Grimrock

Ludum Dare is a popular game development competition where you must develop a game alone in one weekend (48h) following a given theme and it is held once in four months or so. The theme this time around was "Tiny World". I took part in it again (my second time, and consequently the second game I've ever programmed). It was pretty intense but I managed to make a complete game with 16 levels, graphics, audio, music and some fun(?) gameplay.

Anyways, I'm tired so I won't blab too much now. Check out my game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-da ... w&uid=5503. The game is called Snow Globe Kerfuffle and it's a shoot-em-up game that takes place in a snow globe: you have to protect the brittle glass of the snow globe from getting destroyed by some unfriendly catapults. To get to the next level, you have to destroy all the catapults. Anyways, go try it out. It's Flash and you can play it on your browser so you shouldn't have to jump through any extra hoops to get going.

Wow you did that in one weekend?! Awesome!

The music is particularly good!

Daniel.

FUCK

EDIT: spoiler-tagged. -- Sol__HSA

Haha, man, Antti, y u so mean?

Anyway Antti, give us some details! Do you participate for fun, or practice? What was this competition's origin? Will you create a Toorum platformer game for the next one?

Jack Dandy wrote:Anyway Antti, give us some details! Do you participate for fun, or practice? What was this competition's origin? Will you create a Toorum platformer game for the next one?

Well, at least for me fun == practice.

The competition is a great motivator and, if the theme permits, makes you do something you might never have thought of otherwise. You have to figure out a lot of creative solutions to get what you need in the limited time you have and overcoming the obstacles always feels great. On Saturday I came very close on giving up a few times when I got stuck with my programming but luckily there was nothing a few kludges couldn't fix.

I don't know exactly how Ludum Dare got started but this competition was its tenth anniversary already. It's been growing steadily in popularity. When I first entered in August last year there were 599 entries (which was considered a HUGE attendance at the time) and this time there are over 1100 games and counting submitted to the competition. Partly, but not entirely, thanks to the "mainstream" visibility of Notch's participation in the last few competitions. There are a LOT of game makers out there.

=)

More graphs!
EDIT: updated now that the jam is over and surprised me with the number of entries.

Awesome graphs, thanks Sol_HSA!

Oh yeah, I made a timelapse video of the development process of the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGDE1vN9VZ0

For a split second, I saw Zoidberg.