This weekend 20/08/11 or maybe 19th depending on your time zone, is the Ludum Dare game challenge thing. It happens every 4 months, April, August, and December. Those registered at http://www.ludumdare.com can submit a game to the competition. The rules are that you have to write the code and create the assets yourself, just one of you, and only in the 48 hours of the competition. You can use libraries you’ve created so long as you submit them before the competition. which is too late if you’re reading this now. This is my first time entering the comp, i’ll be using them actionscript skills i picked up at uni for my game, just installing flash develop again now, i believe you can use a number of languages, but i’m led to believe that as the people who submit games are the only ones who can judge and rate them, that the best idea is to make it web based as more people can try the game out that way, the next popular is windows, but its also best to avoid installers, so maybe xna could be done, as it only needs the xna redistributable installed and the actual game can run without installing if you submit the debug folder.
The theme of this round of Ludum Dare is escape. Now with my wicked drawing skills, i’m thinking its going to be a rather rectangular car escaping a bigger rectangular something, you speed up you slow down jumping obstacles, while staying ahead of what’s chasing you. Obviously i would want to do something cool like a tornado, but i can’t draw that.
Notch aka Markus Persson from Mojang is also entering, and he is livestreaming his desktop over at http://www.livestream.com/mojang. THough at the time of writing he’s left a little note saying he’ll start in a couple of hours.
Its also worth noting that there is also a 72 hour team Ludum Dare competition too, though i believe this is relatively new.
The competition has no monetary prize, its just the fun and spirit of the community. People from all walks of programming join in, hobbyists, students, professional game designers, sometimes life gets in the way of succeeding, but its sure is worth a crack at it. 1 day 14 hours 6 minutes remaining, here goes…..