Submission Guidelines

Draft - This is a work in progress. We'll update it as the date gets closer, and the details become more specific

Through the contest you should keep a journal of your progress with screenshots and other online holdem poker goodies. Always mark your journal entries with the compo category.

To submit your final entry, create one final journal entry with a link to your game (hosted on your website) and some screenshots (uploaded to this website) and mark the entry with the tag 'final'.

If your blog is syndicated onto the compo blog you should use the compo blog during the competition to ensure that your journal and stuff all shows up correctly during the judging.

The following is a list of requirements for submission.

• Your game, in an appropriate archive.
  • zip on Windows
  • tar.gz or tar.bz2 on Linux
  • dmg on OS X
  • zip if platform neutral
  • Installers are discouraged.
• Source code. It should be possible to compile/run, with the appropriate tools.
• Custom Library source code (if you made one). See Platforms, Libraries, Middleware, and Tools for more details.
• Include a list of all tools and libraries used to create your game. Many entrants are interested what others use, and how “from scratch” an entry is.
• 1x Final Screenshot (PNG, JPG, GIF)

It's strongly recommended you provide a Windows executable (MyGame.exe). While we don't require that you make your game playable on Windows, the majority of entrants have or have access to a Windows machine.

With often more than 50 entries to be judged, it's extremely common for someone to ignore entries they can't simply play by double clicking. It's strongly recommended you include all dependences in your archive, for an easier user experience.

The Competition Game Loader is a nice tool that makes managing and judging all the games as painless as possible. It is recommended that you create a gameinfo.xml file by following the instructions on this page and include it with your game. This will allow you to make full use of CGL's features and make it as easy as possible for users to play and rate your game.

• Games must ship with all DLLs they need to run that are not part of the operating system.
• In order to find the required DLLs, you may wish to try the following:
  • Before packing up your game get Dependency Walker from dependencywalker.com, run it on your game's EXE, collapse the branches and note all the DLLs it lists at the top level in your ZIP except for system DLLs (kernel32.dll, opengl32.dll, anything DirectX).
  • Alternative way is to use dumpbin.exe /imports from msvc binary directory on your executable.
• Find those DLLs on your system, usually in the Windows/System32/ directory, and copy them to the same directory in the ZIP file as the game executable.
• Examples: msvcp60.dll, SDL.dll, zlib1.dll, jpeg.dll, libpng12.dll, libtiff.dll, msvcp71.dll, msvcr71.dll, SDL_image.dll, etc etc
• This DLL hell takes plenty of time, so it is best to do a trial run like this BEFORE the contest!

note: MSVCRT.DLL is actually a system DLL belonging to Windows and should never need to be included.

As a community, entrants do a number of fun additional things during the compo. Here's a list of suggestions.

• Chat in IRC (#ludumdare on irc.afternet.org).
• Additional Final Screenshots, if your game has multiple things worth taking shots of.
• Progress Log. What were you thinking/doing during the compo.
• Postmortem. How did things turn out?
• Work in progress screenshots (in some order)
• Time lapse video showing the evolution of something (animations, etc)
  • Linux: while true; do scrot & sleep 60; done
  • Linux (less spacey): while true; do scrot -e 'convert $f -resize 50% $f.jpg; rm -f $f' & sleep 60; done
  • Linux Makefile (for ease)
  • Windows: Debugmode Wink: http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
  • Windows (more robust?): http://www.hmelyoff.com/index.php?section=4 + http://www.virtualdub.org/
  • Windows (EASY screencaptures and webcam together, made by an LD regular): Chronolapse
  • Cross platform (Command line based, does webcam and screen captures, made by an LD regular): Pycatcher
• Workspace photos! Drinks, food, paper, whatever is around you as you work.
• Motivational posters! Use http://wigflip.com/automotivator/

If you don't work on Windows (or want to provide a Linux or OS X port), you can provide one after the deadline. Voting can start quickly, so you should provide it as soon as possible, or else you might miss your chance.

If you update your game after the deadline, we'd love to see it. Check the forum for a thread on game updates.