Watch Sid Meier build a game in 48 hours

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

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

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

At least one of the teams there was using Flash.

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.

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.