

Ludum Dare 21 winners - pelf
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=top

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rileya
Cool, I got 39th. Ludum Dare is always a blast, I encourage anyone with even
the slightest interest in game dev to give it a go sometime. It's an awesome
excuse to write some really ugly code and not feel guilty about it.

It's great to see LD growing so fast, my first one (#16) had ~120 entries,
this time there were almost 600.

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wccrawford
I'm a little surprised that Notch's was only at 13... That was a pretty good
game!

I'll have to go back and find out what was even better.

This competition was a real push for me. I've been wanting to get into game
programming for far too long, and never took the plunge. I'm hoping to be
ready to create at least a crappy game during the next one. Of course, that
means making many crappy games before then. :)

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mrspeaker
I spent almost the full 48 hours watching Notch - and I thought his game would
do better as well.

The thing that I like most about his effort (which of course has no bearing on
the "goodness" of the game) is that he did it completely and entirely from
scratch. Most of the other entries were "flash game using game library x with
physics library y and random libraries i,j, and k".

He started with a blank project and added everything from his brain (not even
consulting Google once!) It was absolutely amazing to watch.

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wccrawford
Yeah. I watched 4 hours (the first 4!) and skimmed another 10. Sadly, I missed
it live and had to rely on what I found on the net. (Wish some help from
people here and other sites.)

Watching him build the raycaster was a 'whoa, I definitely need to up my game'
moment.

It also made it clear that he knew every aspect of game design inside and out.

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swah
Flash still dominates. No JS it seems.

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ender7
Flash's general architecture makes it a lot easier to create things like 2D
games. You certainly _can_ write great games in JS, but it requires a helluva
lot more domain knowledge, as well as a lot more tweaking and hackery. Many
things that are simple in Flash, such as collision detection, are not in JS.

Flash is essentially a system for moving and manipulating sprites, which fits
perfectly with a 2D game. HTML/JS is an overgrown document layout system, and
it shows.

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watty
This is true. Perhaps competitions like this will help the public realize that
Flash isn't dead after all (unlike the countless articles that have appeared
on HN and claim this).

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swah
Yes, unfortunately Flash isn't very nice on OSX (CPU usage is very high).

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bemmu
I have just boundless respect for these games. I can understand how the code
could be done in 48 hours, but how to tweak the gameplay in that time is just
amazing.

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rnernento
I'm sorry Prelude didn't win... I feel a connection to it even though all I
did was watch him code it. Awesome though, now I know how to kill my morning.

