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Ludum Dare is a periodically held competition to make a game in 48 hours. For this weekend’s Ludum Dare (theme: “Alone”), I waited until the last minute, started a game Sunday morning, and over about seven hours banged out the first and only 3D game I have ever made. It’s called My Own Footsteps and sound is recommended.

• Mac version
• Windows version
• Linux version (requires SDL and Freetype)
• Source code

Thanks to amon26, Mark and Stephen for playtesting.

You can find the Ludum Dare competition entry page for the game here.

Found out yesterday that (1) a group of indie games folk are crashing the IGF with a “pirate cart” of over a hundred indie games, and (2) Klik of the Month Club is doing a competition today with the theme “violate Atari’s intellectual property”. Of course I had to do something, so I made this little 2-player game. I started it last night at about 10:30, and finished it this afternoon at about 2:30. So that would be about 16 hours, some of it spent sleeping.

It’s like pong, but with more pong.

Download

• pongpongpongpongpongpongpongpong (Mac version)
• pongpongpongpongpongpongpongpong (Windows version)
• pongpongpongpongpongpongpongpong (Linux version, supplied by Ranjeet Jhutti)
• Source code

Playing with sound is recommended.

Here is a video game I made in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare competition. It is called You Don’t Fit.

Download

• Mac version
• Windows version
• Linux version (requires SDL and Freetype)
• Source code

You can find the Ludum Dare competition entry page for the game here.

Thanks to everyone who playtested, especially Kevin, Alice, and Yakul.

By the way: This game supports user-created levels using Inkscape. Check the comments below for instructions on how to do this.

This is a little music toy I made for PCs and mobile phones.

Download (version 1.0.1)

• Mac version
• Windows version
• Linux version (requires SDL and Freetype)
• iPhone version (or search app store for “Drumcircle RH”)
• Android version (requires Android 2.3)
• Source code

What is it?

Drumcircle is a radial drum machine: you place tiles corresponding to notes or drum samples, and they play as the clock hand sweeps past them. An internet-play mode lets you collaborate on drum patterns online with other users of the program. I’m really happy with how this turned out– making drum patterns with the tiles just feels really natural and intuitive, especially on the tablet versions.

Drumcircle includes icon art by Mike LeMieux and 27 different sample voices out of the box.

Sample packs

The PC version of Drumcircle lets you add your own samples. Download this thing for more information.

__________________________
Update 6/28

Someone made this youtube video of themselves using Drumcircle and it is awesome.

I have just released the source code to my games, because why not.

The source code for Jumpman and iJumpman can be found here.

The source code for The Snap can be found here.

The code, art and music is available under the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported” license, which means it is free to use for noncommercial use as long as you credit the original creators. You can find more information about this at the Bitbucket pages. (If you find this license too restrictive, I suggest checking out Jumpcore instead.) Both games were created in C++.

Thanks to everyone who played these games, and if anyone finds the source useful, I’d be curious to hear about it!

Short version: Here’s an MIT-licensed open source C++ game framework that lets you write your game once and immediately have it run on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, WebOS and Android 2.3. It packages together all the basic libraries you need to get started with writing a game, and makes mobile porting easy by abstracting away the incompatibilities between OpenGL, OpenGL ES 1.0, and OpenGL ES 2.0.

The project is hosted on Bitbucket, so you can download the source yourself by doing one of the following:

• hg clone https://bitbucket.org/runhello/jumpcore
• svn co https://bitbucket.org/runhello/jumpcore/trunk
• Visit the Bitbucket page and click “get source” in the upper right corner.

Here’s a little physics demo that comes with Jumpcore, shown running on PC, iPhone, and Android:

Long version: When I first started writing C++ games a few years ago, I quickly discovered that there was a lot of stuff that you really need in order to write a game but which SDL+OpenGL don’t provide out of the box– things like text display, or build scripts for a crossplatform binary. So once I’d actually finished my game, I decided to package up the basic skeleton of my game into the thing I wished had existed when I started coding games– a package to serve as a bridge between “there exist cross-platform game libraries in the world” and “I can actually sit down and create a game in C++”. Once I’d put this package together, I found it useful myself for rapidly prototyping new game ideas. I released this a year or so ago as “Jumpcore”, with support for Mac, Windows and Linux; what I can announce today is a new version that adds support for mobile platforms (iPhone and Android). I’ve also set up a project on BitBucket; what I would like is if this could grow into something like a free and open-source version of Airplay SDK, or a stripped-down Unity.

