Topics

1

SFML projects / #relicsofpast - Ludum Dare 39 platformer - WIP - Mac OSX builder wanted

« on: August 03, 2017, 04:22:12 pm »

First of all, this LD, we finally made it. We had made something working in 72 hours, and even if it's not (yet) the best game ever, we're proud of it.

So what did we make?

It's a randomly generated platformer, where you jump in dark. There's a light mechanic, that sadly ended up not very useful, and we'll probably repurpose it somehow.

It has (imho pretty nice) music and pixel graphics done by xclementx, whom I met (online) for first time for this jam, and we'll prob do some more jamming together.

There will obviously be the relics, which we didn't make in time (I had some relic sprites ready, but didn't fit the code in time), and some more minor things like menus, top score chart and such. We have some plans to polish.

If you're interested and especially if you also took part and want to review it, follow here.

Feedback is welcome.

There are builds for Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX available on the LD page, but you'll need SFML installed for the Mac one. (Linked dynamically instead of statically by accident.) If you happen to be a Mac user willing to do us a build (preferably once in a while, but even one time is welcome right now), please PM me here or find me on IRC. Thanks!

Sorry for keeping this page mostly a stub at this point, but I need to prepare some proper gameplay videos and such. Just wanted to release the info into SFML community. News and more proper cover post to follow.

2

General discussions / Real World SFML Meeting in Prague, CZ

« on: April 06, 2016, 02:06:03 pm »

Hi everyone,

some of you might know me from IRC, some might not.

We've noticed over the time on IRC, there are quite some people with .cz domains and some weeks ago, I started to approach them and inquire about where they live and if they might be up for some real world meeting.

The first Prague SFML meeting took place about two weeks ago. We were expecting to be 3-4, but in the end, only two of us arrived.

Just recently, it happened to me, that some more people might be reached using forums.

So, are there more of us? Would there be some interest to meet once in a while, have chat over SFML, C++, gamedev and whatever anyone's currently interested in?

3

SFML game jam / 5th SFML Game Jam

« on: February 17, 2016, 03:00:21 am »

The site's prepared! Go and register now! We're looking forward for all of you!

"Failure is an option" is the theme for this jam!

The jam has officially ended! It's final judging time!

Come join us to our jam IRC channel #sfmlgamejam @ irc.boxbox.org. Open in browser via KiwiIRC.

The Final Judging categories for this jam are:

Innovation - How innovative, unexpected and refreshing the project is.
Gameplay Mechanics - How interesting the mechanics are, how originally are they composed.

Fun - How much fun it is to play the project.
Theme - How well it captures the theme. (Please be open minded for various theme interpretations.)

Graphics - How well it looks, how original it is visually.
Audio - How well it sounds, how original it is audibly.

Mood - How much it captures you into the story and world in general, how much you feel inside the project.
Game Flow - How smoothly the project goes.

Overall - Computed from all the previous.

Terms for this SFML Game Jam are:

Theme Proposal	Theme Voting	Theme Announcement	Jamming	Delivery	Final Judging	Winner Announcement
29. Feb - 1. Mar	2. Mar - 3. Mar	4. Mar	5. Mar - 20. Mar	21. Mar - 22. Mar	23. Mar - 3. Apr	4. Apr

Rules:

Time Frame:
1. The jam starts with 48 hours for theme proposal.
2. Another 48 hours are given for theme voting.
3. The theme of the jam is announced 24 hours before the jamming officially starts.
4. Participants are given 16 days of jamming (Saturday midnight UTC to Monday midnight UTC) to work on their projects.
5. Additional 48 hours are given to participants for packaging the projects and delivery.
6. Everyone has 12 days to try the projects and cast their votes in final judging.
7. Together start to finish, the jam takes 5 weeks, all phases follow each other immediately. Most of the participant's activity is expected in the 16 days of jamming.

Theme Proposal:
8. Everyone with an account on the jam site is welcome to propose theme ideas.
9. Theme ideas must not be offensive, vague, too similar to theme of any previous SFML Game Jam or recent iterations of any major game jam and must make sense.

