While Ludum Dare is traditionally an online event (make a game from the comfort of your home), many real world happen around Ludum Dare. Currently we are up to 21 gatherings:

• United Kingdom, London — Google Campus, hosted by Preloaded
• Scotland, Aberdeen — Kings College Campus at the University of Aberdeen
• Austria, Vienna — Metalab Vienna
• Sweden, Stockholm — Goo Technologies
• California, Los Angelis — Crash Space
• Virginia, Richmond — RVA Game Jams at 804 RVA
• Russia, Omsk — Old48
• California, Oakland — Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (Venue) Please RSVP jbell9!
• Sweden, Borås –- InnovationLab Cancelled
• Austria, Linz — bb15
• United Kingdom, Coventry — University of Warwick
• Ohio, Cleveland — Shaker LaunchHouse
• Florida, Bonifay — TBD (Please RSVP)
• Turkey, Ankara — CClub @ Middle East Technical University
• Ontario, Kitchener — Kwartzlab Hacker Space
• Japan, Tokyo — Pico Pico Cafe/Lexaloffle HQ
• Russia, Saint-Petersburg –- http://vk.com/ld25spb
• Australia, Adelaide — University of Adelaide
• France, Strasbourg — La Plague Digitale
• Norway, Oslo — Bitraf
• France, Bordeaux — more
• France, Montpellier — Université Montpellier 2

Post a comment letting me know where an event is, include a link to further details, and I’ll add it to the list.

Viewers, look below. Participants, post a comment with a link to your live video stream.

Hey folks. Since myself and Phil have started making our GDC plans, we thought it’d be a good idea to encourage you all to do the same. To get things started, you should let everyone know in the comments below if you’re planning to attend.

I know a bunch of us have become GDC regulars, so feel free to ask questions. When I have time, I’ll start assembling a mini-faq up here in the post.

We (Ludum Dare) are planning to have a gathering again this year. We haven’t reserved anything yet, but it will probably be GDC Monday GDC Wednesday, and probably at the same venue (Tad’s Steaks). I do regret Tad’s does not have a vegetarian menu, but the venue is just too perfect otherwise (food court style, come as you please, and a full large room we can reserve away from all the other customers).

GDC 2013 and San Francisco Mini FAQ

Q: What pass should I get?
A: The Independent Games Summit pass is certainly the best bargain, but quantities are limited. You should order it ASAP, ’cause it’s getting close to when they ran out last year. It gets you in to the Indie Game Summit on Monday and Tuesday, the Expo Hall, the GDC Play hall, as well as all Sponsored talks Wednesday to Friday. I want to highlight the last one. Sponsored sessions are your talks by NVidia, Autodesk, Unity, and whatnot. Depending on what you do, there may still be content for you after Tuesday.

If you miss the Indie pass, I actually recommend waiting a bit. Around Xmas, the GDConf people send out a coupon. That coupon is typically good for $50 off the Summits pass, or (I think) $100 of the main pass. Go sign up for their newsletter if you like saving money.

Q: Cheap travel?
A: Most of us are arriving by airplane. I don’t have much advice there, other than booking before your flight fills up.

Once you arrive in the airport (SFO), I highly recommend taking the Bart train.

http://www.bart.gov/stations/index.aspx

For about $9 (one way), you can take the train from the airport to Powell St, which is just a few blocks from Moscone.

Q: Food?
A: I’m a big fan of the Food Emporium on the bottom level of the Westfield Mall. It’s a food court, but an amazing one at that. You can eat pretty much anything for about $10, even Steak.

Something I discovered recently is The Food Trucks (another link). As the name suggests, a variety of trucks park themselves at various locations around San Francisco, and at least last year they had a great spot just a block from Moscone. You can find some really wild stuff here, such as a Korean Beef Burito (Koreto). And there’s different trucks each day. Also about $10.