Jumpcore is minimal; it tries to set things up for you and then get out of the way, allowing you to develop your own “engine” as you see fit. Most of the functionality is provided by a selection of open source libraries I’ve bundled in. Jumpcore comes with:

– SDL and GLee for event and window handling (on desktop platforms)
– Chipmunk version 5.3.4 (2D physics engine)
– A modified FTGL ES (freetype text display library) with OpenGL ES 2.0 support
– TinyXML
– LodePNG, and a simple texture loader based on LodePNG
– A generator and loader for texture atlases based on a script by Retro Affect
– Pthreads for win32

Included code unique to Jumpcore includes:

– A simple GUI interface library (based on Chipmunk spatial hashes)
– Event wrappers unifying SDL mouse events with iPhone and Android touch events
– Wrappers for getting the paths of “internal” files
– A set of OpenGL wrappers that abstract away the differences between OpenGL, OpenGL ES 1.0, and OpenGL ES 2.0, meaning you can write your OpenGL code on mobile platforms the same way you write it on desktop platforms.

Getting started

Developing with Jumpcore basically just means implementing a few simple callbacks. You can find quick instructions and links documenting all the functions in the included libraries at the Getting Started page on the BitBucket wiki.

Compiling

Jumpcore uses GCC on all platforms, however you will need a different version of GCC (XCode, mingw, etc) to compile each of the different targets. You can compile all five targets on one machine as long as that one machine is a Macintosh (Linux and Windows users may need to find a mac before they can compile for Mac and iPhone). You can find detailed build instructions at the How to Build page on the BitBucket wiki.

Caveats and future development

Jumpcore is a work in progress; as I mentioned this is the base I use for starting new projects, so I should be improving it as my main projects continue. For a list of known gotchas and things yet to be done, please see the TODO page, again on the BitBucket wiki. Note: Some of the limitations in this initial release of Jumpcore 2 are quite serious, particularly on the Android version, so you should probably read this page.

If you have problems compiling this or getting it to work, please do let me know. Thanks!

A first person shooter

Download (1.0, r219)

• Mac version
• Windows version
• Linux version (requires SDL and Freetype)
• Source code

How to Play

The Snap is a two-player deathmatch shooter with time travel. Time in the Snap arena takes place in a loop. 20 seconds or so after the start of each game, the events of the game will begin to repeat themselves. You can also jump back in time by about five seconds or so by performing a Snap.

If you interact with the past, you will change the present. If you shoot someone in the past, you will damage them in the present. If you block a bullet in the past, thus preventing someone from getting hit by that bullet, damage in the present will be undone.

For best results, I suggest using a gamepad with analog thumbsticks (you can fit both players on one gamepad if you try!); also, since the game uses stereo sound with the sounds “heard” by one player going to each ear, I suggest plugging in a pair of earbuds and giving each player one earbud.

10 levels are included, and you can make your own; if anyone tries out the custom levels feature, please do post below and let me know.

Future development?

This a prototype of sorts, created in 40 days for the Tigsource Versus competition. I’d be interested in making a more complex game with more complex environments and online play (maybe a “real” first person shooter or a 2D platformer with free-aiming guns) using the time engine someday. Is there interest in this?

CLICK HERE TO JUMP TO THE PRETTY COLOR-CODED FULL RESULTS

This explanation will look a lot like that of previous years, but:

Every year since 2004 I’ve been hosting this Game of the Year poll for the users of some forums I read. There are a lot of GOTY polls out there, but this one I think is kind of special. Most polls, you’re given a list of four or five options and you’re asked to pick the one you liked best. This poll, people are given a list of a couple of hundred options, consisting of every new game released in the previous year– and asked to rate their top ten or twenty.

