Lets see what weekends there are Game Industry/Demo Scene/Indie related things going on in August.
– Evo is in July (11th-13th), so no conflict.
A long long time ago I ran a MiniLD event we’ve nicknamed the Tool Jam. My lovely minions did some digging, and weren’t able to get ahold of the original MiniLD 51 organizer, and asked that I bring back the Tool Jam. So, lets do another Tool Jam!
The goal of the Tool Jam is NOT to make a game, but to make something that will make it easier for you or others to make games.
What do you make? Think about the last Ludum Dare(s) you participated in, whether you finished a game or not. What’s one thing that got in your way, and stopped you from finishing faster (or at all)? Build that.
Small libraries, standalone tools, conversion utilities, Unity assets, algorithms, whitepapers, etc. Think about your process, and what can be improved about it. This MiniLD is all about process.
A long time ago (in a galaxy far far away), DrPetter created a wonderful tool for randomly generating sound effects call sfxr. Today, it and its derivatives have become the staple of sound effect creation for Game Jams (and many Indie Games too). The original Tool Jam was inspired by this wonderful contribution DrPetter made to the community.
The Tool Jam will take place this weekend (May 24th-25th), but for the sake of poor timing we’ll run it again next weekend (May 31st-June 1st), and leave submissions open until the end of the week. Typically, MiniLD events should take place entirely in their own months, but we’re announcing this one waaay too last minute.
Well, it looks like it’s time to talk about removing the Source Code requirement from Ludum Dare. For 12 years, one of the key differentiating factors between the Compo and Jam has been the requirement for source code. You were never required to GPL the code, just share it. It still belonged to you. Alas, this generosity is getting abused more and more these days.
Please help me out by posting other reports of abuse in the comments. I seem to get these every so often, but I’ve neglected to keep a record of them. I will add them to the list above.
There are definite benefits to everyone sharing source code, so we don’t want to discourage it. But at the same time, the internet sometimes abuses good thing, and the source code has been abused for a few years now. Not to mention, some companies make it difficult to report fraudulent apps, so I would rather err on the side of the community and make it entirely optional. That’s my thinking anyway.
This ultimately means that the difference between the Compo and the Jam are the following:
Share your thoughts in the comments.
For reference, an older discussion on this topic.
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:
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).
Deals! Here is this LD’s list of offers, bargains and other things.
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).
Lets try something new!
Share any freely available assets you make available in the comments. Art, Sound, Music, etc. Remember that the Compo is a solo competition, so assets found here are ONLY FOR THE JAM!
Are you itching for some Dare? Yeah! Are you ready though? Nope!?! Then between now and the start, you’re encouraged to test your tools. We call it Warmup Weekend (but we don’t mind when you submit, be it today or next week). 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 cycle. Learn how to make a release too!
Bullet point summary:
If you like what you’ve done, feel free to share it.
As the summer winds down, it’s time for more Ludum Dare!
Final Round Theme Voting has begun! The highest rated themes from Rounds 1-4 have been collected here for the Final Grand Theme Battl-stravaganza! What theme will be victorious? You decide!
[ FINAL ROUND ]
This is the one that counts!
Keynoting Ludum Dare 30 is Joel “Jovoc” Davis, one of the most prolific LD’ers of all time. He’s been doing Ludum Dares for as long as they’ve been 48 hours long. And he’s gonna show you how to cook … games!
I dare ya to have an great weekend!!
Tags: keynote
Hey folks! I’ve started taking notes and collecting thoughts on a Ludum Dare website rewrite. What would help is knowing what people are thinking as they use this current website. While you’re participating this weekend, I ask that you come here and leave a comment sharing what you’re thinking. Things you don’t like about the website/event, things that seem wrong, and things you do like about it. No matter how small, the irks and pains, unnecessary things, and even those little moments that make you smile. I have my assumptions, but you telling will be best. 
Thanks!
EDIT: Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of comments! Don’t even worry about reading them. Repeating what’s been said just reinforces the importance of something.
