Annual Ludum Dare Independent Game Competition

pyman writes "The 4th Ludum Dare game competition is being held over the April 16-18 weekend. A forum discussion can be found here, and you may register your details here. Previous compos have spawned some interesting games, as well as provided a unique insight into the creative process of the programmer mind."

Re:What about mod competitions?

[Nomihn0]

Many people do use the Quake engine for indie gaming. One of the most popular games using the open source Quake engine is D-Day: http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~dday/site Many of these so called "source-port-mods" are left as free. This is for various reasons, including but not limited to the restrictive license under which the code is released. Graphics aren't everything, but they do attract people to the stores. This is what indie developers cannot reach with their resources - the graphical intensity of modern commercial games.

Speaking of sheep...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of sheep, has anyone played the Shepherd for the Amiga? That was a pretty original game.

http://amiga.emucamp.com/shepherd.htm

Re:Fun, but exams do interfere

[arbitrary nickname]

It's a solo competition - no teams allowed, and all art/audio must be made during the compo..

Most freely-available libraries are allowed, including D3D, OpenGL, Allegro, ODE (physics engine), and various audio libs.

I entered the last two, and it is very good fun. Entrants range from game programming newbies to people with games industry experience.... But IMHO it's more about seeing what you yourself can achieve in 48hrs (with little sleep and loads of caffiene) than simply trying to beat the competition. Well worth a go, if you can spare a weekend :)

this is what's wrong with developing

[Anonymous Coward]

the contest is to code somthing in 48 hours? That alone isn't very impressive and judging from the lack of creativity with sheepwars, niether are the submissions. Sheepwars is a bad rip off of 10+ year old games, the controls are counter intuitive to boot.

I don't want to replay (and in many cases repay) games I've been playing forever, I want to see somthing new, maybe I'm foolish but that seems like a far more interesting contest to me.