This does a few interesting things. First off, we get to see all the information about what people’s second, third etc choices are. Second off, because the second, third etc choices count, people are more likely to vote for the game they want to win, rather than the game they think is likely to win– they’re less likely to engage in “strategic voting”. Finally, because we have all this information, we’re actually able to provide somewhat reasonable rankings for something like the top hundred or so games of last year.

The full results– showing the exact number of voters who ranked each game first, second, third place etc– can be found here. In the meantime, the final results were:

1. Mass Effect 2 (8125) *** GAME OF THE YEAR ***
2. Red Dead Redemption (4887)
3. Starcraft 2 (3930)
4. Minecraft (3678)
5. Fallout: New Vegas (3513)
6. Super Meat Boy (3205)
7. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (3006)
8. Halo Reach (2713)
9. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2505)
10. Civilization V (2444)
11. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (2378)
12. Bayonetta (2257)
13. Darksiders (1967)
14. Just Cause 2 (1865)
15. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (1855)
16. Angry Birds (1740)
17. Alpha Protocol (1677)
18. Call of Duty: Black Ops (1604)
19. Heavy Rain (1573)
20. VVVVVV (1523)

The numbers in parentheses are the final scores each game got under the poll’s ranking system. Thanks if you voted, and some more elaborate analysis of the results (plus an explanation of the scores) can be found below.

NOTEWORTHY WINNERS

• GOTY 2010:
  

  #1, Mass Effect 2

• Top-ranked PC Exclusive:
  

  #3, Starcraft 2

• Top-ranked Wii Exclusive:
  

  #7, Super Mario Galaxy 2

• Top-ranked 360 Exclusive:
  

  #8, Halo Reach

• Top-ranked iPhone/Android Exclusive:
  

  #16, Angry Birds

• Top-ranked PS3 Exclusive:
  

  #19, Heavy Rain

• Top-ranked DS Exclusive:
  

  #31, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies

• Top-ranked PSP Exclusive:
  

  #64, Valkyria Chronicles 2

• Best RPG:
  

  #1, Mass Effect 2

• Best FPS:
  

  #4, Minecraft

• Best “Indie” Game:
  

  #4, Minecraft

• Best Game Available Through A Console Download Service:
  

  #6, Super Meat Boy

• Best Browser Game:
  

  #48, Robot Unicorn Attack

• “Cult” Award (see below):
  

  #52, Deadly Premonition

• Best Downloadable Game (XBLIG division):
  

  #59, Breath of Death VII: The Beginning

NOTEWORTHY LOSERS

• Best game of 2010 which somehow nobody considered to be their #1 pick: #35, Alien Swarm
• Worst game of 2010 that at least one person considered their #1 pick: #200, 3D Infinity (This is an XBLIG game; Only one person voted for this at all)
• Worst game of 2010: #237, Dead Nation (Only one person voted for this; it was their #20 pick)

There were 23 games on the nominations list no one voted for at all.

ALTERNATE SCORING METHODS

The rankings listed above are based on a version of the Borda count voting method. Each vote cast for a game gives that game a certain number of points. If someone ranks a game #1, that game gets 20 points. If they rank it #2, the game gets 19 points. If they rank it #3 the game gets 18 points… and so on. I have a script that checks a couple of alternate ways of ranking the same data, though.

For example, if we rank games only by the number of first post votes they got, we get a wildly different list, with tons of games listing that weren’t anywhere near the top 20:

First Past the Post

1. Mass Effect 2 (231)
2. Red Dead Redemption (69)
3. Starcraft 2 (47)
4. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (40)
5. Minecraft (35)
6. Fallout: New Vegas (29)
7. Bayonetta (20)
8. Super Meat Boy (19)
9. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (18)
10. Alpha Protocol (15)
11. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (15)
12. Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (14)
13. Deadly Premonition (12)
14. Rock Band 3 (11)
15. Civilization V (10)
16. Alan Wake (10)
17. Halo Reach (10)
18. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (10)
19. Super Street Fighter 4 (9)
20. Call of Duty: Black Ops (9)

