It’s that time again, for everyone’s favourite 48-hour development compo to open its jaws once more and clamp them shut around the melange of minds that power the indie development community.

Right now, Ludum Dare 24 is gearing up to open its doors. August 24th is the date and currently anyone – yes, anyone – can submit an idea for a theme that the organisers might fancy pursuing. For LD23, back in April this year, ‘Tiny World’ came up trumps and from that we gained such mad beauties as BEEFWAR, the eye-straining It’s A Tab and the mesmerising Cruel Space. So many great ideas, so fully realised in the minimal time available.

So, what of this year’s entries? Well, I’ve already submitted my suggestions of ‘Fix It’, ‘Servile’ and ‘Don’t Go Outside’, themes which, if combined, could conjure the incredible and heartwarming adventures of a downtrodden, agrophobic mechanic. Sort of an anti-Mario. Quite fitting for a community which thrives on bucking the trends of commercial gaming, but somehow I think there are better, more serviceable suggestions out there. So why not have a go? Just head to the page, here, and let your imagination run wild.

And don’t forget that previous and past competition entries are still online and available to play on a whim. So, if you’ve an entire lifetime to spare and no other urges than to engage in people’s interactive mind-farts, head over to the official site for fun and frolics.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Pick A Theme – Ludum Dare 24 Opens Suggestion Box

Stencyl seems to be the next big thing for amateur flash game development. A drag-and-drop, ‘klik n’ play’ style game creation package that allows designers with no programming knowledge at all put together playable games and export them as Flash or even iOS executables. It has already been used to create some pretty impressive things, such as Amon26′s Halloween hit Gyossait, but the biggest test of its power has come in the past few weeks.

Massive Flash portal site Newgrounds threw down the gauntlet with Stencyl Jam 2012. A $500 grand prize, several runner-up prizes of significant cash value, and all the Newgrounds fame and hits you can eat to the victors. Just make a game with Stencyl and submit it. Almost a hundred entries were completed by the cut-off date, and the voting is just coming to a close now. The winners will be announced soon, but for the time being, go check out the lineup. Even some of the lowest-rated entries are smoothed and polished experiences.

There’s some impressively complete games in there, and due to the fact that Stencyl uses fixed-size sprites rather than traditional Flash vector art, they’re much less of a strain on your CPU. It’s a pretty powerful package, all things considered, and the number of entrants to this competition suggests that it’s pretty easy to use as well. A good piece of advertising for what seems to be a great starting point for budding games designers without the knowledge and training to create their own engine from scratch.

Source: The Indie Game Magazine – Newgrounds ‘Stencyl Jam 2012′ Comes To A Close

Our little Indie Games Competition concluded this week and there’s a ton of free games to play and vote on over at Indie Games Day.  For those of you who missed it, all of the entries had only 7 days (and in some cases only 48 hours) to make a game around the theme of this picture:

The website has a donation widget in the right to add to the winnings of the fan voting.  Special thanks to Philly Game Jam for working with us to sync up on a theme.

The number of entrants for the Indie Showcase Award to be presented on July 12th at the Develop Conference in Brighton was doubled this year with the grand total coming in at over 60. Of those, the panel have selected 10 finalists which will be publicly playable during the event in anticipation of the People’s Choice award. For the first time, this year there will also be an Editor’s Choice award.

The awards aren’t the only allure though, the Indie Dev Marketing Sessions take place on July 11th and will cost attendees a whole £95. If you’re more interested in the delegated Indie Dev Day on July 12th which has panels and talks on other subjects relevant to indie game development, then you’re looking at a price of £60 for that one. You can register for either or both of those here.

Back to the finalists though, here’s the list, and what an interesting one it is:

• The Bridge (Ty Taylor, Mario Castaneda)
• Perspective (DigiPen)
• Q.U.B.E. (Toxic Games)
• Great Big War Game (Rubicon Development)
• Zack Zero (Crocodile Entertainment)
• Captain Cat (Digital Tentacle)
• Voxeliens (Volumes Of Fun)
• The Missing Ink (RedBedlam)
• International Racing Squirrels (Playniac)
• Lume (State Of Play Games)

Via Develop Conference

This weekend marks the duration of the 48 hour game jam held in Philidelphia, more commonly referred to as the Philly Game Jam. Ten developer teams will be working furiously to create their jam games, and having fun all the while. There are some rewards to be handed out which fall under the following categories: Best Use of Theme, Most Innovative, Judges’ Choice and WTF?

What is the theme though? Well, the Philly Game Jam has partnered up with the International Indie Games Day so that the theme is the same as the one for both jams. It’s a picture, the one seen below in fact:

As the Philly Game Jam finishes on June 17th, so does the submission deadline for the games to be part of the Indie Games Day celebrations on June 25th. If you’ve made a game in seven days or less and want to submit it to be part of the celebrations then you need to sign up with the website and then you’ll be able to upload it via the FTP.

International Indie Games Day is intended to celebrate indie games – no more, no less. By submitting your game then it will be made available for people to play for free and may even win a prize during the event.

Edge Magazine has announced the winners of this year’s Edge Create Challenge, a contest in which indie developers were offered the chance to develop their own games via Unity’s game creation kit under the thematic subcategory of “edge.”

The overall gong went to Central Core Studios, whose fervent turn-based shuffleboard title Edge of the World impressed the judging panel, comprised of alumni from such established games studios as Media Molecule, Bungie, Sucker Punch and thatgamecompany, with its expertly-crafted style of gameplay and healthy layer of polish. Central Core will receive a full Unity Pro licence, a trip to the Amsterdam-based Unite 12 event in August and a lavish trophy to add a resounding exclamation point on a job well done.

