully I can fit that into my spare time over the next 25 days! We'll see 😅
(1) Ludum Dare games, Global Game Jam games and recent games
(2) "Confiture" is French for jam.