It’s been a while since I’ve last done a Ludum Dare. I felt the itch though, so let’s do it again.
Ludum Dare is an online event where games are made from scratch in a weekend. Check us out every April and October!
The theme this time: Keep it alive
I don’t know if I’ll make it all the way through or actually finish a game. But I’m going to give it a try!
Quick update this morning: I managed to get a ‘demo mode’ working. Now when you first start the game, the boxes will be whizzing around in the background giving you an idea of what you’re about to get yourself into!
A few hours later and we’ve already finished (or at least made good progress on) two of the goals that I was hoping for:
Here we are, 24 hours into the competition.
A lot of the last few hours has been spent doing a fair amount of restructing. Before, I had a single ’thread’1 for each of the tiles, along with another thread listening for user input. Unfortunately though, that lead to all sorts of race conditions. Specifically, whenever two tiles overlapped, it was often the case that one was doing the falling step (which copies from one internal buffer to another) while the other was in the swap step (which copies from tile to another). Then after the first finished, it would copy the second buffer over… overwriting anything that had been swapped.
Oops.
We’re getting there. 18 hours in and I have the first hints of what might actually be a game…
And here we are again. Ludum Dare. Taken directly from their about page…
Ludum Dare is a regular accelerated game development Event. Participants develop games from scratch in a weekend, based on a theme suggested by community.
More specifically, the goal is to make a game from scratch in 48 hours. You’re allowed to use publicly available frameworks and code libraries, but no art or other assets. Previously, I missed the original start time. So although I made my game in 48 hours, it didn’t qualify. This time around, I’m starting on time.
The voting period for Ludum Dare 26 has ended, which means that now we have some results! Before I post my own, take a moment to check out the overall leaders. Given that there were 2346 games submitted (1610 in the compo and 736 in the jam), there are bound to be some real gems in there.
So when I got home, I decided that I really didn’t want to miss another Ludum Dare. Granted, there was only about two hours left in the competition. I’m good, but I’m not that good. 😄
Also, I really wanted to make a web-based game, which meant either write another game in Java (suboptimal) or learn how to write a game in Flash or JavaScript. Nothing like a last minute decision to use an unfamiliar framework and write a game in less than 24 hours. 😄
In the end, I did it in six.
This past weekend was Ludum Dare 25, the newest in a competition that has been running for more than 10 years where the entire goal is to go from nothing to a complete video game in 48 hours or less. I didn’t manage to participate this time around, but I’m looking forward to trying it out next April (they run every four months in April, August, and December).
