Hey, visit the rules wiki to see what I’ve put down for Mini LD. I’ve got a set of rules (well, a list of ways it’s different from normal rules), and a host sign up page, which I conveniently nabbed the first slot on. Feel free to edit and improve the whole thing. This isn’t my deal, it’s the community’s.

Things still quite unknown include: how judging works, or not if we don’t do that, and what category/tags/whatever the entries and journals need to go into. Will each one have its own category? Maybe a general Mini-LD category? If so, how do we separate the entries for different months? These things need work.

There are 10 months of the year that lack an LD contest.  This simply cannot stand.  It is a blight on the game development community.  I feel that by filling those months, we will attract more regulars and more interest, and LD will be more popular.  But on the flipside, LD is a special event, twice a year, a big deal.  If it happened every month, you’d only have a small percentage of the contestants in any given event (and very little overlap, so you’d never get to know anybody).  And so the proposal:

 The LD48 Mini-Contest.  All that I am about to say is just the proposal and up for discussion as to what is right or whether it’s just stupid in general.  This is just my original basic idea for it.  It runs once a month, on the first weekend.  It does not occur in April and whatever other month Real-LD happens in (shouldn’t there be an official month for that too?).

There is no theme voting - the host simply dictates the theme.  Themes for this are encouraged to be different from the type that LD48 uses, though the host does whatever they want.  Basically, I’m picturing setting up a specific challenge for people, rather than a general theme.  Like we might finally see the “no graphics” theme in the form of “Make a game that communicates with the user only through sound.  The player can communicate back by any method you want.”  Something like that, but also something that can be shorthanded to one or two words if needed (”Audio only”), so people don’t have to explain the theme every time they talk about their game to other people.  Other challenges might be things like “Here’s a set of tiles, make a game with them”, “A maze game featuring zombies that is 64k or less zipped” (blah, I wouldn’t enter that one), or “You just got the Fight Club license.  Deadline is in 48 hours.  Go!” (I could see that one with a lot of movies… Office Space!)  If people don’t like your challenge, who cares?  There’s a new one next month.
Host also dictates the start time, so that he gets to announce the theme at a time convenient for him rather than at 4am.  Contestants have 48 hours from that start time to finish their project, just like in LD.

Rules are relaxed - you can use anything you want to make your game, start with any code.  If you just want to mod your existing game, go for it.  It’s almost the opposite idea as LD is - instead of seeing what you can build from scratch, we want to see what you are capable of with unlimited resources (and very limited time).  Content is just as unrestricted, just keep it legal.

The source code rule is equally relaxed (and rightly so, since you can use code that you’re not allowed to share anyway!).  We’d really like you to post your source, but it’s optional.

People sign up on a list to host this, first-come, first-serve.  You can sign up again only once your last hosting is off the list.  This means Fydo gets to run a Kitties contest.  Hosting is entirely simple: just come up with a theme and announce it when the time comes.  Phil’s amazing wordpress code does the rest, letting people upload their entries (well, links and such) and shutting it all off when the time comes.  All mini-LDs would go in one wordpress category, maybe, so we didn’t keep adding categories all the time.  Don’t have that bit worked out at the moment.

Hosts can participate in the contest too, even though they know the theme in advance.  We’ll trust their integrity.  Probably hosting would have some simple restriction on it, like you must have been in 3 real LDs previously (or you must spend at least 70% of your life lurking in #ludumdare), so we don’t get a flood of people signing up and disappearing.

After the 48 hours, the entries are up for voting, and you don’t have to have entered to vote.  You just need to be signed up on this site, to encourage people to check out the entries and see what they think.  The voting (which Phil of course implements for us!) is simpler than the full-on LD, maybe just 1 category: Awesomeness (maybe Gnarliness, or Radicality, or maybe it shows it with a random name each time, or does the host get to choose the category too!?).  You rate it 1-100, so it’s kind of like grading a paper.  Voting can simply remain open until the next Mini-LD (or actual LD) starts.

Of course, each of these mini-LDs will get a much smaller number of competitors, and nobody would do them all (well, somebody would, I bet you, but not many), but they are a nice option for the bleak wasteland of empty existence between LD48s.  I don’t think they’d detract from the bigness and participation of the real LDs, given their smallness and unofficiality.  My hope is that they’d pull more people in for those.  And we always have people in #ld saying “boy, I need a new LD!”, and with this, there’d always be one of sorts around the corner.

And yeah, it’s more work for Phil to get it up and working, but that’s what he’s here for, right?  What else is he good for?

Discuss.

