Ludum Dare 32 is next weekend - Are you in? And what do people normally do when they participate?

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http://ludumdare.com

Ludum Dare 32 is closing in and I was wondering if those of you who have participated before have any tips for newcomers like me. I will join this year and it will be my first game jam. I’m expecting it to be exceptionally hard for me because I’m a perfectionist and the type of person who can spend 48 hours polishing a single sound effect, not make an entire game from scratch. :stuck_out_tongue:

Do you have WIP threads going on this forum or is that too much work to keep up with? I’m planning on trying at least. I won’t be doing a live stream as I have no clue how disciplined I will be. I may end up watching porn or gaming for the entire weekend and I wouldn’t want to live stream that. :smile:

Ludum Dare doesn’t seem to have a forum on their site and the rules page didn’t answer all my questions so I’ll ask some here and double check them someplace else if I get ambiguous answers. :slight_smile:

  • The rules state everything has to be made during the 48 hour compo. That probably excludes the use of the audio database I already have but I’m guessing it’s ok to record sound effects during that time, or extract them from video like youtube? The Sfxr-type sound effects only really work for a certain type of games in my opinion and sound is important to me.
  • What tools are there for generating sound? I know about Sfxr and I see Ludum Dare list a few other on their site, but do you have personal experience with any tools you like? Preferably free. No matter what game I end up making I want it to have sound effects and music.
  • I don’t have any experience with creating music. This relates to the above question, but what are good tools for creating or generating music from scratch?
  • Is the theme revealed just as compo starts or sooner?

My plan is to make a huge lasagna before the compo ensuring I’ll be set for food for the entire weekend with only the occasional toilet break removing me from the computer. But if I don’t drink much I can keep those to a minimum and I guess some kind of hose or bucket system could work…

Apart from that I have no clue. I could wuss out and attempt some small 2-dayish games before the compo starts, but that would be like checking the temperature of the water with your toe before jumping in and I plan on jumping in. :slight_smile: I do however want to experiment some with sound beforehand. My normal approach to sound is to record/extract sound effects and process them in Adobe Audition which I expect may be too cumbersome in such a short timespan And music I haven’t really touched before.

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I’m going for my 10h LD. Here are my games built on past editions (in the first 2 I failed to finish in time).

First tip is to lower expectations :slight_smile:
That is because many newcomers fail at first attempt. You will learn that is counter-productive to try to work on every possible minute. Take your brakes, have decent meals and sleep enough to keep your mind fresh.

Take some time before competition to look on past editions and check out what kind of games humans can build in 48/72 hours. This will help you to fix a target and keep projects in possible realm. You could also take a look on winners entries and check what gives a good score but your main objective should be to finish a game, one that you liked to build and have fun to play.

Theme is announced at compo start (before this, in next week, we will have 4 voting sessions and then one last with winners theme). You may come to like the chosen theme or not (more often “no” than “yes”). Read the theme with care and try to view it from different angles. Some great ludumdare entries managed to extract a creative usage of the given theme.

Take note of every idea that comes to your mind. Try to keep the balance between a good project and a possible project in given time - and this will be a real challenge. Narrow choices with care and now you will have your game idea.

Spend next 2 hours or so to split a list of tasks from your idea. The best way that works for me is tree structure like for example:

Player
  3D model
    Model
    Textures
  Input
Enemy
  3D model
    Model
    Texture
  AI

This will be your road map, use it to track your progress. Try to map each task as 1 hour of work so you can keep a project possible by counting lines < total hours of work in one weekend. Plan things to have at Saturday night a full playable game (including bug fixes). Leave Sunday for graphics, models, sounds and music.

We have a strong advantage that is Unity3d. Abuse the component pattern to reuse behaviors between game entities. Keep your code clean but don’t lose too much time polishing it. If it works, ok.

Publish your game many times, make a post or 2 about the progress in ludum dare page. This will work as a break.

Your main object should be to finish a game, no matter what. Use the road map to check your progress and be prepared to make cuts if needed.

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@L-Tyrosine Got it, keep it simple. I’m thinking World of Warcraft 2. I’ll wrangle the theme to fit my idea.

On a more serious note, have you ever participated in the 48-hour compo? Seems like all your listed entries are from the 72-hour jam. I’m planning to do the 48-hour compo. And I’m planning to go crazy. You get more memories if you do things crazy. :stuck_out_tongue: “You remember that weekend I didn’t sleep and programmed for 48 hours straight?” is much cooler than “Ohh, you mean that weekend were I programmed slightly more than normal? Not sure if I remember that”. :smile:

I will finish no matter what. Can’t promise I’ll deliver quality though. :stuck_out_tongue:

I will play some old entries and look at the source code for old 48-hour Unity entries to see what people are able to make in 48-hours. Those are good tips.

Why do you suggest I publish my game many times as well as post about it on the ludum dare page? Surely I can take a break in other ways. :slight_smile: I do plan on keeping a WIP thread on the Unity forums, but I doubt I’ll publish my game or post about it on the Ludum Dare page before the deadline, unless you have good reasons for it. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the reply. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun no matter how it turns out.

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Greate, that’s the whole point in my opinion.

I prefer to enter in jam to be able to use sounds from libraries. And to have one more day to polish things does not hurt either.

More than once I had problems uploading games and make it work in fullscreen, etc. About posting in ludum dare, I like to do it in order to avoid suspicious about pre made games and so on but it’s not required as a rule. Also to receive some feedback on my work.

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8 days! Woo!
Going to try to participate. Previous one I had to skip. Might end up joining a team this year.

As an advice for a first timer:

  • Keep the design as simple as you can.
  • You’re very likely to still end up missing features you imagined so It’s also important to priorize
  • Art is easy to get carried away with. I personally do those towards the end because its often easiest to simplify (cut corners :))
  • Have a your regular sleep rythm. At least for me its really difficult to try to think creatively if I’m extremely tired.