Q: Hotel?
A: This is the main reason I started this post. I highly recommend splitting a hotel room with someone. Many hotels offer a “2 double beds” option for practically no more money. So with that, you can literally pay half price for your hotel if you share. Plus, you have someone to chat with in the evenings after all the chaos. The GDC website has been pretty good lately for hotel bookings.

Another alternative is the Hostel. Bunking with a bunch of other developers is a really cheap way to sleep. (hey can someone give me links and details for hostel(s?). I’ve never stayed there).

Oh and if you snore, there are these. Your fellow indie thanks you.

No surprise, Warmup Weekend is back!

Between now and Ludum Dare 25′s start time, you should make sure that your tools work. Make some art, import it, and draw it on screen. Make some sounds, import them, and play them on cue. If you’re using a new development tool, learn it.

Bullet point summary:

• No rules or limits. This is practice.
• Learn your development tools! Write some code, run it.
• Make some art, get it on screen, make it move.
• Print some text to the screen. Print some text to a log (if applicable).
• Make some sound, get it in game, make it play.
• If you’re motivated enough, make your experiments in to a game!
• Make something that should take “hours”, not 2 days.
• Then package it up, put it online.
• No time or day limit. But if you have no other plans this weekend, why not?

If you like what you’ve done, feel free to share it.

[ Submit Here | View all Warmup Games ]

We’re just getting started!

More Jams going on: Hack-a-Jam, Indie Speed Run

Hello and welcome everyone to a very festive edition of Ludum Dare. It’s time to make games, eat food, and be merry… for it could be your last. 😉

Theme voting has begun. Every day this week we’ll begin a new round of voting. Wednesday we tally all the votes, and Thursday when we begin the Final Round. Lets do this!

[ ROUND 1 | ROUND 2 | ROUND 3 ]

[ ROUND 4 | FINAL ROUND | π ]

Special thanks to Sos for again running the Theme Slaughter.

Something you may notice is that theme list is much smaller than usual. One of the common criticisms about Ludum Dare is the themes; So we put the top 100 themes from the slaughter in front of a panel, and meticulously reduced it to a shorter 48 themes. We tried to give you a list of themes with a much greater list of possibilities, so everyone isn’t forced to make basically same game. It was a lot of work, so I want to send a big special thanks out to Sorceress, Phil Hassey, and everyone that helped out with the prune.

Keynote

Hey, we’re early with the keynote for a change! Richard Perrin put together this great homage to adventure games that just couldn’t keep to myself:

That’s it from me. Good luck everyone, and may the best theme win.

Tags: keynote

Deals! Here’s a list of offers and other things.

• BlackBerry Port-A-Thon 2 — RIM offering $100 for each ported app. Some free devices too. 36 hours starting Friday, but they end before LD does. HTML5, AIR (Flash), Native C/C++ (Unity, Marmalade). Finished.
• 10% off BetaForce Server Hosting – Use Promo Code: LD4825 (More) – EDIT: Fixed
• Excelsior JET Java->Native (no JRE) – $10 For Charity Promo (Regular Price $1200+)
• PlayCanvas Beta Access – 3D HTML5 Tools
• One Game a Month – Bonus EXP for signing up this weekend
• Unity Pro 4 Extended Trial – T3-NVU8-A2TH-8ESV-UHA4-KJZT – Good for 3 months! – Provides Unity Pro 4.x, Team License 4.x, iOS Pro 4.x, Android Pro 4.x, and Flash Pro 4.x. Expires March 14th, 2013. Ignore mentions of “30-day Unity Pro Trial” during setup. It is wrong. The code is still good until March 14th. Download Unity. Read the PDF. All 400 codes used! Thanks everyone!
• Genetica 4.0 – 40% “End of the World” discount. Tools for Procedural texture generation.

If you’d like to submit your own deal, you can post details and a link in the comments below, or send me an e-mail. Keep in mind I don’t have a lot of time, but if you need a confirmation or just to ping me once it’s posted, go ahead and mail me. When I have a chance I’ll add it to the list. Also it should be relevant to what we do here (i.e. make games).