Hey folks! 😀 For those that don’t follow me on Twitter, I thought I’d put together a list of changes, improvements, and things I’ve been working on these past 2 weeks.
Click for the headlines, or read for the nitty gritty details.
Related: The Future of Ludum Dare Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Suggestion Thread.
Initial Cloudflare Setup – Cloudflare is popular (and free) CDN that speeds up websites by hosting static files closer to you, wherever you are in the world. It’s now installed and working. This is just one of many things that will speed up the website for everyone, especially those outside North America. We’re still bound by how fast the server can fullfill PHP requests, which is next on the list.
Enabling Cloudflare is just the first step towards speeding up the website. Right now we are not optimized at all for CDN (well, not really). It handles those several megabyte animated GIFs people have been uploading great, but we’re wasting a lot of time in PHP and SQL queries, especially on static dynamic stuff. So like I said, next will be speeding up the PHP (OpCache, APCu), and doing various optimizations and updates to better utilize the CDN.
No more www in URLs – ‘www’ is so 1994. All www.ludumdare.com URLs will now resolve to their www-less counterparts. Hello ludumdare.com/everything.
(PS: I’m saving the migration from ludumdare.com/compo/ to ludumdare.com for later. If I was to just do it, it would break a lot of the internet (links). So LD in its current form (WordPress) will continue to live in the /compo/ folder. We’ll be free once we’ve obsoleted it)
Fixes to the Donation Widget – The donation widget is some pretty old code. It’s based on an abandoned WordPress plugin named Donate Plus, that I had to ‘improve’ some years ago. In a sense, it has almost never actually worked correctly. It was supposed to talk with Paypal and sync transactions back and forth, but that stopped working after a month. Fortunately there was a way to manually add donations, which I’ve been doing ever since. No more! The plugin is now fixed. I still instinctively go to the control panel when I get donation e-mails, but now it’s just to admire that it’s done. Ahh the wonders of automation. 😀
There were more bugs, such as only supporting dollar amounts without decimals, fixed. I’m also now saving useful information like Paypal fees and actual Paypal e-mail addresses (wow).
All that’s left is making it correctly record who (what user account on ludumdare.com) donated. This is where I left off. I had made a fix, but it apparently does not work. I’ve written a script to match e-mail addresses with user accounts, but it seems many folks have multiple e-mail addresses. I’ll eventually add a way to claim a donation.
Added “Pre-Donation Widget” contributions – There were a few-dozen contributions to Ludum Dare before I set up the widget. These contributions are now part of the database. We now have a complete record of everyone that has ever contribution to Ludum Dare by Paypal. This will be useful. 😀
Post Previews Bug – Apparently only me and the other admins ever saw this. Anyways, post previews (drafts) now work for everyone again.
Updated Twitch Embed – Twitch finally updated their embed code from a Flash ‘object’ to an HTML ‘iframe’, and I’ve made the change. This means that Mobile and Tablet browsers can watch Live Streams from the website too!
The new embed also supports the Chromecast, which if you have one is pretty sweet.
Broadcast Tracking (and hello LDtv) – LDtv you say? Well it is 2014 (soon to be 2015), and video is kind-of a thing. I want us to better support video throughout the website, and I don’t just mean the Twitch widget. I mean all video. From lets plays on YouTube, to alternative streaming services like Hitbox. I want video to become a bigger part of LD, so much, that I’ve given this advocacy project a name: LDtv.
As for broadcast tracking, this started when I noticed something kind-of amazing the other day.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, just after Lunch, and there it was: The Twitch Widget, full of Live Streams. Again, this was a Tuesday afternoon. Aside from the October Challenge, there was no Game Jam going on. It wasn’t even a weekend! It’s a weekday, and there are 7 people streaming development to ~60 viewers!
What!
In the grand scheme of Live Streaming, yes that’s a small number, but it tells me something: Game Dev Live Streaming is catching on. I always assumed streaming was going to be one of the ways LD would be relevant in the ‘off season’, but here it was, happening right before my eyes.