Most years when I look at the first-past-the-post list a “cult” game usually emerges that received very few overall votes, but where an overwhelming percentage of those votes were #1 votes; this year actually seemed to have more “cult” games than normal, but I think the cult award was pretty clearly earned here by Deadly Premonition, which went from a ridiculous #52 in the normal ranking to #13 in the first-place-votes ranking. Also noteworthy here though were Dragon Quest IX (jumps from #31 to #12) and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat (jumps from #37 to #15, tying with Halo).

I also did two more ways of sorting the rankings: an “approval” vote, where nothing is counted except the number of votes a game received (i.e. a first-place and a twentieth-place ranking count the same– all the matters is if the game was on someone’s list); and an instant runoff vote. Your eyes are probably starting to glaze over at this point, and these rankings very rarely differ from the Borda rankings, so I bolded the places where these two votes differ from the official rank. A small observation: 858 people voted this year. More than half placed some sort of vote for Mass Effect 2.

FINALLY: PER-FORUM BREAKDOWNS

As mentioned before, this poll mostly exists for a handful of video game forums where some people I know post. Since a couple years ago when I started posting the results on this blog, I’ve tried to actually run some extra results, in each case counting only those voters who– as far as one could tell from looking at the logs– had come to the poll from one particular forum or other.

So, here you have it– these numbers aren’t totally accurate because my logging method is not entirely trustworthy, but here’s an approximate by-forum breakdown of these results. Links go to color-coded full listings.

My free Mac/PC game Jumpman is now available for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

HOW TO GET IT

• Click here or search on the App Store for “iJumpman”.

GAMEPLAY VIDEO

FEATURES

• All the content from the PC version
• Gesture and tilt controls (plus optional button control scheme)
• Full in-game soundtrack (plus iTunes library support)
• Full level editor with integrated online level swapping
• Supported languages: English, Spanish, French, German

PLOT

• Guide Jumpman to the exit.

CLICK HERE TO JUMP TO THE PRETTY COLOR-CODED FULL RESULTS

This explanation will look a lot like last year’s, but:

Every year since 2004 I’ve been hosting this Game of the Year poll for the users of some forums I read. There are a lot of GOTY polls out there, but this one I think is kind of special. Most polls, you’re given a list of four or five options and you’re asked to pick the one you liked best. This poll, people are given a list of a couple of hundred options, consisting of every new game released in the previous year– and asked to rate their top ten or twenty.

This does a few interesting things. First off, we get to see all the information about what people’s second, third etc choices are. Second off, because the second, third etc choices count, people are more likely to vote for the game they want to win, rather than the game they think is likely to win– they’re less likely to engage in “strategic voting”. Finally, because we have all this information, we’re actually able to provide somewhat reasonable rankings for something like the top hundred or so games of last year.

The full results– showing the exact number of voters who ranked each game first, second, third place etc– can be found here. In the meantime, the final results were:

1. Batman: Arkham Asylum (7772) *** GAME OF THE YEAR ***
2. Dragon Age: Origins (7019)
3. Borderlands (5579)
4. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (4458)
5. Left 4 Dead 2 (4295)
6. Assassin’s Creed II (4205)
7. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (3858)
8. Torchlight (3792)
9. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (3386)
10. Resident Evil 5 (2941)
11. Street Fighter IV (2576)
12. Shadow Complex (2460)
13. Demon’s Souls (2342)
14. Halo 3: ODST (2104)
15. Brütal Legend (2008)
16. The Beatles: Rock Band (1991)
17. Infamous (1844)
18. Plants vs. Zombies (1773)
19. Scribblenauts (1752)
20. Prototype (1720)

The numbers in parentheses are the final scores each game got under the poll’s ranking system. Thanks if you voted, and some more elaborate analysis of the results (plus an explanation of the scores) can be found below.

