Sonia's Journal

I thought briefly about entering Ludum Dare again this year, but I have a few problems with it.

The first problem is that today is the day of the office party. And staying up for forty-eight hours coding after drinking all afternoon whilst feeling a brain-numbing alcoholic haze turn into a thick gunky hangover just isn't going to happen. But that's a problem unique to this year.

No, my main problem is the same one that's stopped me entering in previous years, namely their policies on pre-made source code and custom (IE proprietary) libraries.

Any coder who even vaguely knows what they're doing keeps a stock of personally-written routines and systems that do boring mundane housekeeping tasks. Dull stuff like loading files, initialising subsystems, detecting formats, polling controllers, drawing sprites, etc., that sort of thing. Stuff you write once then constantly reuse. This stuff will likely as not use things like OpenGL and the Platform SDK as they're the lowest level you can get to on platforms like Windows.

But of course that all counts as "custom libraries", so lets take a look at the rules:

* You must have the legal right to freely share the source code.

Yup.

* You must either share the source code, or provide some way to use or learn intricate details of your library (”.lib” and ”.h” files, documentation, comprehensive “sales pitch”).

No. Fucking. Way.

Sharing the source to the game I have no problem with, but the tech? Naff off. Basically, I'd be expected to give away for free years of work that I rely on to do my job. Which is particularly annoying, as amongst the list of allowed paid libraries is stuff that cost hundreds of pounds or more before they even let you get a sniff of a header file.

They can't even claim it's so everyone can compile the project, as anyone not willing to spend the hundreds of pounds for some of the paid libraries won't be able to compile anything made with them. Yet that is allowed.

The alternative of course is to rewrite all those routines from memory during the competition. But that would be pointless, and probably impossible to enforce. How would they know I didn't just copy the code from a printout in front on me?

Or I could provide libs and cripple them in some way, like they only work for ten minutes without crashing or something, but it would still mean writing docs. Bleah.

So, until all you have to provide is source code to just the game project (there's got to be some proof you wrote it, after all ;) and a compiled executable, I guess I'll be sitting this one out again. ;)