So earlier this afternoon I sent out a quick poll to the Ludum Dare twitter account. The premise was simply, should the Ludum Dare Compo (48 Hour solo event) require source?

So yes, as it turns out a significant number of people like this requirement (or are indifferent). Drilling down in to the reasons people like this rule, we get the following:

1. It’s a good reference for new developers
2. It encourages community
3. It lets us verify that somebody didn’t cheat (**)
4. It keeps people honest
5. It can solve disputes (**)
6. Some broken games can be fixed with just a few source tweaks
7. I like to look at how people implement things
8. Source code is one of the best things to learn from
9. Any code created in 48/72 hours wont contain any serious secrets
10. Even if it’s not you, somebody will learn from the code
11. Ludum Dare is about Learning

And some of the reasons against.

1. The code is often messy and not a good example of proper game code
2. I use a proprietary engine. I can’t release its source.
3. Some tools can’t easily export source
4. Code can be stolen, games can be illegally published
5. I like to make games and sell them later
6. Unity/Flash users get lots of features and only have to share game code
7. My code is mine

I was actually surprised by the overwhelming response, so to make sure we didn’t have skewed results, I added a 2nd question about half way through the poll:

So about 60% have looked at source code, and 33% have learned something from it. All things considered, that is a significant number.

The data says something else too.

I didn’t ask specifically how much source code people have looked at, but one fact I will share is that in the 10 years we’ve run Ludum Dare, we’ve never had to take action because of what was found in source code. I can’t remember any questionable games ever making it in to the top games. Funny enough, many real disputes have been complaints about people forgetting source.

Now as you all know, Ludum Dare very big now. The idea of us policing entries is well beyond what we can do. We don’t actually have prizes, so there’s really no reason to cheat at Ludum Dare. So the old policy of “to stop cheaters” really didn’t make a lot of sense to me anymore.

That said, there’s a lot great reasons to continue requiring source. The Jam has never required source, and that has been one of our main ways of inviting more people to participate in the event. That will not change. But where there may be room to change is why source is required. So, to quote myself:

Of course, if disputes do happen, having source gives us something to make a case with. Innocent until proven guilty is kind-of a nice policy after all. So perhaps the main reason we share code should change.

Here’s another thought:

Now there’s an interesting twist. One of the classic complaints of “From Scratch” developers versus Unity/Flash/GameMaker/Middleware developers is the sort of “unfairness” that they have to share so much. It is an issue we let happen, and it is true it’s not fair. So alright, Matt’s idea provides a fix to that long long problem. Not to mention, #2, #4 and #6 in the “No” list. There’s nothing stopping you from submitting everything as usual, but it gives more liberties to those that are protective/unable to share their engine code. In contrast, it does mean fixing code for some entries (Yes #6) is not be possible (extremely cool but uncommon anyway).

So that’s what’s being considered. Again, we really don’t have the time to police thousands of entries, so the thought is to redefine why we ask for code, and perhaps what we ask of code.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Hey guys. You probably see why we don’t do rating during MiniLD’s now (just not enough turn-out). Looking at the logs, the most ratings any one game has is 8, then 5, 4, down to 0. Should I go ahead and close the MiniLD without rating? There’s really not enough data to give any fair comparison.

Hey folks,

Just a heads up that Phil and I might be especially busy this month (I know I am). I’m out of town as of the 14th, not returning until the 30th (dead tired). After I change back from my gelatinous form to my human form (+/- a day or two), I’ll be able to start responding to your LD requests for our upcoming April event. If you want to get in touch with me (LD related, a deal or opportunity, other) you can find an e-mail here. My apologies, I might be a bit late getting back to you (see gelatinous Mike). If you want to chat with me at GDC, I’ll be around all week, but *hint hint* my Friday is especially empty.

