come hang https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

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I know some of you are compo people, come hang https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

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tl;dr Our priority as a community should be to help Mike to get back on his feet. Not to try and split this decades old community into multiple different jams with their own rulesets, hours after Mike announced his financial troubles.

Ludum Dare is a very big community with many community voices, and it's been a huge part of all of our lives for many years. I have participated without fail in every jam since Ludum Dare 25, for over 12 years, and it made my entire career, without it I would not be a professional game dev. So I understand well what it means for LD to suddenly be apparently cancelled.

I also see a lot of people attacking Mike for not relinquishing the keys to the website to any number of unspecified subsets of LD participants who do not speak for everyone and yet would like to presume themselves the golden group to take over a community they did not build and, moreover, implement completely different interests, ideas and agendas for the site.

The thing that has made LD (despite all the minutiae we grumble about) successful and elevated it above the dozens of jams that occur every month is its consistency. People have run their own game jam ideas and sites for years. 99.9% of them did not gain significant traction.

Trying to clamber over the presumed corpse of Ludum Dare to promote one's own game jams mere hours after Mike announced financial troubles on its own homepage - I find it to be against the spirit of the community. Mike is not just that darned guy who posts the results 3 hours late sometimes, he's the guy who has taken dominion over this site, organising it at a loss for decades and steered it well.

There are few community projects that have ever had the longevity of LD. Many people who want the keys have only been at LD for a few years. To my knowledge, aside from myself, the only two people who have consistently participated in every Ludum Dare since the day I joined are Sheepolution and Mike Kasprzak. 2 people amongst tens of thousands.

Community run projects that do survive this long tend to switch leadership, and rewrite the rules. Tamriel Rebirth, one of the oldest mods, regularly destroys old contributor work and rewrites their entire design codex. I have seen many games I was a member of be destroyed by new leadership and mass exoduses as somewhere down the line the new community heads disagree with the original premise which made them unique and popular, and the new players they attract got bored. Go and seek the entire forum era of the internet, and I will show you the sandy leg of Ozymandias. And yet LD stands under Mike's relentless work

I am not disrespecting anyone's hard work. I'm sure a community made game jam can be successful. I also presume they will tend to converge on something that looks like itch.io, something to which Ludum Dare has extremely different values - for the better. LD attempts to prioritise peer review above popularity, anti brigading, and widespread interpersonal user interaction and community.

My instant reaction to "Mike, the person who has tirelessly worked to foster this incredible website for decades" is "let's help Mike!!", not "bye Felicia let's do our own jam". Nothing ever stopped anyone from doing their own jams. There are dozens every month. People are using Mike's hardship as a marketing opportunity to try and replace the singular best game jam in the history of the internet with ones that never had that level of interest, instead of helping the guy who worked tirelessly so we could enjoy ourselves and build these offset communities for years.

The site has never been faultless, but it has been consistent. Mike rarely makes radical polarising changes, he never sold the website out to dodgy interests, the worst you get with Mike is stuff runs a day or two off schedule sometimes. In this situation, a rare crisis has happened, and many people seem to be trying to callously market their enterprises instead of helping.

So let me be clear - I do not want to cancel Ludum Dare. For that sake, I would love if we can support Mike enough to keep it going or find sponsorship. Failing that, I am totally in favour of a "Community LD" that takes part on the scheduled 2025 dates, with the goal of then coming back here after the crisis.

But trying to move us all over to 3 entirely different jams run by multiple different interests and fracture the community, I find unpleasant and undecorous. If the LD Jam discord, the largest sub community, wants to keep things going, we can just host a simple itch jam, much like Ludum Dare 36 for those of you who remember it, was a bootleg jam without official scoring. And the world didn't end.

Now, if Mike completely gave up on LD forever, of course I would change my tune and hope that he would hand over the reigns to someone who shares his vision. But as it is, we should be coming together as a community to try and help Mike, and to failing that to try and keep the community together under the banner Ludum Dare, as we always have, as we as devs exist To Give a Game.

So glad to say I will be doing my 33rd consecutive Ludum Dare. Was extremely disheartened by the news but I'm really happy the community and industry came through for Big Kasprzak. LET'S JAM

just letting you lament what you could've had

seeing a bunch of great and unique themes and then ominously "depths" which already essentially won Ludum Dare 29 (Beneath the Surface) and 48 (Deeper and Deeper), and seeing other posts around like "I like mining!!", I'm having cold flashbacks

I played 200 games across those two jams where you mine down, or dive in water, no exceptions. how many games about collecting crystals or conserving air to get treasure chests do I really need to play in one lifetime. I promise you, the game you want to make in that theme has been done 1000 times. help defeat the Depths scourge so I never have to experience this theme again

this has to rank quite highly in the number of green themes for me and the lack of reds. usually I have like 16 reds 1 green one yellow

I HAVE NEVER BEEN WRONG. DON'T LET ANYONE TELL YOU OTHERWISE. GET IN HERE

https://www.twitch.tv/alexrosegames

it's not a shmup, it's SHMDOWN

you're taking a photo tour to hell. streaming day 1 now

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tooday I make the fun https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

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That is not the real title lolz. https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

Day 2. very silly game but it's going lol https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames once again I am making the positively dumbest game of all time

[parked while building]

https://youtu.be/V2nuouiESwQ

making a game I wanted to make for a long time https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames