Ludum Dare 35 (4/15 - 4/18)

"What is Ludum Dare" you ask?

Ludum Dare is an accelerated game development event held every 4 months. Thousands of developers create games for two concurrent competitions taking place over 1 weekend. Full competition rules can be viewed on Ludum Dare's webstite, but here's a summary:

Compo
• 48 hours long
• You must work alone
• You must use the competition theme
• All game content must be created within the 48 hours, with a few exceptions (see full rules)
• Publicly available libraries and middleware (e.g. Construct 2) are allowed
• Source Code must be included when submitting

Jam
• 72 hours long
• Work alone or in teams
• All creation tools are allowed

At the end of the weekend, entrants rate eachother's games for 3 weeks. Winners are announced at the end of the rating period.

Why should you participate?

Many reasons:

• It's fun.
• You'll join a great community of developers.
• C2 is, in my opinion, perfectly suited for Ludum Dare.
• Making it to the end, and submitting a game provides a great sense of accomplishment.
• It will make you a better developer. Testing your game creation abilities under tight conditions, with a strict deadline, is like a game development adrenaline shot. It's a serious learning experience that will test your existing skills, and force you to rapidly develop new ones.

Let's get the excuses out of the way

"But I can't afford to participate." It's free. "But I don't know how to make a game." Download C2, go through some tutorials, and play around with the software. You'll quickly realize that creating a game much more possible than you think. "But 2 or 3 day is too short a time to create a good game." Long, in-depth, gaming masterpiece aren't possible, but you can absolutely create an awesome game. I dare you to play some of the winning Ludum Dare games (see below), and tell me they aren't awesome. "But I already have plans that weekend." Challenge yourself to create the best game possible in whatever time you have available. My LD29 entry was created in 2 hours. It's not particularly sexy, but I'm quite proud of what I created in 2 hours. "But there aren't any prizes." Monetary prizes... no. The prize is the experience and the game you produce. It's not uncommon for participants to further develop their entries into commercial products. Speaking from personal experience, professional opportunities have come my way both directly and indirectly from participating in Ludum Dare.

Here are a few links you may find useful/interesting:

• Ludum Dare Survival Guide - Great tips, especially if this is your first Ludum Dare.
• Tools - A nice collection of popular tools used by many Ludum Dare participants.

I hope I've convinced a few of you to participate. Best of luck to everyone.

I'm participating for the first time, can't wait (14,5h until it starts)

I am in for this too! Will be my 2nd ludum dare but last time I did it with my son and just threw something together in a few hours. Interested to see what everyone will come up with especially the other C2 devs.

What is your experience with LD? Did you enjoy it?

LD34 happen to come on a weekend I had no plans and I ended up making a game with my 5 year old over a few hours for the most part (http://www.kongregate.com/games/8bitthirsty/a-knight-in-a-cave-ludum-dare-34-jam). I had a lot of fun but didn't really participate too seriously with my submission and it was really cool checking out what everyone else made. Cleared my schedule a bit more for this one so I am hopeful my game will turn out well.

I have done quite a few other game jams and I do highly recommend them. They have all been fun for me and I don't get burned out working on a game when you have such a short timeline and you know people playing aren't expecting perfection. The only thing I was a little bummed about with LD34 is that I didn't get many plays on my game or much feedback but I didn't put much effort into promoting my game outside a quick tweet/facebook post/C2 forum post and there are tons of entries so that is an area I really hope to do better with.

I would suggest everyone remotely interested go into it with an open mind and come up with an idea and run with it. Don't worry about polish and don't stress too much over the parts of game development you aren't as into. If a game doesn't have good or any sound or polished animations its not a big of a deal.

Sounds very interesting, thanks for your insight!

Gonna give your game a try after the jam is over

Best luck/fun/whatever

I'm in again, better late than never!

Submitted the game just in time, farily happy with it although only has 3 levels due to lack of time. You can play it HERE

Finished mine with 15mins left on the clock. Spent too much time outside this weekend with great weather for a change but I am overall happy with how it turned out. Planned on having a lot better level and upgrade structure and a better boss fight but I had a lot of fun making it.

Check it out

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=65596

Making of Stranded on Planet Shiftos (timelapse video)

Here's my team's game:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-3 ... &uid=22452

I also streamed my development all weekend, so if C2 dev streams are of any interest to you, you can see a lot of those here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... BG0CTcp1Hg