Here in Johannesburg we had an awesome time. Games were made (completed?! hax!), people were met and fun was abundant.

With a total of 15 entrants (16 counting the roaming party), we had 8 teams, 8 completed games. For me that is an amazing achievement, especially because of the games that were created. This is a minor wrap up of each of the games, where www.igda.co.za will have a fuller breakdown of the event in the coming days.

Here is each entry, description, screenshot and link!

Team 1 - Extinction 

"Aim to be mediocre."

Bradley ( BradMarX ) : Entry link 

Team 2 - Hypoxia - Winner : Community vote - overall coolest game , Judges award - Most Innovative 

Hypoxia leads to the extinction of vision. If you can not see, you have to rely on your other senses to navigate a dangerous environment and prevent your own extinction. Perhaps you can save some others along the way. note - This game is driven by sound alone ! 

Heinrich ( Harsi ) , Frans ( Ditsemo ), Marius ( mpeche ) : Entry Link

Team 3 - PlanetEx - Winner : Judges Award - Most amount of fun award (based on community feedback)

You are a god and have become bored with your creation. Time to clean this place up.

Dave ( DamienWrath ) , Dirkie ( dirkieK ), Remert : Entry Link 

Team 4 - Chain Reaction - Winner : Judges award - Most random content

Kill off species one by one to kill off humanity last in a puzzle style game.

Ernest ( edg3 ), Peter ( brownbot ) : Entry Link

Team 5 - TechnoViking

TechnoViking is the story of olaf, the disco-loving viking, thawed out by global warming, 2000 years after his birth, he has awoken to find the human race extinct. He must now fend for his survival against creatures of the night, using only a hand gun and flash light.

Lorenzo ( Necrolis ) : Entry Link

Team 6 - Project Volcano - Winner : Most technical game (think DX10 geometry shaders and crazy flow maths )

Survive as long as possible against the rage of the volcano.

Charl ( Antagonist ), Bobby ( coldan ), Jonathan ( elyaradine ) : Entry Link

Team 7 - KillSat 9001 

The puny humans must die! Our Black Ships fill the sky! We shall turn their orbital laser satellite against them! We shall pulp their pathetic arkships! We will crush their last hopes of survival! We will make them EXTINCT!

Gareth ( Gazza_N ), Sven ( FuzzYspo0N ) : Entry Link

Team 8 - Lygophobia 

You are the last surviving human. Survive the onslaught. Stay in the light and keep moving.

That wraps it up

A huge thanks to all the participants, to Microsoft especially for letting us use their great venue and it was an honour to have organised an event like this.

Thanks to the IGDA and to Global Game Jam! It was a great experience and we look forward to more.

Don't let me tease too long. Below is the almost complete home page and identity of the Laboratory2D game tech.

What is left?

There are quite a few minor things to tweak here and there, some weird things in the design, some tech issues.

More specifically the beta / testers / builders / accounts and their functionality. The build system will be tied into this front end, along with the rest of the back end stuff, documentation and samples. Once i have all these finished i will be launching the site, not making a big splash for now - as the site is for the next bunch of good news. 

Guest blogs

Firstly, i posted a link to a mailing list for a particular piece of my tech puzzle, and got a really good response. Good enough for a guest blog on their main page, which is a huge deal for me. In preparing for that, i want the home page to be up with all the information, links and details you would expect, including downloads and status tracking etc. 

That means that i need to get it up as soon as i can, i would really like the engine to make the impression i have designed it for and I am hoping that the posts will be a good step in getting people to know the reasons for this stuff in the first place.

How the accounts work at the moment

As everyone who knows the details knows - the site uses tracking and remembering for a number of things. I have now implemented using Google Accounts and Twitter sign in to ease that process. Most times, you are one click away from being a registered user and enjoy the benefits without yet another login to remember. The one benefit of this is that it makes it a lot easier to manage for everyone - especially us.

New features

Wow, i think this list would be way too much to post in one go. I will more likely post each sample as i finish it here, along with the features it introduced. 

Everything from 100% automated tilemaps (including collision, box2D support, trigger events or callbacks) - all in a single line of code - right up to full physics support for box2D 2.1a and more.

Support for Bison Kick http://jacobschatz.com/?p=500 importing, much cleaner api's, documentation and samples.

Currently on a nice 16 examples the list is only growing. Look out for a full feature post when the site goes live :)

So after fighting with the threading of my engine for a while, i managed to integrate the v8 debugger into the engine.

What for?

That's Eclipse, the awesome people at http://code.google.com/p/chromedevtools/ have a plugin to debug web files in chromium,
But i noticed a few people using it for node.js, and well, im using v8 too, it works :)

THIS MUCH

Thats how excited i am, this really changes everything about the way you can and do work with the game engine, It basically turns eclipse into a full scale IDE for the game engine which is something really critical. I was hoping something would come up that would be usable but this is just way up there in terms of features, editing the values, pausing resuming the whole deal.

So,

Chome dev tools guys, eclipse, and node - Thank you!

Aren't we growing tired of these really snappy, buzzy, trippy, kicky, annoying as hell website names?

If you are making yet another web application, please choose a better name.

At least, in my opinion these tend to make you sound a tad web.2.0 and it makes it harder to take an application seriously. If you are making something aimed at teens or pre-teens and maybe some really annoying tech geeks it sounds like a really awesome idea but i think the really stupid names are starting to come up, and when that happens - the fad is over and the desperation to be 'in the cool crowd' rises.

If your application needs a short url, be creative. Stop forcing every word you can conjure up into a shortened TLD, just to sound hip.
And if you can't, see if you can get some more glossy buttons and cute animal cartoon icons to seal the reality of the trends.

Please.ly?

Last time i had some issues with the iPhone textures,
i had not tested too well before posting.

Instead, here is the final fixed up version :)

I have uploaded the three builds of the ludumdare entry (nothing spectacular, mostly hacked up in 48 hours) just for testers to grab the mac/linux versions.

If you can leave feedback i would appreciate it, but these builds do not signify the current state of the engine/technology (ie : this build is old, and has old scripts, and most of the logic was written in 48 hours so its pretty hopeless).

If you would like access to the actual builds, you know what to do.
Comment, email etc.

NOTE : This is not the state of the engine and its tools!

Windows   |   Linux   |   Mac

So, I built the linux version today. Simple and straightforward too, thank goodness some libraries really are cross platform buildable.

Still a few more important steps before 0.9 final, 99% of which are just important bug fixes and additions :) 0.9 beta 1.9 is the final feature updates and those are to be posted about soon.

Watch this space!