Watch Sid Meier build a game in 48 hours

http://kotaku.com/5517715/watch-civilizations-creator-build-a-game-in-48-hours

by btilly • 16 years ago

155 35 16 years ago

joeld422• 16 years ago

And if that sort of thing sounds like fun, check out the LudumDare 48-hour game making contest, just over a week away.

http://www.ludumdare.com

Any language/platform is welcome. I don't think anyone has been crazy enough to try to write a game in lisp yet but of any of the FP junkies here want to try it, that would be cool to see.

bokchoi2• 16 years ago

Here is a Lisp game design challenge that allows for a week:

http://dto.github.com/notebook/lgdc.html

joeld422• 16 years ago

thanks! that's pretty neat.

sjf• 16 years ago

A pity it's over for this year. I couldn't find any results or list of entries. How did it go?

Jach• 16 years ago

Aw, you mentioned LD before me.

Your last comment reminded me of this guy's entry "toy game" for LD10, http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2007/12/16/working-title-ruck... made in Common Lisp. I think I remember seeing a Scheme game at some point... But yeah, lots of languages and libraries make a showing and people make some awesome stuff.

jbyers• 16 years ago

This is a really enjoyable video, especially if you've ever dabbled in game development. By happenstance I sat next to Sid Meier on a bus at E3 a few years ago. He seemed every bit as friendly and gracious as the video portrays, which is great to see from someone who's firmly at "legend" status.

arvinjoar• 16 years ago

I love stuff like this. I get so inspired when I see "Pirates of Silicon Valley" or "Revenge of the nerds" or any other movie/documentary about computer history. Please tell me if there's any other good computer history movies/documentaries!

SteveC• 16 years ago

I think you mean "Triumph of the nerds". There was a follow up to it called "Nerds 2.0.1 - Brief History of the Internet"

lee• 16 years ago

It's pretty amazing to see how much can get done in just 48 hours.

frou_dh• 16 years ago

I assume competitions like this have a liberal policy about using pre-existing game/rendering engines else you could use up all your time piecing together the low-level foundation and not get to any actual game design.

BoppreH4• 16 years ago

It became very clear with Meier's game and the Magician one, and it kinda make the competition unfair, but it didn't seem to bother anyone. Or at least not in front of the cameras.

vidar• 16 years ago

He was not part of the competition.

chipsy• 16 years ago

One of the most gratifying things about the "Game Jam" is that it puts all those flame wars over development environments to the test.

Most of the time, the people who stick to C/C++ tend to get demolished by the overhead of fighting the compiler. There are always exceptions - especially since the tiny scope means that code isn't the only bottleneck - but for the most part, it's shown very clearly that making games in a short period requires fast code iteration.

http://wolverinesoft.org/event/contest/48hourcontest7/

I'm pretty sure Sid used Unity, while the students are using all sorts of things: SDL, ClanLib, SFML, C#/XNA, Flash, and Java.

BoppreH4• 16 years ago

Quite low on content for a 23 minute video, but entertaining nonetheless.

I would like to know more about their tools and developing/programming practices, this was completely omitted from the recording.

BrandonM• 16 years ago

With its length, it seems perfect for some kind of 30-minute episode on a channel like G4. The production was pretty good in my opinion.

I agree about the development tools. Another thing I kind of missed was that I felt they could have shown the top few games (and Sid's) being played more than the brief snippets they gave us.

adrianwaj• 16 years ago

There are only two phases of a person's life: before Civilization, and after.

brandnewlow2• 16 years ago

Civilization has been a blight on my family. My dad brought it home from a trip once only to have it contaminate first his brain, then mine. For years, one of us would hide the thing or break the CD or just throw it out only to eventually buy another copy or a new version when it comes out, being careful to ignore the fact that we were both hopeless addicts.

The problem with the Civ games is that they make it easy to get into "flow" state where you're just clicking around, doing stuff, constantly stimulated etc. It's trouble, trouble I say.

pella• 16 years ago

-------------- some links ---------------------

http://www.freeciv.org/ ( my favorite )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeciv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)

-----------------------------------------------

eru• 16 years ago

You should (not) try the original Master of Orion. Also available as abandonware. It has some nice twists.

Sirian (http://www.warpcore.org/~sirian/moo1/index.html) has some very nice reports on MoO games he played.

Stay away from MoO 2.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

Why is that trouble? Consequences, schmonsequences!

jballanc• 16 years ago

Holy Crap! And here I thought I was the only person who's had to break a Civ CD...

dmn001• 16 years ago

original video source: http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/4/14/oral-history-of-gaming-g...

caffeine• 16 years ago

Any chance there's some way of modifying the buffering in that video? It's excruciating to watch it stutter through every frame, when I know that 10x-ing the buffer size would completely solve my problem.

(This is a fundamental issue with Flash video players.)

pan692• 16 years ago

I didn't had that problem but, was it just me or weren't there any controls on the thing? I couldn't pause it or anything. Near the end the dog decided to take a dump on the carpet and I had sit through the whole thing again after I cleaned it up.

kidko• 16 years ago

I didn't have any of those problems, actually. The video played fine and I had controls the whole way through. FF 3.6 on an outdated Ubuntu distro here, which I would have expected to have its share of problems if normal systems did.

BoppreH4• 16 years ago

I'll probably get hunted down and killed by this, but I think they could do much better if they used Flash. For really quick projects, it's about as good as a game making program can get.

teamonkey• 16 years ago

At least one of the teams there was using Flash.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

Check out 15:08 in the video. Sid Meier: best dressed man in video games?

elblanco• 16 years ago

This reminds me of a small demo party.

Watch Sid Meier build a game in 48 hours

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