Sorry about that! Uploading images should work again.

Test. :smile:

I'm running a few days late here, but Ludum Dare 49 has ended with just shy of 3000 games submitted!

Congratulations everyone that took part! :smile::thumbsup:

For roughly the next 2 weeks, we'd like to encourage you to play, rate, and give feedback on games submitted by your peers. The ratings and feedback you give is how we determine the results, so please, make your voice heard! Visit the homepage or the games page to get start.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/games

Tip: Leave and Like (:heart:) good feedback

In Ludum Dare, we have a system prioritizes your games if you participate in the play, rate, and feedback process. Currently the system is heavily weighted towards feedback, so make sure you're leaving feedback!

Also, keep an eye out for good feedback left by others, and give it a like (:heart:). That's how we know someone is doing good job with feedback.

Did you not finish? Were you unable to make time for LD49? Stay tuned!

Times have changed. For some it has become harder and harder to make time to do Ludum Dare. From family, work, and school obligations, to our schedule just not working for you.

We've heard you loud and clear, and we think we have a solution. :smile:

We'll be making the announcement next year, ahead of Ludum Dare 50, of our new flexible event: Ludum Dare Encore.

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay informed, or join the discussion on Twitter at #LudumDareEncore.

Results Awards Show? Sort of! Do you want to make one?

A lot of people assume an event as prestigious as ours has an award show at end. If you've taken part in Ludum Dare, unfortunately you know that we don't do that. Results day can be somewhat anticlimactic: Play and Rate closes, and a few hours later results go live.

We can do better, but today I'm short on the manpower necessary to organize and pull something extravagant together.

I had an idea though.

For Ludum Dare 49, we're going to try this: Instead of "flipping the switch" when we're ready, we're going to live-tweet a countdown of the Top 10 games from the event (Jam and Compo). The winners will be spaced out several minutes apart to give everyone time to download and play them. I'm still working on the specifics, but expect this to take place over a 2-3 hour period, giving each game (or pair of games) 10-15 minutes in the spotlight.

Why?

Well this way anyone can play along, but my hope is we get some talented streamers and YouTubers covering the results, which means more of your games get time in the spotlight (not just the winner).

Reaction streams and videos are popular, but I don't think anything exactly like this has been done before. I'm extremely curious to see how this goes.

All results will then become public shortly after we finish live-tweeting.

GameMaker Community Showcase Competition

Our sponsor GameMaker asked us to let you know about their latest contest.

Opera and Game Maker are hosting a competition with a $45,000 USD prize pool to celebrate all the wonderful games made with GameMaker Studio 2. The Community Showcase Competition is aimed at creators of existing and free games made with GameMaker.

Whether you made your game for Ludum Dare or not, you're eligible to enter.

Opera and GameMaker recently launched GXC, a brand new online portal for games created in GameMaker. You can use free version of GameMaker Studio 2 to export games to GXC, and share them with your friends.

Here's how to submit.

Core games need your help!

We're thrilled to see that at least 9 of you decided to give Core a try this past Ludum Dare. I think it's a really fascinating tool, and encourage more developers to check it out.

Anyway, the downside of making a game in Core (or Roblox) is that you need Core installed to actually play the games. Core is currently available as a free download on the Epic Game Store (Windows only).

https://www.coregames.com/download

Manticore Games really helped us out by sponsoring the event, and I would really appreciate it if you could help us out by installing Core and checking out the games built with it. Sponsorships go a long way towards helping us improve the event, and I really want them to have a positive experience working with us.

You can find a list of all Core games submitted here:

https://ldjam.com/tags/platform/core

Thank you!

Ludum Dare 50: LD's 20th anniversary, coming April 1st-4th, 2022

Wow, 20 years! Did you know we're older than Twitter? Older than YouTube? Older than Facebook?

Yup! We started this crazy thing back in April of 2002.

Be sure you come back April 1st-4th weekend, no joke, that's when we're holding Ludum Dare 50.

Sign up for our email newsletter and we'll remind you.

Wrap-up

That's it for now. Go play and rate games! :smile::thumbsup:

Hey folks!

As Ludum Dare 49 comes to a close, here's a summary of what to expect.

LIVE: Counting down the Top 15 Compo and Jam games

We're trying a new thing!