I started asking questions: How long has this been going on? Why hadn’t I noticed this? What can I do to help it thrive even more? And like most of my Twitter ramblings, I said what I had to say and moved on to the next thing.
Are we at 24 hours of constant streaming yet?
A couple days later I wrote a PHP script to start tracking this. A cron job, every 5 minutes, hit Twitch and see whose online. Left it overnight to see how that would go.
And the scary thing: Yes, some days, we are at 24 hours of streaming!
We are talking 1 person carrying the night shift, but it happened. The first night I started tracking the data, there it was. I’ve also learned Sunday nights and Holiday nights have a lull where us Canadians and Americans sleep. But when I wake up tomorrow morning, there will be streaming, and it’s great.
I’ve put together a special page where you can find additional live stream data. In a sense, this is the beginnings of the larger LDtv project. Generally, we need to start caring more about the video content people are creating, and in this case, the people putting a lot of hours in to streaming. Figuring out who those people are. I’ll have more stats, charts and things to share soon.
Hitbox.tv Live Streaming Support (LDtv page only) – It’s not yet available on the front-page Widget, but the stream tracking is also tracking Hitbox.tv streams. For those not in the know, Hitbox is a lot like Twitch, but they’re not owned by Amazon (for better or worse). A number of folks have been asking for Hitbox support, and we now have it. Coming soon to a Widget near you!
YouTube Live Streaming Support (LDtv page only) – Like Hitbox, this isn’t available on the Widget yet. Long term, I want LDtv and the Website to do something with YouTube videos, so I began doing some research in to Google’s APIs. One thing lead to another, and we now have YouTube Live Stream Support!
YouTube streaming supports both Google+ style “Hangouts On Air” and proper YouTube Live broadcasts. Curious about YouTube streaming? You may have to go to your YouTube account settings and enable it. To compare, Twitch and Hitbox work essentially the same, but YouTube has a built-in DVR. This means as a viewer, you can rewind and fast forward through a Live event, or hit the LIVE button to resume watching Live. It’s pretty cool. That said, YouTube Live is a bit like an aircraft with lots of buttons and switches. Powerful, but complicated.
Header and Sidebar Declutter – One of the ugliest parts of the website is the madness that goes on in the page header and the sidebar. I’m often asked where to find things, many are right in the sidebar or header. Obviously, what we have isn’t working, so I’m going to try to fix it. The Mailing List, IRC, and Reddit now have big icons on the sidebar. I’m told they act funny in some older browsers, so I’ll continue to tweak the code. This is just the start. I plan to continue tweaking and improving the layout as we go.
Steam Widget (Curator and Group) – Ludum Dare has a Steam presence. Originally we had a small Steam Group of 200-some members, and it was okay. But then Steam Curators happened, and with some effort, we managed to become a Top-50 curator. Unfortunately we have slipped, down to the Top-60, but that’s still good! That’s nearly 2600 people, LD’ers and Gamers, that will now hear about your Ludum Dare games as they cross over in to PC’s biggest game market. And the higher we go, the more people we can share your games with. 😀
We also used to have a ‘Featured Post-LD Games’ list that, to be honest, in recent years was just a Steam Games list. There’s just too much volume on iOS and Android, that I had to limit it to places with less volume. That said, of the 14 Ludum Dare games on Steam, 8 have come out this year, with the another coming next month, and 1 more scheduled for 2015. Steam is growing fast too thanks to Greenlight, and Valve has now made it easy for us to collect games.
Rarely talked about, we’ve had a Ludum Dare Steam Group for years too. A good 200 people found it organically, but now seems like a good time to open the floodgates.
So I’ve combined these 3 Steam things together in to a single custom Steam-like widget. Visit the website and scroll down; It’s hard to miss. The Featured games list is now a random 3 Ludum Dare games available on Steam. Currently, the stats update ever 10 minutes (I may bump this). It still needs some work, but check it out! I’m pleased with the results.
