The Open Bundle

There are so many game bundles on the internet (thank you, Humble Bundle, for making this a trend) that The Open Bundle is easy to overlook. Its name is simple but not descriptive, and to be honest it doesn’t actually include any games. Instead, it has art, music, and code for making games. What really makes it special, though, is that it’s a grand experiment in leveraging crowdfunding to make releasing things under Creative Commons licensing viable for artists.

What Ludum Dare has Done for Me

I originally posted this on April 9, 2013 on my blog on Gamasutra. Cross-posting here, as I should have done before.

I first learned of Ludum Dare last August. I wasn’t in time to participate, but I was able to play a wide variety of interesting games. That got me fired up — I definitely wanted to participate in December’s 48-hour compo (hereafter LD48). I hadn’t programmed in years, really, but I was signed up for an Intro to Computer Science MOOC and was pretty sure I would be capable of pumping out something come December.

Participating in Ludum Dare #25

When December and its LD48 came around, I was not at all confident in my abilities. I had successfully brushed up on basic computer science concepts and learned some new things, but the MOOC had been taught in Python instead of the C/C++ I originally learned in. I could do some things with Python, like perform computations and output things to IDLE, but I had no clue how to do things like play sound and draw graphics. To make things worse, I live in Japan, which meant that the event would be starting at noon on Saturday for me. In order to be functional for work on Monday, I needed to get to bed around midnight on Sunday, leaving me with only 36 hours to make my game. In short, my limitations were many.

Trifecta: Poke for OSX, Itch.io, and the Ender’s Game Trailer

Item one: there is now a Mac OSX build for Poke, the game I mentioned in my last post.

It can be downloaded from item two, which is my profile up at itch.io. Itch.io is a web site made by another Ludum Dare person. It’s designed to just be a place where indie game developers can host their game files. The site supports pay what you want models, with the minimum price being set by the developer and $0.00 being a viable minimum price. It’s a neat site.

Then there is item three, the first trailer for the Ender’s Game movie adaptation.

The book and I have a history. When I was 9, Ender’s Game became the first book so engrossing that I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finish reading. To this day, it and its inseparable sequel Speaker for the Dead are, together, my favorite book. I’ve waited many, many years for this movie adaptation to come to fruition.

If I love this book so much, you might ask, why would I look forward to the adaptation? Aren’t they usually bad?

Ludum Dare

One of the things in my mess of being busy in the past couple of months was Ludum Dare, a game jam which is held every four months.

A game jam is a challenge in which game developers must create a video game from scratch — concept, design, coding, everything — within a certain time limit and possibly with other restrictions.

So here are more details about Ludum Dare. In the month leading up to the game jam, interested participants may submit ideas for themes, which are voted on by the community up until the last minute before the jam starts. Participants then have 48 hours to make a video game, alone, that matches the theme. There are then three weeks of voting by the people who made the games, and at the end the games are ranked. Your prize is that you get a game and hopefully learn something.

The most recent Ludum Dare was held the weekend of December 14th and the theme was You Are the Villain.

I participated even though I wasn’t entirely ready, but it was fantastic. And I now have a game. And I learned much. And I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the game from other participating developers, some amateur and some professional. I’m very happy with the experience.

If you’re interested in trying the game out, here are links to the files:

• Windows (64-bit only, sorry)
• Mac OS X
• Python source code (only uses basic libraries, should run on any Python 2.7 installation)

Here are links to the blog posts I put up on the Ludum Dare web site before, during, and after the event:

• Butterflies in my Coding Stomach
• Considerations in Preparation
• Creeping Forward
• Tools Declaration
• Workspace in Progress
• Final Workspace Setup + Starting Food
• Oh-ho-ho-oh God, I’m So Screwed! (Idea Too Ambitious?! Maybe So!)
• Hmm. Well, Progress Has Been Made
• Let it Snow >:D
• Finish Line, HO!
• Done.
• Five Minutes of Screeching
• Decommissioner Postmortem (48 Hour Compo)

And here’s a link to my official entry page.