They seem to be hosting it here as well, in this very town. However I'm still a bit undecided whether to join as a jammer or not (10 spots left), being socially super awkward and anxious even with friends sometimes.

Might drop by as a visitor if that's not a problem tho.

I managed to finally get GM:S and GM 8.1 (As backup) onto my Windows XP laptop. Almost all of the issues I had with them were caused by the software I'm using as a virtual KVM switch (To use one keyboard and mouse across my connected computers).

Also found that I apparently had a license for GM:S Professional. Got YYG to send me a list of my licenses and bam, there's the Pro module for Windows.

Also installed Aseprite, BFXR, Famitracker, etc. All ready to go :P

As absolute emergency backup, I have SFML and GCC.

Nice! We'll have to compare notes afterwards :P

So I thought this was a pretty fun event. Think I'm more of a remote jam kinda guy, but I had fun making a silly game with a friend and got to see some other people's cool stuff.

This game was mine, but it's only semi-playable in its GGJ state and I changed a bunch of variables for the demo so it doesn't really work quite as intended. It's very much in my usual aesthetic: bad graphics, different-but-not-necessarily-fun gameplay, lacking balance, and a fair amount of funny text and general humorous touches. We got some good laughs at the demo.

This was the best game presented, though I think it may be more entertaining when presented at my site than when played. Still a very nice effort.

Something I noticed during the last Ludum Dare I did and here again is that GM seems to be becoming less and less used. Unity appears to be the tool of choice for the overwhelming majority. My team was the only one who presented with GM, and there was a wave of derisive "oh no Game Maker" in the audience. Which would only strengthen my resolve to keep using my easy tool for my fun gamedev hobby but…

I really feel like I strained against some limits with this one. Not in terms of graphics or power, but in terms of what you can express nicely in GML. My game required a fair bit of data-fiddling: comparing lists and strings and lists of strings. Doing this without a simple, Pythonesque way to make lists, with a very limited array of list manipulation functions and also without regex was a chore. On the Sunday afternoon I remembered Twisterghost's gdash and downloaded and integrated that, but it was too little, too late (though gdash is rad and you should check it out if you haven't).

So I think I'm going to give Unity another bash, so I can have another tool in my belt. GM is good at getting rectangles to move around on the screen with very little effort, but it's bad at data manipulation and it's bad at text. I'm still absolutely going to use it for things, but I want to only do so when I'm playing to its strengths.