Linux Game Jam 2019 is officially live, go make something cool

With regard to time it's kind of unfortunate that they chose to end before easter. Most people will have a long weekend which would have worked nicely for a little project.

With regard to time it's kind of unfortunate that they chose to end before easter. Most people will have a long weekend which would have worked nicely for a little project.

Yea, but at the same time, lots of people will be doing family stuff and won't have time for coding...double edged sword I guess.

Good luck to the contestants!

I just installed Godot last weekend and worked through some tutorials to get the hang of it. So the jam starts a bit too suddenly for me to participate, but I'll try again next time.

I like what I've seen so far, but there is a lot of stuff that got changed between the release of Godot 3.1 and the tutorials I looked at. Will have to dig a bit deeper to understand the class extension mechanism and get to know the API better.

Any recommendations for copyleft tilemaps and spritesheets other than kenney.nl and opengameart.org? Should I pick up a cheap Wacom tablet or are there better alternatives?

I have an idea for a small game, so I'll try to make something this year too. It usually doesn't amount to much though, so I'm keeping my expectations low.

I like what I've seen so far, but t
Any recommendations for copyleft tilemaps and spritesheets other than kenney.nl and opengameart.org? Should I pick up a cheap Wacom tablet or are there better alternatives?

Those are my go-tos, so I'd be interested to know that as well. I was looking around for some 9 slice tilemaps for autotiles the other day, but I couldn't find much, so I'm thinking of making something with Inkscape instead.

Any recommendations for copyleft tilemaps and spritesheets other than kenney.nl and opengameart.org? Should I pick up a cheap Wacom tablet or are there better alternatives?

Humble Bundle is running a bundle for game dev assets right now: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/8bit-pixel-game-dev-software?partner=gamingonlinux (I added gamingonlinux as a partner on that humble bundle link)

There is a license with the assets. I'm not a license expert. Though, it seems to be mostly restricting redistributing/selling the assets as your own work, but not really restricted on using them in your own media creations.

I spent a few weeks looking for RPG tilesets, but other than the sources already listed, I couldn't find anything I could use outside of OpenGameArt. I checked commercial sources as well, such as the Unity store (as I wouldn't mind spending some money on it), and even THERE wasn't anything offered that would have blown me away. The closest thing in that regard was a Humble RPG dev bundle from a few months ago, which I got and had some great character/monster/inventory assets, but I need tilesets for world building too (namely terrain, towns and dungeons), and that bundle didn't have enough of that.

I guess your best bet is either commission an artist, or Learn2Paint, unfortunately.

Thanks for your responses!

Even if the tiles and sprites don't match the game, I guess getting those from the bundle is a good investment to get a project going, using them as placeholder art. And it contains some music and sfx as well, that is a nice bonus.

Thanks for your responses!

Even if the tiles and sprites don't match the game, I guess getting those from the bundle is a good investment to get a project going, using them as placeholder art. And it contains some music and sfx as well, that is a nice bonus.

Going with placeholder stuff to start with, and updating after you have the core of your game running properly if you have time is a good strategy.

I'm not sure if the assets from the Humble thing are likely to fit with the jam's rules though, which state that assets must either be original (created for the jam) or "freely licenced".

I just need something to get started and will not enter the competition this time. In the past I used to do some 7 day rogue-likes as those don't even need programmer art, it was all ASCII. Then I leveled up by painting crude shape graphics on the browser canvas. Now that I'm checking out some engines that raises the bar. That's why I think I'm going to restrict the style to 8 to 16 bit era and learn some pixel pushing.

But I agree, better come up with your own creations for the jam.

I just need something to get started and will not enter the competition this time. In the past I used to do some 7 day rogue-likes as those don't even need programmer art, it was all ASCII. Then I leveled up by painting crude shape graphics on the browser canvas. Now that I'm checking out some engines that raises the bar. That's why I think I'm going to restrict the style to 8 to 16 bit era and learn some pixel pushing.

But I agree, better come up with your own creations for the jam.

There were a couple of terminal/ASCII based games submitted last year - ENDUSER (made by Samsai, Tumocs and Tuubi) and ~Woguey Wikey~ (made by m8vu) were both games we praised in the judges' round table video. I've spotted at least one terminal based game being worked on this year. There's no reason to shy away from that if that's your thing!

You might also be able to find an artist out there willing to team up. A couple of people have been hunting for collaborators in Discord, but so far that's mostly been programmers. I was toying with the idea of making some CC0 art across the course of the jam that anybody could use, but unfortunately, I don't have the free time to make that work this year.

If it's helpful at all, I find it better to approach jams as a challenge rather than a competition. Exploring what you can make is much more interesting than exploring not whether you can make something better than other people's work.


Last edited by Cheeseness on 12 April 2019 at 11:35 pm UTC

You might also be able to find an artist out there willing to team up.

On this note, mooncube dropped into Discord offering to take art requests. If you're keen, you can find them over on Discord, or you can try hitting them up on Twitter/on Mastodon.