PoV told me to make shapes and make things out of them, so I did.  I also added notations of what shape made each sketch.  Pardon the complete absence of quality, this is a photo of my sketchpad.

If you are getting a blank white screen when you start my game (even if you used your intellect to then click on it and play the game anyway), your video card may be displeased with my non-power-of-two textures. No, I wasn’t just being SUPER minimalist! The version I have up at my site (sorry, it’s in an installer) fixes that, so it may work if you had visual problems before.

Get it here: stillpond_install.exe (1.9mb)

However, that’s also my post-compo edition. It has two new bonus game modes (they are hidden, search the title screen! Think of Strongbad!), but aside from those modes (and fixing the texture sizes) it is totally unchanged. So I think it’s fair for you to judge it for the contest, provided you ignore (or don’t find) the bonus modes.

Yep, that’s a shot of gameplay! Hey, it’s supposed to be minimalist.

you may download the intense thrills of Still Pond: stillpond.zip (2MB)

It is for windows and includes source code.  Developed using PTK, and I think I did things in the semi-proper way, shouldn’t be too tough to recompile for Mac.  There are two exes, a windowed and a fullscreen, but on my computer the fullscreen one constantly minimizes itself, which is beyond annoying. I consider the windowed version official, but if the fullscreen one works for you, it is better for the gameplay.

Unfortunately, I can’t share much info on this game, as part of the minimalist nature of it is the lack of information you are supposed to have going into it.  That’s a big shame because it means I can’t share the most fun bits.  But anyway, it works so far!  I’ve got a leaf, see, and it falls on a still pond.  Working as advertised.  Pretty cool.  It also reflects.  I’m going to totally lose the journal contest, but it’s worth it - I don’t want to give away the surprises!

I have an idea, a pretty lame one that should be kind of funny at least, and have implemented a title screen!

Let’s face it, we’re obsolete.

When life gives you lemons, give up!

All done! Already filled with lots of user submissions. I can already tell that making sure submissions work right is going to be murder. But we shall see! It’s pretty awesome already, with multi-part puzzles made by different people.

Play now: http://hamumu.com/maze.php

It requires a Dumb Account to play, but those are free and the most fun thing in the world, so you would be a fool to pass that up.

No need for another screen, it would look almost identical to the last.  But big big progress.  It’s almost entirely done, and I’m quitting for the night.  Now, you can walk around in the world, pick up and drop items, and create new rooms.  The new rooms even include riddles and the use of items, and new items in them.  Riddles and using items are not implemented, but the presence of new items is.  The remaining stuff is probably an hour’s work.  Then clean up, polish, security enhancements (the big issue with doing a webgame as opposed to a single player one!), and it’s all done.  That’s going to be the best part - seeing people stuff it full of new rooms and insanity.  This is a really simple project, but it’s going to be a fun one!

Well, I spent day 1 playing WoW, watching TV, and trying to come up with an idea with no success.  Now it’s day 2, and things are coming along really smoothly:

There’s more functionality done than you can see in the shot.  You can move around the (two-room at the moment) maze.  If there were items, you could use them, drop them, and combine them, but not pick them up yet.  So as you can see, there are doors leading off into space.  If you go that way, you actually stay in the room you’re in, but an edit section will pop up on the screen for the room you tried to enter.  I haven’t done that yet, but you’ll be able to make your own description and layout there.  Then that place is marked “pending” as it’s emailed to me for verification (to check for language and such).  Pending areas can’t be built in or entered, and there’s a “nifty” graphic indicating them.

This is going to be a sight to see!  I can see great potential for impassable situations, but that’s all theoretical right now.  If I didn’t include items and just had riddles, we’d be good, except for one thing - I just know shortly after startup, we’ll end up in a state where all possible paths are blocked off.  But I can always manually throw in doors if that happens.  I could just verify that there is always at least one door leading into the void, but that’d be a very heavy database churn to do.

Here are all the things I can remember of the million I considered for this ridiculous theme (Weird/Unexpected/Surprise):

- Plan a surprise party. The challenge is getting it all done and everyone hidden before the victim returns from being kept out

- Whack-a-mole variations. One of them a surprise party one (wife’s idea): Kids you have to keep whacking into place so they aren’t visible when the surprisee arrives, as they constantly fidget and want to get up.

- A mountain goat hopping around on a mountain, trying to scare birds. No, I don’t know why. I just thought controlling a mountain goat that hops around would be fun.

- A stealth game where your goal is to sneak up on people and give them presents or some other surprise. I realized after a moment that this is that one Burger King game.

