Hello guys. I’m in LD26. I was in LD25 Compo, and participated in LD24 Jam with a team of some of my high school students (We called ourselves gbellgames ).

I’ve been thinking about Ludum Dare as a whole, and there two things that really bugs me.

One of them is the fact that most of the games are just, at most, concepts tests. Some games are simple nice concepts or ideas that last for like 5 minutes, if that much.  Don’t get me wrong, some of them are really genious, brilliant stuff, but I find hard it calling them “videogames” when they are so short-lived.

I personally have real difficulty to share a game made by me if it’s not a proper game, that make people want to play for longer than just the 5 minutes that takes  to grade it.  The 2 games I’ve worked for Ludum Dare were like that. You could call them good games or bad games, but they were *complete* games, not just a demo for a concept.

Of course, sometimes people just can’t cram a lot of content in a game in 48 hrs of development, but I wonder if some people just focus too much in trying to create a supposedly innovative concept, and they just forget about actually doing a game.

So, what you guys think about this?

(The other thing that bugs me is how people confuses artsy bullcrap with decent gameplay, but that’s for another post )