Ludum Dare 45 starts on Friday

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Corona is the perfect game engine for game jams, in particular now that we support HTML5 builds making it much easier to submit your project. 

The most popular game jam starts tomorrow, Friday, Oct 4 at 6pm EDT. Theme voting is going on now, so you even have a chance to influence what everyone jams on.  

Go to https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/theme to vote on your theme or https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/ to learn more.

Team up! Go Solo! Whatever rocks your world but let’s show the world what type of game chops you have and how great Corona is to jam with!

Rob

#2

Thanks for the heads up, Rob.

This sounds like the perfect excuse to create some minigame.

#3

I’ve got the weekend clear, and I’ve got the shed clear to work in for zero distractions. I hope it goes better than the last one, the theme really stumped me and I just ended up with a so-so Bomb Jack clone.

I’ll almost certainly be using Unity unless the theme only suits a 2D game, as I find it much easier to create nice-looking worlds quickly in 3D. I can’t draw to save my life and I hate programmer art! :smiley:

https://ldjam.com/users/madbeagle/games

#4

It’s started!

Regrettably I need to give a lecture today, but once that’s done, I’ll be starting my weekend with Ludum Dare 45.

I already have the perfect, if not perfectly stupid idea in mind! :smiley:

#5

So, I somehow managed to push through.

Not having learned of this event sooner, I completely failed to schedule for it and I completely ran out of time. Well, I just had to cut out a series of mini games, effects, and what not.

Oh, and the most fun was with how I learned that Lua file system doesn’t work with HTML/Win32 builds. I built my entire game to load files from there and learning that it doesn’t work at 10min to deadline wasn’t fun.

Here’s the game (and currently very ill looking source code) for my Ludum Dare 45 submission:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/get-a-job-baby

It was supposed to be a compo submission, but yeah, ran out of time and needed that extra day to even finish this well.

Did anyone else take part?

#6

Had a complete nightmare, to be honest. The theme was so disappointing - ‘Start With Nothing’ covers just about every game ever made. If I just wanted to make any random game, I would - I like the theme to be restricting and inspiring in equal measure. 

I had an idea on Saturday that I worked on til lunch and decided was bloody awful. Gave up for the rest of the day, but it was still nagging at me and the next morning I had another ‘still-terrible-but-not-quite-as-terrible’ idea. With the weekend fenced off anyway I ploughed on and finished it, but it’s probably my worst entry.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/angry-words

Just to compound matters the WebGL build won’t work, despite it being a pure Unity UI game. Overall, just frustrated that once again the worst theme in the final round won. That’s democracy for you…

#7

I agree with you. I thought the theme was too broad. Seems that you took your criticism to the next stage though! :smiley:

I’ll be playing and reviewing your game in a moment.

For LD46, I’ve already marked it down on my calendar so that I can actually work properly during that time and I’ll do a few html projects in the meanwhile so that I won’t get caught by surprise again. Handling 2 client projects, going out with friends and giving a morning lecture aren’t the best uses of your time during a game jam. Oh, and you can’t imagine the feeling of dread when you realise that your submission doesn’t work, and you have no idea why, and you’ve got 10min left to find out. :smiley: I had to make some quick fixes that made me feel sad for my code. :stuck_out_tongue:

#8

Thanks, I’ll give yours a play later :slight_smile:

Haha yeah, the name is probably the best thing about it:

  1. I was angry, both at the theme and myself for being so uncreative

  2. The game resembles a crossword and another word for cross is angry

  3. Angry Words sounds like Angry Birds.

Probably the only positive thing to come out of the whole experience was I found a really great free API for leaderboards in Unity.

#9

Just figured out the massive bug that almost derailed my entire submission.

I was trying to be smart about loading my minigames, which are all found in specific folder(s). I was loading them by using lfs, which worked perfectly on simulator because the .lua files were there, however, Corona does something with the .lua files and they can no longer be found after the build process, so my game could no longer find them and therefore it couldn’t find any game modes which crashed the game.

Learning new things can be stressful. Had I not tried to be too clever, I wouldn’t have faced this issue. Now I’ll just load the files from a table (that already exists anyway) and things will be smooth once more. :stuck_out_tongue:

#10

@nick_sherman Level 2 “The Theme is Terrible”  – haha!

@Xedur - I like the odd premise of the baby’s birth and then the baby finding and working from different bosses - rapidly clicking on all those shapes felt like work!  : )

Good job to you both.  Sorry I didn’t join you this time.