We are planning to have another Ludum Dare get together at GDC. Tentative date is March 27th, i.e. GDC Wednesday, at Tad’s Steaks (the food court’y steakhouse we gathered at last year). It’ll be after the IGF Awards ceremony, maybe slightly overlapping the GD Choice Awards, but you can always come a little late. I’ll come back with final details once we’re booked. Oh, and since some people have asked, it will be all ages (Food Court’y).

Ta!

Join us on GDC Wednesday (March 27th), 8:00PM at Tad’s Steaks, just after the IGF awards. 10 minutes from Moscone.

Thank you everyone! We all had a fantastic time. We hope to see you again next year. 😀

Tad’s Steaks – 120 Powell St, San Francisco, CA

Tad’s is an inexpensive cafeteria-like steakhouse. The menu is simple but not very vegetarian friendly, so if meat is not your thing then you may want to eat before you come. We’ve reserved the upstairs area, which is a nice quiet place to hang out, chat, eat, and demo games.

Everyone is welcome. The venue is all ages. See you there!

While Ludum Dare is typically an online event (make a game from the comfort of your home), many real world events happen around Ludum Dare. Here’s the list:

• Montpellier, France – Baptême du jeu and Kawenga
• Los Angelis, California – Launch party at Crash Space
• Oakland, California – Museum of Art & Digital Entertainment, AKA The MADE. please RSVP
• Omsk, Russia – Omsk Ludum Dare
• Adelaide, Australia – Jamalaide at University of Adelaide
• Saint-Petersburg, Russia – IT bar KLЮTCH
• Richmond, Virgina – RVA Game Jams
• Stockholm, Sweden – Goo Technologies
• Łódź, Poland – Facebook Page
• Vancouver, Canada – University of British Columbia’s Game Developer Association
• Mountain View, California – Hacker Dojo
• Wellington, New Zealand – Victoria University
• Toronto, Ontario, Canada – Ryerson University
• Tokyo, Japan – Pico Pico Cafe (home of Lexaloffle)
• Manchester, UK – at the MadLab
• Skopje, Macedonia – Hacklab KIKA
• Lexington, Kentucky – Run Jump Dev
• Johannesburg, South Africa – University of Witwatersrand
• Bordeaux, France – Motion Twin (one seat left!)
• Mannheim, Germany – RaumZeitLabor Hackerspace
• Ithaca, New York – Ithaca Generator Makerspace
• Coventry, UK – University of Warwick

If you want your event on the list, post a comment letting me know where your event is. Be sure to include a link to further details (either here on the blog, or elsewhere).

Hey folks. I’ve been working on a sidebar widget that automatically fetches live streaming video from Twitch TV. It’s still in development, but it is usable. Use this post to share feedback with me.

Version: Alpha 1

Currently using Diablo 3 livestreams, since there are no Ludum Dare streams.

Usage (soon): Create a stream on Twitch.tv and set your game to “Ludum Dare“.

Hey folks. I’ve updated the streaming widget with a number of new features, and an improved look. Like before, if you have any comments or feedback, please let me know.

The Ludum Dare stream list is now live. I’ll be leaving my own stream streaming while I can, just to have something there (no video streams is so boring). Feel free to try it out yourself by starting a Twitch stream, and setting your game to Ludum Dare (you do this from the twitch.tv website).

Version: Alpha 2

TODO: Optimize page loading
– Move scripts in to a PHP wordpress plugin that loads the scrips at the page end, so it doesn’t slow down sidebar loading.
– Minify.
– Combine SVG files in to HTML/JS? Maybe

TODO: Write FAQ! If somebody wants to write a “how to stream” guide for Windows, Mac, Linux, etc, please do! Post a link in the comments and I’ll use it.

Alpha 1 post is here.

It’s Warmup Weekend time!

Between now and Ludum Dare 26′s start time, you should make sure that your tools work. Make some art, import it, and draw it on screen. Make some sounds, import them, and play them on cue. If you’re using a new development tool, figure out the development and testing cycle.