Unfinished: Patreon and Donation Goals Widget – It figures. The important thing as I saw it going in to this Ludum Dare update plan was to highlight how much money we’ve taken in, and how I’m doing towards my goal. Some of the first code I wrote 2 nearly weeks ago was a parser for the CSV file that Patreon spits out. Alas, this got back-burnered, to hopefully pick up and finish today (Monday). Nope, but I did get close.
To say I’m rusty with PHP would be an understatement. I’ve been spending a lot of time in recent months doing JavaScript gamedev, but unless I was going to rewrite the site with node.js, this doesn’t do me a lot of good. Part of me wanted to take on some less-scary code first (i.e. not Money), and the other part wanted to do things that sounded fun (like reverse engineering Steam’s website a bit to get curator data, data without APIs), which is how we got here. And now that my initial LDtv data gathering and Steam widget are working, I’m ready to finish what I started.
Wrap up – I think that covers all the big things. I’ve been doing some general research on other Web APIs (Reddit (OMG EASY), Twitter, Facebook) as well as some work on the rewrite plan for next year (LD2015), mockups, and lots of note-taking.
I have a video I may do this week, this time about something I’d like to change (the hashtag). Stats always tell us that half of all participants in an Ludum Dare event haven’t done one before, so the simpler we can make it, the better. And given that we’re up to our 31st event, of 48 or 72 hours in length, #LD48 or specifically “48” is about as vague as you could get (I’m thinking: #LDJAM or #LDjam). Anyways, this is a rabbit hole, so lets save this discussion for later.
You made it to the end! I’m finished my long ramble-rant! Hooray for you!
FYI: I’ll be kicking off our ‘5 week countdown’ to Ludum Dare 31 with a bunch of stuff on October 31st. Theme Suggestions will open, but I’ve got a extra special thing for the artists. Stay tuned!
That’s it! We’re done. Until next time!
* * *
PS: I thought about calling this the Ludum Daregest (Digest), which lead me to Ludum Daregeist, and to Ludum Der Geist, but that was too spooky. 😉
Back again with the 2nd bi-weekly report.
These weeks were spent fixing the server, optimizing, and continuing to make things better. Try browsing around. The website should feel faster than it ever has. I’ve only just started.
Related: Digest Week 1. Changing the Hashtag.
The Future of Ludum Dare Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Suggestion Thread.
Of course I didn’t install it myself, but it did take a couple days back and forth with our host to get it sorted out. We now have 12 GB of RAM, which used to be 8 GB. And at the same time, shaved $35 off our monthly cost for our dedicated server (now about $189 /mo, was $224).
I agree that we should be spending less, but remember we have 40,000 users and 7 years of data on WordPress, a piece of software designed for maybe a dozen users max. I’m amazed it works at all. 😀
Apache 2.2, PHP 5.5 (was 5.2), and MySQL 5.6 (was 5.1), we’re now running the latest stable version of each. Some folks may have noticed a bit of downtime last weekend. Turns out some of our WordPress plugins weren’t compatible with PHP 5.5. If you’re reading this, then it’s fair to assume I fixed (or disabled) them.
Nitty gritty: PHP introduced something called “Strict Standards” some versions ago. WordPress enables this by default, and in early PHPs wasn’t an issue, but it is now. Something that happens over 7 years of running a WordPress blog, you pick up several plugins that are eventually abandoned by the authors.
More grit: I don’t want to do anything drastic like switch to Nginx or MariaDB yet. I totally want to do it, but what’s most important right now is that everything is still working. The PHP 5.5 and Apache upgrade was enough incompatibility for now.
One of the nicer optimizations, OPcache is bytecode cache now included with PHP 5.5+. Before, PHP scripts would have to compile every time before they ran. Now they only need to compile once. Ahh, so much less wasteful.
