[caeril]

LD doesn't help learn any of this. The time constraints force most entrants to use Unity, GameMaker, or some other framework/engine that abstracts learning about any of this stuff away.

If your object is to learn, better to try out Handmade Hero, entirely from scratch: https://handmadehero.org/

[spywaregorilla]

If you think using an engine means you're not going to need to worry about these things, you're going to have a bad time. Make games, not engines. If you want to make games, make games, not engines.

[otikik]

I agree that LD is not the right time to learn how to do pointer arithmetic, or how to draw a pixel.

What the time constraint teach you is to adjust to a time budget. Wear many hats. Improvise. And Finish Stuff. All very valuable lessons that will help any developer.

There's a healthy and beautiful spectrum of tools and languages out there between the "all included" of Unity and the aridness of plain C. Have you tried Löve? It abstracts a lot, but a lot of what it abstracts is really not that important for making games, in my opinion.

[wheybags]

+1 for love2d, have done several ludum dares with it, and I can honestly say it's the perfect tool for the job.

[tinco]

I've done all of those things every time I participated in Ludum Dare, and I've used a game engine only once. The time constraints make you pick your battles. You have to pick technology you're fluent in, but there are great input/output libraries for games for literally every language out there. I picked Javascript, and even did one in 3D with a procedural audio track that was affected by the plays.

One time I decided to make a multiplayer game on a hexagonal grid. Just getting the hexagonal grid working took me over half of the time, didnt produce much of a game at all that time, but it was still fun, it's ok to fail.

[merpnderp]

What libraries did you use in JavaScript? Three.js or a game engine or just WebGL?

[tinco]

Three.js

[stolen_biscuit]

This comment is wrong. You still learn all those things using a game engine. You don't have to write your game in pure C and handle everything from first principles to learn how to manage those aspects of game development.

[jbluepolarbear]

Making your own engine is definitely a good learning experience, but it’s not required for making a game. Game engines are tools for making games, they don’t make the game for you.

[seba_dos1]

You don't even have to "make your own game engine" - often you just take a windowing library, optionally with some barebones renderer (like SDL or Allegro) and simply make a game without an engine. This approach was very common at the beginnings of compos/jams like Ludum Dare, it only changed somewhat recently with increasing popularity of ready-made engines.

[Laremere]

Ludum Dare actually outdates Unity ;)

I've done it 8 times, once with GameMaker, twice with Unity, and the rest were custom.

[Lerc]

I have done Ludum dares on and off since #6. I have yet to use anything like unity. Closest to a framework would have been using OpenFL which is a Haxe cross-target reimplementation of the Flash API.

For the last few I just do VanillaJS on canvas.

[echelon]

I did a non-Ludum Dare weekend game jam, and I built this:

https://github.com/echelon/laser-asteroids

No unity, no unreal, no engine. Learned it all as I went.

Game jams are a fantastic time and place to learn.

[Uehreka]

The time constraints of AAA game dev force many entrants to use Unity too ;)