Community Game Jam Blogpost Generator

(currently only ludumdare.com)

by Alex Bezuska

Project started: 2016.12.21

This is a tool intended to help #gamedev communities and game dev spaces like ours (Warp Zone Louisville) to easily show off the awesome games made by our community each time we participate in a game jam. The tool takes a provided list of game page urls and pulls out the title, author, screenshots, and description, and creates an html file that can be copied into a blog.

How to use:

Overview:

I have two included templates ludumdare-bootstrap.html (if your blog has bootstrap) and ludumdare-minimal-styling.html (which includes some minimal css) to get you started. Create your own by duplicating an existing template. This project uses request, and cheerio to scrape data from game jam websites (currently only ludumdare.com).

Instructions:

• Install node (instructions for your OS here: https://nodejs.org/en/)
• Clone this repository or download the zip
• Open index.js in your text editor and replace the urls in the config object at the top with your own (currently only ludumdare.com urls work).
• Navigate to this project in your terminal
• Run the program using node index.js
• You will notice a file added to the ./output directory called blog-post.html (or whatever you named the outputFile in config)
• Open the output html in your browser to make sure everything is working
• Copy html into your blog post (see note for WordPress users below if you are having strange formatting issues)

Note for WordPress users: When copying html into a blog post, WordPress loves to do things like insert <br/> tags and automatically put things in paragraphs, this can really jack up the formatting of the post. To address this I really recommend you use the free plugin Raw HTML by Janis Elsts which allows you to check boxes to disable all of those settings for each post, example:

Contributing

Please do not hesitate to submit pull requests, I would love this to be a community effort. The game dev community is all about helping each other out and I want to offer this tool as a starting point to build something greater. Check the Github issues for ways to help that I already have on my radar, but here are a few important issues:

• The name sucks, I want it to be easy for people to understand what this does
• I would love help to add the capability to scrape other game jam sites to this project – Global Game Jam and Itch would be fantastic additions

Versioning

I would like to use SemVer but I need to research how to do that a bit more.

Authors

• Alex Bezuska - Initial work

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.TXT file for details