This is something I’ve wanted for a long time (and sorry, I’m gonna nerd out). By design, PHP scripts are isolated from each other. Typically, if you want to share data, you write it to a database (MySQL, etc). Talking to the database can be slow though. Indexing aside, communication with the database is done over a TCP connection, even if the database is on the same machine!! There’s also software like Memcached that lets you store shared data, but you also talk to it via TCP.
As a gamedev, one that’s done his fair share of low level assembly and graphics coding, I am not a fan of this slow way of thinking (variables over TCP). It makes total sense for scaling up to multiple servers, but is so wasteful on a one machine setup. Heck, it’s wasteful on 2 machine setups too!
And that’s where APCu comes in. APC used to be a popular OPcode and User Data Cache for PHP, but now that OPcache is bundled with PHP, it’s less important… EXCEPT FOR THAT USER DATA CACHE! APCu is the now standalone User Data part of APC. And as it should be, APCu allocates and stores your shared data right on the Heap, and is directly accessible with just a PHP function call. No time wasted with encoding and sending request/response packets, the data is right there.
That said it’s not perfect. I’ve filed a bug regarding a poor uptime problem I’m having (minutes to 2 hours before a reset). It’s still ridiculously fast though. And if we can get this uptime bug resolved, it’ll be perfect.
When I started looking in to it, ludumdare.com/compo was wasting a lot of time. Some bigger SQL queries, but more importantly a lot of queries: about 43 total (potentially 47, but WordPress does cache queries internally).
There were redundant queries. The website theme was based on a very old version of the default theme that shipped with WordPress (7 years ago). That stupid theme made 3 wasteful queries in the header. That code is soooo gone now.
Some of the bigger queries were my fault. The Steam Widget, I do an ‘order by rand()’ in my query, which has shockingly terrible performance. Also there’s something wrong with the top-donors widget (lacking useful indexes maybe?). Either way, I made them store a cached copy of their outputs in the APCu storage. The cached data expires after a minute or five, so technically they’re not fixed, but running a query once is far better than every time.
Also the black-header-bar at the top is now gone. It’s convenient, but the absolute worst query of all has that to blame. Some stupid comment validation check, which might be fine for sites without 70,000 comments. I’ve since created a replacement (see below).
And then we get to the meat. Remember when I said WordPress wasn’t designed for communities as large as ours? Funny thing though, they almost got it right. The way it generates post lists and threaded comments, it uses a query to retrieve all posts and comments… but then if you want to know anything about the person that posted the comment, it’s doing 2 requests per user! That’s for all posts, and all comments! The part they got right is that there actually is an undocumented function available to pre-cache a list of users by ID in a single request. So if you crawl the lists of posts and comments, collect a list of IDs, feed it to that function, then it will cache all the user data for all the users quickly in just 2 queries. That way better than 28 queries. 😀
So on average, many pages require 14 (or fewer) queries to complete, but the root ludumdare.com/compo page is still about 17 queries. Less than half of where we started.
There are several pages I still need to clean up, but under 15 queries is what I’m aiming for. After that, it’s going to require outright changes to WordPress to optimize more, and even then I think we’re better off replacing it outright. We’re still going to need WordPress for a while though.
I think this one’s fixed, but do let me know if you see any more permission issues cropping up. Some of the security stuff I set up with Apache made things more strict.
Just a minor tweak. Rather than fix the hub website, since all the work is going in to the compo website anyway (the goal of making it easier for everyone), why not just go direct?
Again, moving everything in /compo/ to root will break the internet. A lot of links will just stop working. Yes I could do some Apache rewrite rule wackyness, but I’d rather keep all the “old website” stuff in /compo/. That way, when we do migrate over, I can better track URLs that need to be send elsewhere on the site.
Like this post says, I’ve gone ahead and changed the default hashtag to #LDJAM. All official tweets will now use #LDJAM, and #LDJAM will be the tag we recommend.
