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Ludum Dare 24: One of the best birthdays (31 Aug 2012 at 12:44)
Last weekend was Ludum Dare time again, my eighth-ish time participating in this 48-hour video game making competition. The theme was "evolution", a classic which has made the final round of theme voting like 10 times without winning. This particular competition I ran into some problems, but the game is charming in its way:

A pixelated cell with a charming but ambiguous facial expression wears a birthday hat. The text reads, 'One of the best birthdays'.
One of the best birthdays by Tom 7


At first I was trying to come up with experimental gameplay, since I got a big kick out of doing that in some previous contests. But I couldn't get excited about anything (of course 2/3 of the way through I had an idea I really liked, but it was too late :)) so I decided I'd just make a game in a style I really like and spend loads of time cranking out content. The game is a large-map dangerless exploration platformer. I initially attempted to make the map 16,000x16,0000 pixels (256 megapixels!) but found out hours into working that some tools I expected to be robust (Imagemagick, for example) did really weird bugs on such-size images, and it also turned out that libpng was like the one thing I had not installed in preparation. Wha-wha, I know, cool story bro. So there are some epic hacks going on behind the scenes to make this work, and some of the game world is conspicuously barren, and I didn't finish the in-world music so the game is silent except for the characteristic title theme song. But the game can be completed and I think it's pretty fun and it was a weekend well spent! Play it!
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Adhesion (69.205.69.21) – 09.05.12 00:36:54
Yay! The exploration platformer concept is so awesome we ended up doing the same sort of thing and had a lot of fun doing it.

Your game is great - I put some comments on the Ludum Dare page if you saw those. Though also, it does desperately need a cute chiptune loop for the main gameplay...
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nothings (98.247.33.160) – 09.06.12 22:14:22
I made stb_image.c for many things, and "easy to drop it when you're in the middle of a game jam and need a PNG" is definitely a sweet spot for it; I'm sad you didn't know about it. (Although it might use too much memory since it's design to be simple, not optimal.) Google it if you care.
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Tom 7 (67.186.6.86) – 09.11.12 23:04:36
stb_image is great, thanks for that. I will use it some day because I can't stand shared libraries. I wish it had support for 24-bit PNGs with an alpha channel though! That's what I usually use.
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João Vítor Fernandes Dias (186.192.59.18) – 06.10.24 19:20:14
No flash support :(
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