…So it’s time to clean the cobwebs off the old OpenGL+SDL base code, so I’m not wasting valuable time setting up lib/include paths, and fighting with MSVC’s desire to inflict Unicode pain on anything you try to build…

Here’s what I’m planning to use, should be acceptable under the ‘custom libraries’ rule (except for the font texture, which will have to be replaced during the 48hrs)

http://www.bluescrn.net/LD48/LD48Base.zip

Contains OpenGL+SDL init code (now featuring resolution switching), Texture loading, simple 2D blitting, a basic font renderer, and some pretty incomplete/untested vector maths code. Linked with FMOD and Chipmunk in case I get a chance to put some audio in, or want to use physics…  Somebody should have added ‘Chipmunk’ as a theme!

Thanks everyone for coming out and making Ludum Dare 10 a great success. A fitting close the fifth year of of the compo.

If you haven’t seen it yet, the results can be found here. Final entries can be found here.

Now, as much as we’d love everyone to idle with us in #ludumdare until April, we understand this isn’t practical for everyone. So, in addition, we have a mailing list at gamecompo.com.

To subscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-subscribe@sykhronics.com

To unsubscribe, e-mail: gamecompo-unsubscribe@sykhronics.com

And when in doubt, hit up ludumdare.com.

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Now, unlike prior years, we’ve tried to make it clear that the next compo will be in April. Anyone that’s stayed up with our shenanigans will know April is our magic month, the anniversary of the first Ludum Dare compo (the original 24 hour compo in 2002). If there’s one tradition we’ve kept over the years, it’s been holding a compo in April. Be it organized a month in advance, or pulled together last minute.

So the first order of business is to pick a weekend in April to hold the compo. I’m not looking for suggestions per se, but reasons to include or exclude a specific day. Our options include:

• April 4th-6th Weekend
• April 11th-13th Weekend
• April 18th-20th Weekend
• April 25th-27th Weekend

Ideally, we like to plan around such things as Game Industry events (GDC, E3, Game Connection, etc), Exam season (we love you students), national holidays, or any such event that either hinders or benefits the majorities chance to participate.

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And in final, if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback for us, please do share them. Ludum Dare is and has always been about the community. Without you all, we’d just be an IRC channel.

Thanks again everyone, and have a great 2008.

Tomorrow is the big day people. Yee haw.

For the LD4 in 2004, we did a series of preparation compos. They were much shorter as a real LD, and as theme had the remake of an agreed upon classic game. One of them was Robotron (the others were Sapce Invaders, Frogger and Spy Hunter). In the Robotron one you had 4.8 hours for the game. My entry turned out to be a much better game than the one I actually wrote with 10 times as much time for the real LD. Oh well.

The game is rather simple. One directional input (cursor keys) controls the movement of the pink blob, another one (ASDW) controls the gun. Just like in the original.

There’s 30 partially random levels, and quite a lot of different enemies with unique behaviors.

Some of them, like the crab and the spider, were added in a post-compo version. Those are really hard (but fun, this is one of the few of my games I play through occasionally), as is the final boss. The crabs circle you, and the spider tries to aim ahead when shooting - back then I was still good at calculus, apparently The final boss doesn’t shoot you directly, but takes a lot of hits and spawns random enemies.

I don’t know what the theme for this Non-Compo was (I think there wasn’t one), but I made a yahtzee clone. Much more than a clone, though, it is far more complicated than Yahtzee, allowing you to score a bunch of different ways.

As you can see, there are 2 colors of normal ducks, and a King Duck. So you can score in the Same column if your dice involved are the same color, the Diff column if any different ones are involved, and in the King column if the King is involved. The High column is one you can use if you ever get another column twice, but your second time is a better score than the first. It makes some sense when you play it. And to stop a die from being thrown on subsequent rolls, you put the ducks to sleep (as you can see in the picture).

This was my first actual 3D game! Well, my most finished 3D game (even though it’s not finished). Those dice are pure 3D, hand coded from scratch. Take that! Their rolling is real, not just a visual representation of a random number generator - they get a random spin on all axes when thrown, and wherever they stop when they land is what they are on. The code to interpret their facing into a number was the tricky part.

Too bad for you, you can’t play it - there is no downloadable version at this time.

It was a dull Saturday afternoon and I needed to make a game. I proposed the idea in #ludumdare and got DrPetter and trick on board with the idea. In “4 hours” we whipped together a game about an elephant that jumps on a rolled up squirrel catching falling giraffes while dodging spears thrown by the natives. It’s more fun than a barrel of pigeons!

You can get the game here. Be sure to check out the forums, there are some pretty sharp strategies people have worked out to get ridiculously high scores

Proof I have real trouble coming up with good game names.

This game was a quick one. A week before a LD we had a warmup, put in 12 hours during the weekend. The theme was vectors and a subtheme of chains.

I was quite pleased with how this worked out in a lot of ways. The rendering was with a little 2d OpenGL style setup where I implemented pushmatrix, popmatrix, scale,rotate,multmatrix,LoadIdentiy, setcolor and line. All of the glowy effects were done by a two layer drawing system, A blur buffer of high saturation drawing and a overlay of bright low saturation. The persistance came from averaging neighbouring pixels in the blur buffer and subtracting a bit. I did that part with a wee MMX routine.

Most of all, the thing that pleased me about this game is how fun it is. It’s a bit hard but I think there’s potential for a great full game in this idea. I build a linux version and had it running on my arcade cabinet for ages, that was great fun.

I guess the only sad part about this on is that if I had have done this for a genuine LD48 I would have used the extra time to make something even better.

The final game isn’t entirely my own work though. I slapped a mod file onto the game for music. Livens it up quite a bit.

Download the game