Here is a demo of my game No-Brain Jogging after day 1. Play it on Windows or Linux, no installer, just run the game:

Runnable Windows .exe

Runnable Linux executable

Source on Github (if you want to it build yourself)

Screenshot:

Gif video:

Here my educational 2D zombie shooter for you to play

on Windows

on Linux

No installers, no zip folders, just the executable game.

Here is a video of my game No-Brain Jogging

Play it on Windows

Play it on Linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4TEty6hnw

Solve your math quickly or zombies will eat your brain!

Play No-Brain Jogging on Windows or Linux.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/no-brain-jogging

No-Brain Jogging now has a Linux and Windows build. Just run the executable, that's the game. No installer, no stress.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/no-brain-jogging

Here is a screenshot:

Windows .exe

Linux executable

Creating games is one thing. Creating software that others can run is the other.

In my LD experience I have the feeling that I was able to play maybe 30% to 50% of the games whose page I visited. The reason is that many people do not consider how others are going to play their game.

I use a 32 bit Windows XP virtual machine to play Windows games, I do not want to use my regular machine to run unknown software, I do not really think that anybody posts malware, I just have a better feeling using a VM. I also run Linux in Live USB mode to play Linux games if I encounter one. HTML5 games I play on my regular Windows 8 machine, hoping nothing bad can happen to me :-)

The top-most problem I have with Windows games is that they use either Unity or Game Maker 2, both of which have cancelled XP support in some of their recent versions. To stay backward compatible as far as possible I would suggest using older versions of these engines. I have yet to see a game that really NEEDS the new features that are introduced, that make these engines incompatible with XP.

Another big problem is 64 bit only builds. You may not realize when building on a 64 bit machine that your compiler might just target 64 bit by default. This creates problems for a lot of people, there are a lot of 32 bit systems, especially on lower-end hardware like netbooks.

The easiest way for others to play your game is the browser. If you create an HTML5 game that seems to be the optimum with regards to deployment. Still, you might run into other problems like performance, controller support or incompatible browsers.

I test my software on all my machines, virtual and real, to make sure to catch as many potential user problems as possible. Since I use the Go programming language and not many people create games in Go, I have even created my own game libraries over the years just to make sure that my games can be deployed on any Windows machine and on Linux and Mac.

These libraries include loading Windows DLLs for Direct3D9, DirectSound8 (supported from XP up) and bundling resource files into the executable so that users can just download my game and run it. A setup program or a zip folder are fine in my opinion, if the game then runs, but having just a single executable is the second best option to release your jam game right after the browser option.

Hey there XP users, are you there? Anybody? If you want to, you can play this game and please add a comment if you use Windows XP, this micro-poll would be interesting to have for our discussion about deployment which raises the question what to support in your game.

Also note that XP is only the minimum OS target, you can play this on ALL Windows versions.

Here is the game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/no-brain-jogging

Hey, if you have not played my game yet, please do. I am almost there, 18 ratings already!

Unfortunately, I do not have much time right now so I do not get to play as many games as I would like to. But I will be sure to return the favor some time in the next two weeks!

Here is my mathematical zombie shooter, for Windows and Linux: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/no-brain-jogging

Thanks to all of you, LD rocks!

I just found this game which is a really cool puzzle game! And not, it is not mine :-)

Here is a really cool puzzle game that I played yesterday and that I have to come back to now because it is cool!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rogue-crush

Thanks @mrerdalural @idikit @team-catwheel

In for the Nth time, again using The Go Programming Language for everything I do :-)

If you want to use Go yourself, checkout my Github page, it contains a lot of libraries, my LD games and other programs written in Go:

https://github.com/gonutz

TL;DR let anyone rate games who has submitted a game in the past

I want to propse a change to the rating system. This LD I had no good idea for a game so I did not upload one. Still I was excited about the other games I had been watching grow over the weekend and like always, I saved their links for later (by the way, the list of people I follow seems to be ordered very randomly so simply following someone and looking up their games later does not work for me, room for improvement there as well).

After the weekend I started looking at the games on my list and I played two of them and wrote a long and detailed comment, which to me is the most important part. Then I wanted to give my star ratings but it said that only people who submitted a game were able to do so.

I understand that not everybody who creates an account should be able to rate a game, this would allow very easy cheating on the rating system. But how about this: you can always rate games if you have submitted one in the past?

As I said, to me the comments are the most important thing so this is no deal breaker. Still I would have loved to also rate the games, I was disappointed that I could not contribute to their 20 ratings limit because I know that this is a hurdle for many games. This took the wind out of my sails a little bit and I would have probably played more games if I could have rated them.

My proposed solution is to let all users who have ever submitted a game in the past rate games in the future. I feel that once you know how tough it is to make a game, you will take rating serioulsy and not abuse the system in any way, like people could if they just needed to create a new account to rate a game. A slight variation of this would be to only allow people to rate who not only submitted a game but also got their game rated with >= 20 ratings.

First-day demo coming soon.

Play Computers in a Nutshell - the first half - right now on your Windows or Windows-compatible computer.

Github Release or Direct Download

If you are a programmer, then this game is for you. If not, you might find it a bit hard, like a nutshell.

You can check out my mystery game Computers in a Nutshell here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/$141527

I think I have a good to fair chance of winning in the Graphics category this time.

Computers in a Nutshell

I have done some LD games in Go before (see for yourself, it's possible) and I want to encourage others to give this great language a try themselves.

Over at my Github I have created some libraries that help you create games in Go:

• Very easy to use, minimal API, cross-platform game framework
• DirectX if you want to go low level: Direct3D9 DirectSound8 DirectInput8 and Shader Compiler
• Windows API wrapper to go along with DirectX
• Windows GUI framework if you want to use GDI instead

Additionally I have made some tools that make asset creation and deployment nicer:

• Pack assets into one file and include it into your executable
• Create .ico files from images
• Read Gimp's .xcf files
• Read Tiled's map files
• Build atlas images out of smaller ones

I hope people find use in these libraries, I have used all of these to create my games and would love to hear from you if you use any of these yourself. See you around, have fun!

So I built my game in Go, as I always do. I pack my resources into the executable so you can just download and run a program without any shenanigans, like we used to do since the inception of computers. To be sure I put the right links in my description I download the Linux version. Runs fine. So I download the Windows version but I cannot open the game. It just deletes the .exe file without me being able to say "Run anyway". Why is Windows so bad?

Bad Windows 10 - you are bad!

Here is my game:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-it-alive-the-rectangle-that-is