Hello good people of Ludum Dare!

I'm very excited about my recent news, so I thought I'd share a little history, and tell you about what's going on as of this week.

Around this time eight years ago, I was feeling a little lost. I was 19, and on a university course I was struggling to find any interest in. But I found something that started to turn things around.

Actually, it was two things. I watched Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary about the making of Super Meat Boy, Fez, and Braid; and I watched Amnesia Fortnight, a documentary about internal game jams held in the studio Double Fine. I found these dives into game design and development endlessly fascinating. A fire was sparked.

My cousin Niru had shared these documentaries with me, and found them equally captivating. He brought up the idea of game jams, and so we had a peek online to see what was around. We weren't really looking in earnest, only indulging a pipe dream we had begun to share. But we started thinking about it more seriously when we saw one particular result on Google: Ludum Dare 32 was taking place next week.

We got in touch with Will, a computer-savvy friend of ours, and together with my cousin and I, we decided on a whim to clear our weekends of interruptions and take part.

Our game was Latvian Milk. Looking back, I'm still kind of shocked the three of us made something this... un-terrible? By any rights, it should have been a disaster. I think we mostly have Will to thank for its success; while he'd never made a game, he was at least bringing some coding experience to the table unlike myself and my cousin. Not only did he largely code Latvian Milk over those 72 hours though, he was learning Unity from scratch while doing so. We all were.

It was scrappy, we got almost no sleep, but hot damn was that one of the most fun weekends I'd had. And that would be the beginning of a new and favourite hobby of mine. Over the years, I've taken part in ten Ludum Dare events. That's not all though, my cousin was serious enough about our new endeavour to head to the National Film and Television School here in the UK to study Game Design and Development. That gave our little team more skills and some great new friends and industry contacts. And thanks to many Ludum Dares, we had a refined workstream and a developed mutual understanding of our identity as a budding studio.

After Niru left NFTS, it was time to establish our studio officially. We founded Buried Things, taking the name from our LD45 entry of the same name. And for our first project, we decided to continue development of our LD46 game WAVER. So, we have to thank Ludum Dare for rather a lot. It made us the developers we are today, gave us our name and our first ever shipped title.

Links aren't working right now, but you can check out WAVER: A Typing Adventure on Steam!

And that brings us to today. Despite shipping our first title, and getting close to finishing our second, it's still been a side project until this point. But in the last month or two, we've found the means for me to finally go full-time with Buried Things! My last day of work in my old career was on Friday, and so this week marks the beginning of having 'Game Developer' be my day job. Awesome. And what better way to celebrate than with the next Ludum Dare?

This is the start of a journey I can't wait to undertake. The last few weeks for us have been about planning what our first steps into this new world will be. For starters, our next big project is also going to be a continuation of an LD game - Jingoku, made for LD49. Buried Things' ethos is also about open and communicative development. We want to show those anticipating our games how we're getting on; we want to be a resource for anyone who wants to develop their own games, or indeed develop their career in games; and we want fast feedback on what we're doing to help direct our games to a better place.

In that spirit, we're opening up a few channels of communication where anyone and everyone is welcome to join us. If you've enjoyed any of our previous LD games, or are interested in the behind-the-scenes of indie game development, you can catch us at our Discord channel (again, broken links, but the URL join code is /UW3jybuqrz). Through that you can check out our videos, streams and public issue boards.

Thanks for being a lovely community that encouraged us to participate and learn how to do this game dev thing properly. Best of luck with LD53, happy jamming!