``` I lurk around Ludum Dare for years, getting the itch every time the jam is running "huh, maybe I should join this time" and never actually making anything. I had no idea what I was missing. This community is the best gift for game developers and I'm really happy I finally joined it!

It is hard to get enough people to use/play/try your creation. You can make family and friends play your test builds, but you run out of options fast, even more when they realize why you are calling them for the 5th time last hour. Also, they love us, they will say anything to make us happy (even when sometimes what we really need is a "this game is bad!")

As creators, we are infinitely biased. We have all the context in our minds. We have all the answers to every trick, quest, shortcut, dialogue, puzzle ... And we played our games thousands of times. It's a classic thing, you want to make your game look smart and decide to paint a button blue and put a blue pill into a level, thinking "Heck! This is great! Look how these two things are connected and how people will figure out when they see it!". And as long you keep going on doing your game, without putting it out to other people to see, you will keep digging yourself more and more.

Two years later, you get out of the basement with your perfect creation, and nobody can even understand the title you wrote now in your own dialect. Confusing interfaces, details that went missing, too hard, frustrating to understand, complicated mechanics, and the worse of all, your game is not fun at all. You can find this kind of story in every game dev community.

I thought I was done on Sunday night, I went through a lot and I was the happiest to have finally joined Ludum Dare. I could brag about that now! Little I knew that I was just starting.

I was expecting that on the sea of thousands of games submitted, I would never have anybody caring, or at best some plays on itch.io. When I noticed that Ludum Dare reviewing system had a built-in positive loop, I was curious "Will this really work?". It was after I have done the third review that the first comments for my game started coming in. I was so happy :) And it was when I started submitting my game to streamers to play that I was sure this was an amazing community I should have joined years ago! You can develop some idea, try something new, read reviews of what people think and even watch somebody play your game!!

When you have somebody playing your game, they will not have your context, your answers, and you can't really help them. Whatever you managed to put into the game out of your head is now trying to stand for itself.

Watching a play from a game that didn't exist last Friday, reading the detailed feedback that some good souls leave and checking how that one special thing you spent three hours working on didn't quite work the way you thought it would work. That's where you get to learn.

Maybe for all of you it is obvious, but for me it clicked just after joining, so I wanted to share these thoughts. Nobody learns how to make games in a weekend, or learn anything by doing a game that nobody wants to play. We all learn when we keep reviewing the incredible stuff we all put into test in the last days :)

Thank you for playing our games! Keep doing it! ```