Theme Voting:
10. Each participant (person intending to try to make a project during the jamming phase on his own or in a team) is allowed to take place in theme voting. Non-participants are asked to abstain.
11. The theme ideas will be voted on in several rounds.
12. Each round each participant has limited amount of votes decided by organizers based on amount of received theme ideas. The number of votes as well as the number of rounds will be known to participant at the beginning of the first voting round. Number of votes will be the same in all rounds including the final round.
13. Votes can be used to cast positive or negative points on ideas in the given round.
14. Theme ideas with best scores from each round will progress to the final round. Winner of the final round will be announced as the jam theme.

Theme Announcement:
15. Participants are free to publicly or privately brainstorm project ideas and form teams. No actual work on the project should yet be started.
16. Participants can continue to do whatever they're normally doing even if that would be useful for their jam project, but they shouldn't specifically work on the project itself.

Jamming:
17. Participants can work in a team of any size, or by themselves. Any participant is allowed to work on several teams or projects (like asset creators can provide music or graphics for several projects, etc.).
18. Participants should only create any original work needed for their project during this phase.
19. Any programming language may be used, as long as SFML (or one of its bindings) is used.
20. External libraries are allowed, but not SFML's competitors, such as GLFW, SDL, Allegro, etc. The use of OpenGL is allowed, however.
21. Any additional resources are allowed as long as participants have rights to use them, but they shouldn't be presented as original content created for the jam. Previous rule is the only limitation to this.
22. Participants have to give credit to original authors of any resources they use, that are not their own, even when the license doesn't enforce that. (Mostly so it's clear what is and what isn't their work.)

Delivery:
23. Team size and members must be stated when submitting.
24. A link to source is required when submitting as well as link to assets/anything needed in addition to compiled source in ready to use form (archive with expected directory structure, directory with expected contents and subdirectories on some cloud storage service, ...). Additional libraries should be listed and providing precompiled binaries or ways to obtain or compile them is encouraged.
25. Source and any assets created for the project have to be release into Public Domain or under permissive or copyleft license if that's possible. Participants are encouraged to use permissive license for maximal reusability of the work. Recommendations for participants without prior understanding on licensing are provided here, but are not part of these rules in any way.
26. A link to a working version of the project for either Windows, Mac, or Linux is required when submitting. This must include the executable and all assets/extras needed to run the project.
27. Projects with NSFW or shocking content must be marked as such.
28. Porting to other OS's as well as fixing small bugs in the project and any issues with the packaging is allowed and encouraged.
29. Participants are allowed to continue work on their project, but they have to keep the version made during the jamming phase (with exceptions per previous rule) for final judging.

Final Judging:
30. Everyone with an account of the jam site has right to vote (even non-participants).
31. Final judging takes place in several categories, that will be known to everyone at the beginning of the jamming phase.
32. Participants can decide to not take place in judging for some categories for any reason. Participants who didn't create any original content in given category are encouraged to do so.
33. Porting to other OS's as well as fixing small bugs in the project and any issues with the packaging is still allowed and encouraged.
34. Participants are allowed to continue work on their project, but they have to keep the version made during the jamming phase (with exceptions per previous rule) until this phase is over.
35. Winner in each category as well as overall winner will be announced once the final judging is over.



This post should stay up to date and may be edited later. To discuss the rules, please use the original planning thread.

4

SFML game jam / Unofficial Jam Project License Recommendations

« on: February 17, 2016, 02:47:41 am »

License Recommendations:

Those are just recommendations meant primarily for those that don't have any idea how to license the project. As code/assets without any stated license doesn't provide any rights and therefore can't be reused in any way, but are also (wrongly) seen by many as in Public Domain, it's important to always state your license and therefore your intentions with your work. All participants are free to use any other licenses as long as they're either permissive or copyleft.

This part is completely informal and meant just as help for those completely lost in the world of licenses. It's not meant to indicate some license or group of licenses is better than another. Things might be slightly simplified here for the sake of clarity, so read further sources and primarily the license text itself if you want to be sure. This should not be interpreted as a legal advice of any kind.

