Ludum

My entry for Ludum Dare 35.

So, I ended up writing an interactive game engine, which I call “Ludlum”, and then a game written in that engine, which I have titled “A Game.”

This is my first LD, and I’ve wanted to do it for a long time. However, since it’s my first, and I didn’t even know that I was going to participate until shortly before I got started, so I decided to pick something I’ve been doing since I was a kid: text adventures, or “interactive fiction”, as they tend to be called nowadays.

It’s a short game, but I decided to go meta: it’s a game loosely based on my childhood, where you learn about programming games. “Transform”, the theme, is more alluded to than it is direct: this is a game about how my own life was transformed by computers.

Furthermore, I wrote the game in Rust, the programming language I work on as my day job. It was a ton of fun. I picked a terminal library that apparently doesn’t work with Windows, though, so that’s unfortunate. It should work on Linux and Mac OS X.

You can build the game yourself. First, install Rust. Then, install with Cargo:

$ cargo install ludum

Then, make sure you have the Game.toml file: https://github.com/steveklabnik/ludum/blob/master/Game.toml

Run ludum from that directory, and the game should start.

If you don’t have Rust installed, binary releases are on the Releases page.