How I First Heard About Ludum Dare

I had originally heard about Ludum Dare from a local duo of composers called 'Fat Bard' here in my hometown of St. Louis. They had told me that Ludum Dare is the place to meet some of the big honchos in the development industry. That very same day that I heard about it, I looked it up and saw that it was starting that night. I joined Ludum Dare 58 just hours before it started, and I was able to find a wonderful teammate from Poland within a few hours on the Discord.

It was the first time that I did a game jam that had an extensive ranking system. I had no idea how everything worked, and I still kind of don't understand how some of the marketing like interactions work, but I think I'm getting somewhere.

What I Learned About Team Structure

Now I'm starting to think that in any game jam, having at least one person dedicated to code, one person dedicated to audio, and one person dedicated to graphics is the best way to go. Last year, I think that being just a two person team where neither of us had strong suits in art made it a little hard to get something out there without taking multiple all-nighters. But I thought the mechanics of the game that we did last year were awesome, and I really enjoyed making that.

Preparing Better This Year

I'm really happy that this year, instead of trying to find someone at the very last minute to be a part of a team, I decided to post my information on the Discord a week ahead of time. I was very lucky to be picked up by some wonderful folks from the Netherlands, and we made a great game together.

My Ranking Jump

For my second Ludum Dare, what I'm really proud of is my huge jump in rankings. I was able to learn from my logistics mistakes that I made last year, and as a result I was able to jump from 415th place in audio in LD 58 to 30th in audio in LD 59. Considering that there were 1610 entries this year, I consider that a huge win. I could not have done it without my team also making a fantastic game to incorporate my music and sound into.

The Challenge of Audio Visibility

I always tell people that one of the hardest things for us composers and sound designers to do is to market our skills, because really it is grossly invisible to most people. You have to convince people to actually put on headphones and click a button to listen to it before they can even acknowledge its existence. We almost need to have visuals and other non-audio elements to survive, especially in our now fast-food information diet on social media.

What Comes Next

I will be making a postmortem about how I did the music in Operation Alien Translation, hopefully in the next few days. I just didn't realize that because I'm new on this platform that the links I provided in the post will be hidden until I've gathered more interactions within the community, so now that I'm not drowning in work, I have time to hang out and meet some folks!

Gratitude

I also just want to thank all the folks in Ludum Dare for continuing to keep alive that spark for creativity and the game dev community, especially to the folks so far like Marcin, Sheep, and Shores that believed in the quality of my work enough to team up with me during this. Discovering the game dev community has literally been one of the best things that has happened to me in my life in the last few years. It is absolutely amazing to connect with all these talented and hardworking folks on here that human art alive!