Once you pick your license or licenses (you can license different parts of your work by different licenses and it's usually good idea to split at least by code and assets as they behave quite differently), just copy it's full text, edit any parts like <author> or <year> and put in into file called LICENSE in your repository/work folder. In case of multiple license mention shortly which part is licensed by that given license, like "All code in this projects is licensed under those conditions:". You can also mention the license in your README or in header comment of individual source files, but that shouldn't be needed. You should always redistribute your license with sources and possibly even with binaries (that depends on license, but it doesn't hurt you to do so).

Generally speaking, you have three options. Let's dig into each a bit.

1. Public Domain

This option is for you, if you don't care tiniest bit what anyone does with your work. You want to give it to everyone, for free, to be used however they like. They can reuse any parts or the whole thing and don't have to bother you about it. You're basically giving it away, for real.

Unless you want to compose your own Public Domain statement, you've got two main options in this category and the nice bit is, you can license your code and your assets using one license, as you just waive all rights and there's not much to care about further.
Unlicense tl;dr;Legal
CC0 tl;dr;Legal

It shouldn't make much difference which one you choose, the second one is probably slightly more popular while the first one keeps it short and simple, but that's about it.

2. Permissive license

If you don't want to give the thing away fully, but also want to let anyone use it for anything they want without much concern (that is including commercial use and about anything), you should consider a permissive license. Details might slightly differ, but mostly you require to get your copyright notice and that's it. No one has to bother you to reuse the work, yet you still own it.

Some good choices for code here are:
zlib tl;dr;Legal
MIT tl;dr;Legal
BSD tl;dr;Legal
ISC tl;dr;Legal
Apache tl;dr;Legal
Artistic tl;dr;Legal

The first four are quite similar, short, permissive, the other two are slightly longer. What they allow and disallow also slightly differs, but the main idea is similar. The first one is used by SFML itself.

And you'll want to license the assets with a different one:
MirOS tl;dr;Legal
OGA-BY
CC-BY tl;dr;Legal

Here, the first one derives from BSD license and gives roughly the same care to your assets, while the second one is probably the most popular permissive asset license.

3. Copyleft

Now you not just wanna give, but you wanna everyone else to give back. That sounds wonderful, but also poses some limitations, as generally any derived work must reuse the same license and that's not always practical. Still, you can do this. There's also slight difference between strong and weak copyleft, where the first one demands even other components to adapt, while the second one only cares about itself, so it can be used together with things under other licenses.

Weak copyleft for your code:
Mozilla tl;dr;Legal
LGPL tl;dr;Legal

Strong copyleft for your code:
GPL tl;dr;Legal

Weak copyleft for your assets:
Against DRM
CC-BY-SA tl;dr;Legal
FAL

I don't know about any way to strongly copyleft assets, as they mostly behave like solitary units.

If you're not sure you want to copyleft your code, you might consider one of the first two approaches as in that way, your work will become much more useful.

Some further reading to help you decide:

ChooseALicense
FreedomDefined
OSI
FSF

If you still don't know, probably just pick one of the three approaches and use the first one on list for code and for assets or ask around, but expect quite mixed feelings about any of them.


This post should stay up to date and may be edited later.

5

SFML game jam / Wanna another? (early 2016 edition)

« on: January 11, 2016, 11:59:29 pm »

Hi everyone!

As it seems, the last SFML Game Jam was nearly a year ago, so I opened the topic up at IRC and was asked to bring it here.

So, ladies and gentleman (and queerfolk and strange lurking creatures and whatever you consider yourself to be), would you like to have another SFML Game Jam?

My idea would be to have it at least month (or at least say two weeks) away from both Global Game Jam and Ludum Dare, which gives us space sometime February/March or well, sometimes after.

What would you think?

I'd also like to push the rules a bit to roughly LD Jam level (unlimited team, use what you want, if you have rights to do so) to encourage people go wild and make games, but that would be up for another discussion if we agree we want to have another. We may as well split the leagues just as LD does, if there are people that wanna push and people that wanna stay. Just start meditating over it.

So right now the main question is: do you wanna have another SFML Game Jam? Secondary question is: would sometime February/March be good? (Try to propose other options if not.)

Thanks for any feedback and seeya jammin'!