NOTEWORTHY WINNERS

• GOTY 2009:
  

  #1, Batman: Arkham Asylum

• Top-ranked PS3 Exclusive:
  

  #7, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

• Top-ranked PC Exclusive:
  

  #8, Torchlight

• Top-ranked Wii Exclusive:
  

  #9, New Super Mario Bros. Wii

• Top-ranked 360 Exclusive:
  

  #12, Shadow Complex

• Top-ranked DS Exclusive:
  

  #19, Scribblenauts

• Top-ranked PSP Exclusive:
  

  #46, Dissidia: Final Fantasy

• Top-ranked iPhone Exclusive:
  

  #56, Canabalt

• Best RPG:
  

  #2, Dragon Age: Origins

• Best FPS:
  

  #3, Borderlands

• Best Game Only Available Through A Console Download Service:
  

  #12, Shadow Complex

• Best “Indie” Game? (I’m not even sure I know what that word means.):
  

  #18, Plants vs Zombies

NOTEWORTHY LOSERS

• Best game of 2009 which somehow nobody considered to be their #1 pick: #30, Punch-Out!!
• Worst game of 2009 that at least one person considered their #1 pick: #248, Harvest Moon: Animal Parade (Only one person voted for this at all)
• Worst game of 2009: #284, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (Only one person voted for this; it was their #20 pick)

There were 17 games on the nominations list no one voted for at all. Also, FIFA 10– which was left off the nominations list by complete accident– probably deserves some kind of special “moral victory” award for the sheer number of people who were upset about its absence.

ALTERNATE SCORING METHODS

The rankings listed above are based on what was originally intended to be an approximation of Condorcet voting, but which I’m told is actually closer to the Borda count. In my Borda-ish voting method, each vote cast for a game gives that game a certain number of points. If someone ranks a game #1, that game gets 20 points. If they rank it #2, the game gets 19 points. If they rank it #3 the game gets 18 points… and so on. I have a script that checks a couple of alternate ways of ranking the same data, though.

For example, if we rank games only by the number of first post votes they got, we get a wildly different list, with the most obvious difference being Batman and Dragon Age swapping places:

First Past the Post

1. Dragon Age: Origins (134)
2. Batman: Arkham Asylum (119)
3. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (111)
4. Borderlands (58)
5. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (45)
6. Left 4 Dead 2 (45)
7. Assassin’s Creed II (41)
8. Demon’s Souls (41)
9. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (32)
10. Street Fighter IV (25)
11. Brütal Legend (14)
12. The Beatles: Rock Band (13)
13. Shadow Complex (12)
14. Torchlight (12)
15. Resident Evil 5 (11)
16. Halo 3: ODST (10)
17. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (9)
18. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (8)
19. Red Faction: Guerrilla (7)
20. Forza Motorsport 3 (7)
21. Infamous (7)
22. Little King’s Story (7)
23. Machinarium (7)

Most years when I look at the first-past-the-post list a “cult” game usually emerges that received very few overall votes, but where an overwhelming percentage of those votes were #1 votes; this year there was no obvious leader in the “cult” category, although the jump in ranking for Demon’s Souls seems pretty significant, and Murasama (which jumps from #37 to #17) and Machinarium and Little King’s Story (which jump from #40 and #48 to a five-way tie for 19th place) seem worth mentioning.

I also did two more ways of sorting the rankings: an “approval” vote, where nothing is counted except the number of votes a game received (i.e. a first-place and a twentieth-place ranking count the same– all the matters is if the game was on someone’s list); and an instant runoff vote. Your eyes are probably starting to glaze over at this point, so I bolded the places where these two votes differ from the normal rankings:

FINALLY: PER-FORUM BREAKDOWNS

As mentioned before, this poll mostly exists for a handful of video game forums where some people I know post. Since a couple years ago when I started posting the results on this blog, I’ve tried to actually run some extra results, in each case counting only those voters who– as far as one could tell from looking at the logs– had come to the poll from one particular forum or other.

So, here you have it– these numbers aren’t totally accurate because my logging method is not entirely trustworthy, but here’s an approximate by-forum breakdown of these results. Links go to color-coded full listings.