That said, the Twitter Widget actually supports multiple hashtags: #LDJAM, #LDCompo, #LD48, #LD72, #LDtv, #LudumDare, #LDGame, and #MiniLD. It also supports some silly ones: #LDJelly, #LDKittens, #LDPotato, and #towlr.
In the future I’d like to do more with Twitter and social media support. I’m glad I could do at least this one little improvement.
I’ve wanted to do this for a VERY long time.
The colors still need work, and I’m sure I’ll be forever tweaking it, but I hope you agree even in its current rough state it’s an improvement. Let’s compare:
Tell me, do you miss the old header? (I might, a little… but just a little)
These replace a lot of the information scattered across the header. Gone are the ugly red rows of 63 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes, and 18 seconds, replaced with a nice compact digital’ish countdown clock contained within an informative box.
And just to be crazy, I’ve included an actual start-time guide in Ludum Dare 31 box. This also meant I *cough* had to learn a thing or two about UTC time. You lazy fake-‘merican Mike. 😉
The clock code I rewrote from scratch, so please let me know if you see anything weird.
When I disabled the WordPress Login bar (due to it being HORRIBLY designed, see above), that meant we needed a replacement RIGHT AWAY!
So, I took the opportunity to kill a flock of birds with an awesome rock (wuht). Welcome to the future, where the website can detect if you’re logged in or not! Instead of the “Sign in/Create Account” link constantly found in the header bar, welcome to the future: Context Sensitivity.
And then when you’re logged in…
Yes, it’s the stupidest thing, but it just goes to show how little time I had to work on Ludum Dare before this crazy project of mine. The little things get neglected… for YEARS.
Clicking on your name takes you to your profile page, and +New Post does something (what could it be *shrug*). Finally, clicking your avatar takes you to gravatar.com, something we used to link way down in the sidebar (where nobody saw it). Hopefully this means we’ll see more avatars and less blank faces.
I’m trying out the navigation bubbles. I’m not entirely happy with the color scheme yet, but at the same time I don’t want them to overpower things.
The “What is Ludum Dare” (about page) and “Rules / Guide” buttons, I want them to be obvious, but I’m still not happy with them. Not to mention the content they link to still needs work.
I’m still working on this, but I think it’s a good start.
Post minimizing is a feature I did add earlier this year. One of the more frustrating parts of the site is the clutter that builds-up in this part of the site. But when there’s important things to say, it has to go somewhere (here or in the header… annoyingly). Anyways, minimized posts look a little nicer now.
A visual thing: I’m no longer using pure white on regular posts backgrounds. Special posts have always had their off colors, but now regular posts have a slight grey color to them. And had I not pointed it out, many people wouldn’t have noticed. That’s the magic of color. And now that we’re off white, white things in posts will stand out better. That, and I can do the subtle shine seen along the top of all posts now.
Also gradients. I like gradients. 😀
The #LD48 website… Oh, sorry. The #LDJAM website is looking a look curvier.
— Alex Taylor (@tayl1r) October 27, 2014
Oh yes, I’ve been rounding everything too. 😀
One tiny feature I snuck in today: Post ages. Long story short, I didn’t want to have to do the math in my head for “when did I post the Hashtags post?”. I shouldn’t have to do math. Let the computers do the math! And now I know it was 5 days ago. 😉
Finally, the last thing, also the first thing in the picture above, the new Event Navigation Bar. It’s a bit rough right now (just to support the October Challenge), but I’m going to be doing a lot of work here very soon.
Coming soon: This little widget will soon be the hub for quickly getting information about your submissions. How many comments you’ve received, how many ratings, how many more before you actually place. In general, the whole idea of Coolness really needs a major overhaul. We’ll see how much I can do.
Coming soon: For users that aren’t logged in, the bar will soon unroll showing either a random selection of games from the current event, or a random selection of recent winners after events. One of the biggest complaints about the website is how terrible it is for finding games. So, once I’m a bit further along, random visitors will now immediately see games.