- A web version of Scattergories. You’re given a letter and a topic (”Actors that start with A”). You can enter 5 things that fit, and you get points for each one you pick that nobody else did. See how that fits the theme? It’s quite clever. The real challenge here is incorporating peer review so that you can’t just enter “GHJDKHS” and win.

Anyway, I have settled on a web game, sort of similar to Andy Schatz’s conversation game. It’s a text adventure where you roam around a maze, and when you get to an empty room, you can add your own on. That will undoubtedly result in weird, unexpected surprises. Each room can contain a riddle to open one of its doors, the content of which is entirely up to the room builder.

Obviously, verifying the appropriateness of submissions will be a high priority.

inspired by PoV’s posting of this:

I created this pelly (admittedly useless as an award):

I guess people are posting tools lists… so I shall join in!

I used MSVC 6 (yes, 6!  Not 2006 or whatever), The Gimp, and SFXr.  Chatzilla for a whole lot of IRC action.  Probably Notepad for the readme. The library I used was PTK for graphics, input, and sound.  I made the font with Bitmap Font Builder.  I tried to use Musagi to make music, but failed.

And that’s that!

My lunch is actually the red cup (apple juice again, remember the empty fridge?), and the thai peanut plastic tray.  The rest is breakfast mess and wife’s salad-based lunch bits.  And assorted other junk that’s sitting around the kitchen island.

This is it! Pretty darn complete. Download here: shortfuse.zip (1.1mb)

I tried making music, and that was a bad idea, so I didn’t put it in. Love those SFXr sounds, though!

Note: If it runs way too slow, or just if you prefer, you can use the command line argument “opengl” to run it in openGL instead of directX.

Looks like 7.5 hours to go, and I have what could be done.  I definitely want to add a bunch more levels, and maybe music… I’m going to try out Musagi a bit!  But other than that, we’re done.  Fully functional menu and instructions screens, all the gameplay is in and whatnot.  High scores are a go.  Here’s the menu:

Eat ‘em and weep, boys.  That’s homemade belgian waffles.  And a rose!  Actually, pen that looks like a rose.  Hmm, the colors didn’t come out right in this picture… Dadgum lack of sunlight.  Maybe I should’ve tried turning on a light.

Things are really about done here.  Tomorrow is going to be all about making levels, the main menu, and polish.  I think it will be relatively fun, depending on how the levels are done.  You can now both win and lose, the former of which is shown here:

There are 15/14 barrels done because the barrel you carry is currently extra to the count (you can set it down any time, which is an important part of the strategy and a very important part of not exploding), which I think will change right this second.

I have extraneous ideas for other things levels could include, like rockets that shoot off elsewhere when lit, but I’ll probably not bother.  Just polish this up and ship!

A classic combination served by Ukrainian chefs - delicately braised french bread with butter sauce and fresh fruit compote, and puffed maize drizzled with Romany salt and a light cow’s milk cream blend. Paired with this we have Crystal Geyser grapeless unfermented chardonnay.

Lots of visual progress, a little bit of real progress.  All new pixely graphics all around, and a new HUD at the bottom.  The game automatically zooms the display in to cover the portion of the map that actually has stuff in it, so instead of scrolling, it just gives you a wider view on larger levels.  That’s good because you need ot know the whole layout to make your plans.  This zoom feature is currently very questionable, I seem to have to manually tweak exactly where it goes, depending on the level layout, so I’m missing something there, but it mainly worksish.

Currently, you can’t win or lose, but if you could be killed, boy would it be hard.  Thinking ahead is a must, and it all goes quite fast.  Each level has a percentage required to complete it, and you also need to stay alive, and the main gist is to get the best score you can, provided you blow up enough and avoid dying.

Now there are sounds courtesy of SFXr (just the fuse burning and explosions, at the moment, but that’s really all that can HAPPEN at the moment), and your fuse burns, and if it goes next to a barrel, the barrel blows up.  The barrel explosions chain to neighbors.  There are also a few assorted items visible on the screen - x2 and x4 score multipliers, and gold.  The gold and multipliers are intended to entice you into taking risks you shouldn’t.

Still all temp art, but I suspect the flame particles will stay like this.  They shoot up super vertically, looks like the barrels are practically launching into orbit.  Initially an accident, now a favorite feature.  I’m going to do art now, because I need to have the style down before I do the font stuff, which I feel is sort of next on the list.  The core gameplay is done, you just can’t lose.  And since this is a game of score, I need to get that score tracking up so I know what is happening there!  Art’s definitely the biggest portion of what’s left, so let’s get on it.