The two runners-up, who will both receive a Unity Pro licence, came in the form of Framework, an action puzzler created by Quick Fingers, and Edge By Night, a fast-paced rooftop-running game apparently starring a cat, lovingly developed by Anthony Beyer and Alexandre Colchen.

For more information on both the judging criteria and official judging panel behind the Edge Create Challenge, have a look at Edge’s official results post.

Tiger Style has announced that they are working on porting Waking Mars over to PC, Mac and Linux. Huzzah!

We’re rather enjoying this steady drip feed of iOS titles coming over to PC – believe it or not, we don’t all have Apple products, either small or large. The ones that do sometimes dance around, boasting of a new amazing iOS title that they’re playing while we sit here with our mice and keyboards playing other wonderful things. So no, it doesn’t hurt too much. However, we will get all happy and perhaps even do a little “you can’t tease us any more” dance when such a port does happen.

This time it is Tiger Style’s slightly creepy adventure title which has you exploring alien plant life in the tombs of Mars, appropriately titled Waking Mars. To survive the game you’ll have to learn the various behaviors of this flora and manipulate it to your will, inbetween crawling, climibing and flying your way around the red caves.

In the announcement, Tiger Style said that the price for the game on PC will be $4.99 and gave some interesting reasons why:

“Launching at $4.99 also reinforces the idea that the game is serious and significant, and that it’s not “just a mobile game.””

More information on Waking Mars can be found on the game’s official website.

Thanks RPS!

It’s brainstorming time over at the Indie Games Day website.  Do you have a great idea for a theme for the 7-Day Developer Challenge?  Tweet your ideas by using the hashtag #indiegamesday and stay tuned to the website for your chance to vote on the theme that you think will inspire the best free games.

With Ludum Dare’s 10th anniversary just passed, it seems appropriate to talk to one of the people who have turned it into the great 48 hour game jam event that you know it as today. We’re of course referring to Phil Hassey who is one of the gentlemen behind Ludum Dare as well as being a well known solo game developer. In fact, Phil is such a big part of Ludum Dare that his bio on the site reads: “Phil was instrumental in the big switch from Ludum Dare’s random unfinished compo websites and webhosts, to WordPress and the custom code we run today. If the website is working, chances are he fixed it. Phil also tends to pick up the slack when Mike is .. slacking.”

As part of an interview in which we chatted about his upcoming release, Dynamite Jack – which is itself created out of a Ludum Dare project from 2005 – I took the opportunity to talk to him about his involvement in Ludum Dare and how he has seen it grow since he got involved as one of the main hands in 2007. Phil also talked about his ideas on game development, the role of game jams and marketing your indie game too, but we’re saving that for later.

“It was back when I made Galcon, [Ludum Dare] was just kind of falling apart because there was no one running it”, Phil says as he reminisces. “So I stepped up to take charge, then Mike [Kasprzak] joined in to help MC the thing. That’s actually worked out really well because there’s quite a lot of tech work and quite a lot of MC’ing work to be done to keep it running. But the whole thing just blows me away – like this past Ludum Dare I think we’re going to hit 1200 games by the end of the day.”

This interview was conducted before all of the submissions were in and the final count is actually 1401 games, which is a tremendous effort from everybody involved. The target for Ludum Dare 23, in order to celebrate its 10th anniversary with style, was 1000 entries. So as you can see, that has been blown out of the water.

“It’s so awesome to be able to help out and create this opportunity for so many people to just make games and learn that they actually can make a game. That’s one of the things when you’re a hobbyist developer, like myself who doesn’t have any AAA background or anything, you make a game and never release it because you’re just screwing around with it forever. But with a game jam you’re given a 48 hour limit and you actually get something completed…It’s great to see so many people getting involved and making the games they want to make.”

We then steered Phil towards talking about how he has seen Ludum Dare grow while he’s been behind all of the tech side of the event and helping plan things, before anyone else who is currently part of the organization of it all.

“It was in 2007 that I started working on the site, so December 2007. When I started that’s when we began to use WordPress and keeping track of everything. So it was back during Ludum Dare 10 that I started out and if you look at [this page] you can see how much it has grown. I think Mike came in around 11 or 12 and just having the competition more consistent helped the site grow and you can see it growing steadily until about Ludum Dare 18.”

“About then, Notch, well he’s actually been doing them since about Ludum Dare 15, but 18 was after his rise so around then he started promoting the jam just by tweeting about it as he was continuing to compete in it. You can really see how that made it explode, just by the numbers – 18 had 200 entries, the next one had 280, then 350, then 600, then 900; and now we are about to hit 1200. Between just having the competition be more consistent and having Notch promote its existence, Ludum Dare has grown like crazy and it’s pretty exciting.”

So according to Phil, who is one of the main driving forces behind Ludum Dare, you can all blame him and the other Ludum Dare organizers as well as Notch for its growth, particularly in the last five years. Of course, it’s the huge and ever-growing indie development community that makes the figures rise and it’s great fun seeing what can be achieved together. Phil also mentioned that it feels like indie games in general have grown a lot since about 2007, his focus in particular being the arrival of the iPhone and how this has attracted a whole new wave of game developers.

If you were a part of Ludum Dare 23, feel free to post your game in the comment section below.

We’ll have the rest of our lengthy chat with Phil Hassey published in Issue 22 of The Indie Game Magazine.

Out of the many glorious things to have come out of Ludum Dare 23, one of our favorites so far is Rat King Entertainment‘s dungeon creation tool, Wunderworld. You must try it out, oh you must.

While many of those who entered Ludum Dare 23 were worrying about level design, Rat King took a different approach and made a tool that allowed the player to create their own levels. Taking the theme of “Tiny World”, Rat King combined this with their love of for game development and Ultima Underworld to make Wunderworld – a dungeon creation tool. In this, you can build up a multi-tiered dungeon from a simply 9