Well, I never did find the time to finish the automated stuff, so I manually filled in the numbers. We raised almost $1800 in the days before October started, and are close to $1000 for November. Like I said, I’m going to keep working at it for the rest of the year whether we raise enough money or not, but it’s looking like we’re going to have to consider sponsors.
Well, it’s almost time to start the big countdown to Ludum Dare 31! This Friday marks the 5-week mark. I’ve opened Theme Suggestions early (secretly), but Friday will be the official countdown kickoff day. If you have a Ludum Deal for us, contact me. The Deals go live Friday.
If everything goes according to plan, this will also kick-off on Friday. We’ll see. Part of the *new* 5 week countdown extravaganza.
Now that my “uh oh’s” are out of the way (mostly, the big server upgrades), I can give a clearer picture of what comes next.
I hope to tackle all of the above in some capacity in the coming weeks. Oh, and running Ludum Dare 31. That’s kind-of a thing I should do too.
If you made it this far, congratulations! You win at listening to the ramblings of a mad-man.
And with that I’ll say adieu. Until next time.
Deals! Here is this LD’s list of offers, bargains and other things.
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).
Here are some Wallpapers created by the community.
If you’d like to be added to the list, make a post, and leave me a comment here.
Hey folks!
It has been a month since I’ve said anything, and I owe you guys an update.
Me, I’m still finishing up my Steam port of Smiles HD. Like we always do, I under-estimated the amount of work necessary to finish the port. This was a C++ game I wrote back in 2008, over 6 years ago. I haven’t seriously touched the code for about 3 years, and the bit-rot is real.
Since then, SDL2 was released, and pretty much all fixed-function GPUs have gone extinct. I’ve been using shaders and SDL2 so long now, I don’t want to go back. This meant making the game work with my current code-base, and unfortunately finishing parts of the code-base as it hasn’t shipped a game yet.
The game is working again, but it still needs a lot of TLC. That and I’m going to have to rework/redo the high scores and achievements to be Steam friendly. I’m hoping this only take 2 more weeks… but yeah. This game, the Patreon, and the donations are my only income right now, so it kind-of has to be done ASAP.
I had planned to start on the new Ludum Dare website on Monday February 2nd, but I’m just not ready yet.
On March 1st I’ll be travelling and spending the week in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. When I get back, we start the countdown to Ludum Dare 32.
It’s also tax time soon, so I’m going to lose a few days to that.
Long story short, development on the new site is going to be spotty these next couple months. I should find some time before Ludum Dare 32 in April, and hopefully even before GDC. But for sure, the new site will not be ready for April. The goal is still August’s Ludum Dare, but we’ll see once I get in the thick of it (this year for sure).
Thanks for your patience.
I’m just ironing out the final details.
Tentatively, it’ll be GDC Monday at 7 PM at a REALLY COOL NEW VENUE! Backup plan is Tuesday at ‘the usual’, but things are looking good for Monday.
I’m proud to announce that this years Ludum Dare GDC Gathering will be at a brand new venue: GitHub!
Do you Game Jam? Then join us for an evening of war stories, chatting, chillin’, and whatever. There’ll be food and drink (Pizza and :D). And yes, for the first time, there will be Vegetarian and Vegan options. 😀
Have a game you want to show-off? Bring it along too!
Click HERE for Waiting List
Monday March 2nd, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
88 Colin P Kelly Jr St
San Francisco, CA 94107
(about a 15 minute walk from Moscone)
EDIT: The Ludum Dare Wallpaper/Poster from the party can be found here:
First a huge shout-out to everyone that joined us at our Ludum Dare GDC gathering party in San Francisco last week. It was an amazing time. We’re hoping to do it again next year, and will try to get even more you there.
TIP: Sign up for the Mailing List!
I owe a huge thank you to GitHub for generously hosting us, and Lee Reilly for planning, organizing, and throwing us a really amazing party. It was the best!
Here’s a few photos to remember the night.