Have fun! It’s ok if you don’t finish your game or if the design didn’t turn out as you expected.
But it feels fantastic to have your game uploaded.

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Seeing as sound was my biggest worry here’s what I’ve found so far. Of all the tools I’ve tried so far Bfxr for sound effects and Autotracker for music stand out as the best.

Bfxr (http://www.bfxr.net)

  • A simple tool for generating sound effects with presets for different types of sound effects and a lot of options for manual tweaking. Has a nice GUI. Apparently it’s a newer version of Sfxr. All the sound effects it generates sound fairly similar and perhaps lends itself best to retro / pixel art games, but that’s ok. It’s very likely I’ll end up making such a game.

Autotracker-c (ld24/autotracker.py at master · wibblymat/ld24 · GitHub)

  • A tool for generating music loops with apparently no ways of customizing the output. All you can do is run it again and again until you get what you want. The music loops do sound pretty good though. It generates .it-files which I have no idea what is, but Unity apparently natively imports them. :stuck_out_tongue: You can however use VLC or something else to convert them to a normal audio format. Here’s instructions on how to install Python and use it: ludumdare.com/compo data is offline | Ludum Dare

Autotracker-Bu (it2everything/atrk-bu.py at master · iamgreaser/it2everything · GitHub)

I think I’ll end up using these and then use Adobe Audition to tweak the final output.

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I’ve done the 48 hour compo twice, I finished both times.

My last entry was Death Police 3000 not going to win any awards but it felt really good to finish it!

Also both times I did not stay up all night! Also I did not work non-stop during the day. I’m 44 and have a wife and child. I worked about 15 hours total over the two day period - which is A LOT for me ; but I still made a game in that time so huge accomplishment.

They say you can announce if you are using something from your ‘library’ before hand; if your an audio designer you could announce that.

Honestly I just do everything by scratch; it is to me what the challenge is supposed to be.

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I am also in for the first time, compo. Really looking forward to it. Checking out the sound tools TwiiK posted. Thanks for that!

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I’ve played some with those audio tools and you can create some pretty cool sound effects with some effects and manipulation. But I just found this:
http://jfxr.frozenfractal.com/
https://github.com/ttencate/jfxr

Jfxr is apparently the third iteration of Sfxr. :stuck_out_tongue: It seems to produce higher quality sounds than both Sfxr and Bfxr and it runs in your browser.

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Also this looks nice,

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Cool. I also installed the FL Studio demo to check it out, but I doubt I’m going to bother learning music production before the jam starts. :stuck_out_tongue: I feel like I would want to create the music for some of my games myself at one point in time though and there seems to be a lot of tutorials for FL Studio.

I just love sci-fi and I love music like this:

But it seems so rare nowadays so it would be cool to know how to make something similar myself.

FL Studio certainly comes with enough shortcuts. :stuck_out_tongue:

112×624 50.6 KB

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Some nice themes so far,
http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/04/11/ludum-dare-32-theme-voting-begins/

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If you want to maximize your chance of success then pay close attention to rule 3: you’re allowed to prepare a codebase beforehand.

If you prepare the right code, this can save you many many hours of work, and allow you to get a menu, controls, etc, running in no time.

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Whoa, I think that’s new. Previously, any code you started with had to be available for others to use as well. So if you created a prep project, you had to share that project with everyone, if they wanted to use it.

I like this change. I know many people already have projects with the basics ready (like menus, as you said) but don’t really want to share that stage of the project specifically. It’s nice to see you can have that ready to go now.

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Well, you still have to publish your source code, so I’m not sure if anything has changed. Perhaps just the wording?

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Kind of makes me think maybe Unity should do these game jams focused on scripting/API examples and then release the source as well. They’d get some cool sample projects to help people out

As far as the LD goes I have thought about doing one from time to time and have not yet. It does sound like fun just not sure what I could produce in 8 to 10 hours. Guess finding out would be part of the fun though. I have not done a super short project in quite a long time.

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How do you like the themes so far? Round 2 had many good ones.
In-fact I’ve often felt that these voting rounds are very lucrative for future game ideas in general. Got lot’s of fresh new ideas just by reading them through (better write them down :)).

Yeah, it seems like they changed it.
The old one said: “Base code and personal code libraries are allowed, but should be declared and shared with the community prior to beginning your entry. To do this, make a blog post” (old rules)

I remember re-writing things I had already made on other projects in previous jams. It did feel kind of pointless at the time. And it was waste of an hour or two. However the new rule kind of says that its ok to take a game you’ve made and re-skin it to look something else. But it’s not like anyone could check if someone used older code anyway. I guess it doesn’t really matter.
And someone doing that would miss the whole point of the event.

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For audio I started with musagi it’s fairly simple and a lot of fun to mess with. More recently I have been getting into caustic 3. Its built for mobile and works great on a tablet with a stylus but if you scroll down the page there are also desktop builds.

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You have to publish your source code, but you don’t have to actually let anyone use it. They can look at it to verify you didn’t cheat, basically.

Previously, you weren’t allowed an unfair advantage by stockpiling code privately and using that to jumpstart a game.

I think with the recent boom of engines and sample code that that’s gotta rather pointless, though, so they’re letting people work how they want to.

That’s my opinion, anyhow. I like the change, as it doesn’t really change anything for other people… Nobody was going to use your private jumpstart code anyhow.

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I like the change also; as it lets you focus on the GAME and not say a project setup like menus or a script for GUI buttons or such.

It does raise in to question how far one could stretch this template idea to the point where it starts actually implementing game play.

Hopefully they actually review the category winners for such things before declaring winners though?