Bullet point summary:

• No rules or limits. This is practice.
• Learn your development tools! Write some code, run it.
• Make some art, get it on screen, make it move.
• Print some text to the screen. Print some text to a log (if applicable).
• Make some sound, get it in game, make it play.
• If you’re motivated enough, make your experiments in to a game!
• Make something that should take “hours”, not 2 days.
• Then package it up, put it online.
• No time or day limit. But if you have no other plans this weekend, why not?

If you like what you’ve done, feel free to share it.

[ Submit Here | View all Warmup Games ]

We’re just getting started!

IT BEGINS! Help us reduce the thousands of suggestions down to a more manageable size.

Deals! Here is this LD’s list of offers, bargains and other things.

Development

• CraftStudio – Cooperative Game Making Platform – CraftStudio is now Beta (changes)! Help celebrate by participating in the free weekend, starting 24 hours before Ludum Dare.
• Construct 2 – Make Games, No Programming Required – 40% off until April 29th.
• PlayCanvas – Collaborative 3D HTML5 dev suite – 30 spots for access to the private beta. Anyone that submits a game gets a 1 year Indie license after the beta ends. Contact info@playcanvas.com, and be sure to mention LD48 and your Ludum Dare username.
• Goo Engine – Modern HTML5+WebGL 3D Engine – Goo Technologies is offering early access to Goo Engine free for Ludum Dare participants. Sign up here.
• Atanua – Circuit logic simulator – Seriously. Sol_HSA, one of our long time Ludum Dare veterans and part of the moderation team is offering a free license to anyone that makes a Ludum Dare game with his logic simulator. And you thought you were hardcore making your LD games in C or assembly. Think again! Use this temp license to try it. Let Sol_HSA know: 109A21DCEE8841D3F1B63738300162A429226A09A8024885C729F8306D2AE46B734812
• Unity Pro – Unity Pro Trial (Unity Pro, iOS Pro, Android Pro, Team License), good until May 28th. Use the code T3-NGDY-EPTV-VJUK-6Z4D-PQNF, good for 500 activations.
• Unity Pro Discount – 10% off all Pro purchases/upgrades. This offer is available for individual developers and their personal purchases, not for studios. Sign up here. Offer good until May 31st.
• Loom Game Engine – Game Engine with Realtime Editing – 50% off all subscription plans, and the price is grandfathered for the lifetime of the subscription. Use code: GO_LD26

Content Creation

• Pixexix Pro – Draw on (texture) your 3D models using any image editor – Use coupon code LUDUMDARE26 during checkout for 75% off. Read more here.
• Sprite Something – iOS Sprite, Animation and Map editor – On sale Friday, April 26th for $1.99 (Regular $4.99). ONE DAY ONLY!
• Voxatron – a Voxel game with integrated editor and exporter – Did you know: Voxatron can export things you make in voxels as .obj format files? Now you know! Don’t have Voxatron? Look here.

If you’d like to submit your own deal, you can post details and a link in the comments below, or send me an e-mail. Keep in mind I don’t have a lot of time, but if you need a confirmation or just to ping me once it’s posted, go ahead and mail me. When I have a chance I’ll add it to the list.

Also it MUST be relevant to what we do here (i.e. make games).

Curious that room, isn’t it? A mockup by @laufman… that I have to now make work.

Hey Musicians! We’re looking for someone to write a good backing track for our little #Sworcery inspired jam game. We’re still working, figuring everything out (too early for SFX), but would love someone to help set the mood. Yes, the game takes place in this one room (part of the room I’ve kept hidden to avoid spoilers).

What do you think? What sort of soundscape do you think suits the lonely room?

Now with @laufman‘s character animations in and working. I think we’re starting to figure out where this is going.

Could use some Music.

Looking the same, but feeling way better. What @laufman and I are up to.

Phew! There. Got all the objects in so far. I’m tired. Zzz.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 27th, 2013 at 11:08 pm and is filed under LD #26. 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.