EDIT: More Photos (Higher Quality. My camera phone is terrible)
Enter Here
People thought they were early
Octocat
Octocat skeleton
Octocat Thinker
Gaming themed Bar menu
Side-Scrolling Platformer
Real Time Strategy
Third Person Shooter
The Chow
Pool with Sos
Footy
Developers
Developers
Developers
Developers
Demoing
Developers
Just Cheese and Vegan left
@foolmoron sleeps
We got those!
Wide
Bar
Until next time…
Alright! It’s time we got this ball rolling.
As many of you know, my goal this year is to finally refresh, redo and build us a brand new Ludum Dare website. It’s a big deal. We’ve been going strong for 13 years now, but we’ve grown *A LOT* the past few. I’m in constant awe that many thousands of you tolerate the sub-par duct-tape and cardboard website we have today. I never expected LD to get this big, and to become so important to so many people. I feel I have a responsibility to take this little hobby of mine very seriously.
So part of bringing Ludum Dare up to date is cleaning up the branding. Last year I took the first step, switching our hashtag from #LD48 to #LDJAM. We are big on social media. It’s how I keep in touch with many of you. But we’re constantly bringing in new people, and in just 5 years we’ll finally reach our 48th main event. If we weren’t already 13 years old, that might seem far away. It’s one less question I need to answer.
I can’t even remember when I made the current Ludum Dare logo, but it’s been a very long time. What a shame it would be to have a brand new Ludum Dare, with the same old logo. Like getting a haircut before something new, it’s just something you do.
But rather than starting with a debate on typography and color, I want us to explore something that’s been in the back of my mind: A Ludum Dare Mascot.
We sort of have a logo. At some point, it was clear that many early LD’ers were Commodore 64 fans (myself included). The Commodore 64 never really had a standard joystick, but you could plug in *A LOT* of different things (including Atari 2600 joysticks or Sega Master System gamepads). Somewhere along the line, a bunch of us just mutually agreed that the Suncom TAC-2 was the iconic joystick we were going to use to represent Ludum Dare. It also kinda helps that nobody really knows who Suncom is anymore, and if they’re still around, they certainly don’t care about the TAC-2.
The Suncom TAC-2 (Totally Accurate Controller MK2)
Funny thing, it’s actually a really terrible joystick for play (solder and balls instead of microswitches). But man, it captures that 80’s iconic retro gaming vibe just right. It was all about the style.
So hello, it’s 2015 now.
It’s probably 30 years since the TAC-2 was manufactured. I’m not saying we get rid of the TAC-2, but we should consider our options. Gaming has changed, and is always changing. You might even say we had an effect on that change (something small, but hey). Really, the only constant in gaming is change.
So if it’s fair game to change the Logo, what could we do?
Of course, there’s the mascot route.
Taccy the Tacky TAC-2… this is why I need your help
.. Well, Taccy is probably not a good choice, but we need to start somewhere.
I want to think there is an ideal little character we can create to both represent and share with the community. Maybe there’s multiple mascots. Maybe there’s a root character that gets reinterpreted. Maybe there’s the general mascot, and maybe there’s a Ludu-tan/Dah-ray-chan or other personification.
I’ll admit. I love what GitHub does with their branding
Ludum Dare means a lot of things to a lot of people. You all constantly blow me away with your creativity, so I feel this is something I need to defer to all of you to help find.
This isn’t a contest per se. I’d rather think of this as a conversation. If someone has an idea, and if you have suggestions or alternative takes on the idea, I want to see the back and forth. I want us to work together on this.
Post your thoughts, sketches, and ideas in the comments. I will follow along as best I can.
EDIT: Oh! Image posting doesn’t work in WordPress. I’ve been manually editing posts and embedding the images. Leave me a link to an image file, and I’ll do that for you.
The team from @acidnerve discuss their upcoming game PC and PlayStation game Titan Souls, a game originally created for Ludum Dare 28 (Theme: You only get one).
Deals! Here is this LD’s list of offers, bargains and other things.
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. 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).