It has come up time and time again "Hey Ludum Dare, you should do a live results show". I'm somewhat limited in what I can produce by myself, but instead of doing nothing, I thought I'd try live-tweeting the results... well, some of them.

https://twitter.com/ludumdare

Starting at 7:30 PM ET, 4:30 PM PT, and 23:30 UTC, the main Ludum Dare twitter account will countdown the top 15 games. Every 10 minutes, two games will be tweeted out: one from the Jam and one from the Compo. This will last for about two and a half hours. We'll be using hashtags #LDJAM and #LDLIVE.

My hope is that we get some live streamers to try the games. Anybody that wants to see the top-15 games played can jump between various live streams in the sidebar widget or on Twitch.

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/all/tags/c8d6d6ee-3b02-4ae7-81e9-4c0f434941cc

If you're streaming, be sure to use the Ludum Dare tag on Twitch. FYI: Due to a Twitch API omission, the sidebar widget currently only monitors streams with their game set to Software and Game Development. The link above to the Ludum Dare tag will find everything.

I wasn't sure what the right amount of time is, but I decided to try 10 minutes per pair of games. Yes this does mean not everybody will get a chance to play both games, but my hope is this encourages viewers to jump between multiple streams. As a streamer you might decide to play whatever you want, play just the Jam or Compo games, or multi-stream with a friend. What you do is up to you.

Finally, at the end of the countdown, I'll flip the switch letting everyone view their personalized results.

Cool?

Anyway, I'm off to grab a few Zzz's before the kickoff. See you in a few hours!

Mini FAQ

What is this "Compo" vs "Jam" thing?

We have 2 categories that people submit games to when doing Ludum Dare. The Compo is our "hardcore solo" category, and the Jam our regular category. People making games for the Compo have to work alone, and they only have 48 hours to make their games. Everyone else gets 72 hours, and they can optionally work in a team, but not everyone does.

How often do you do Ludum Dare events?

Currently we do them every 6 months: Every April and October. Follow us on Twitter, or our email newsletter for announcements.

Phew! Ludum Dare 49 has ended! That was fun. Did you join us for the live results? Let me know what you thought about it in the comments below.

Shout-out to PomoTheDog, MarcMagus, and BougieBirdie for streaming the games, and @anchorlight for live-blogging the results here on the website. :smile: :thumbsup:

Results

The results for each category can be found here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/results

You can check your game page for your individual results (via the My Game link up top).

Congratulations everyone! You made a game!

Ludum Dare 50: Ludum Dare's 20th Anniversary! April 1st-4th weekend

No joke, our next event will be April 1st weekend, AND it's Ludum Dare's 20th anniversary! Crazy, I know!

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay informed.

https://newsletter.ldjam.com :mailbox:

Or follow us on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/ludumdare :bird:

Huge thanks to our sponsors!

Before we go, I'd like to give a big shout-out to our sponsors for Ludum Dare 49: Intel, GameMaker Studio 2, and Core.

Now that you've built a game, if you plan to commercialize it, don't forget about Intel's GameDev Boost program!

Next week, October 27-28th is Intel's InnovatiON online event. If you tune in, you might catch some familiar faces. :wink:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/on-event-series.html

If you made a game in GameMaker Studio 2, don't forget, you're eligible for GameMaker's Community showcase competition. Details on how to submit are here.

And I'll be back Monday with a look at the Core games created for Ludum Dare 49. I'll be checking out the 9 games created in Core. Some really cool stuff. :smile:

Thanks again!

Ending the old "Google Groups" mailing list

It's bittersweet, but tomorrow I'll be sending the last message(s) to our google groups mailing list. The Google Groups list replaces a mailing list I used to run on my old Sykhronics mail server... except it was actually a discussion list, not a mailing list, but we managed to go years without people realizing they could respond.... haha :laughing: :sweat_drops:

As mentioned, our current email newsletter is here:

https://newsletter.ldjam.com

See you in April

That's it for me. See you next year for the 50th anniversary of Ludum Dare! :fireworks:

Core was one of the last sponsors we signed for Ludum Dare 49, announced just a few days before the event. So while time was short, I’m excited to share that we had many Core games submitted to Ludum Dare 49!

Core represents a very different, but important take on game development. My generation learned to make games from the ground up, because frankly, we didn’t have another choice. But while I was making GameBoy, PlayStation, and mobile games, this whole other generation grew up in Roblox, which blossomed into its own billion dollar gaming economy. For the next generation, I think Core has so much going for it, with its modern graphics tech (Unreal Engine), multiplayer out-of-the-box, robust scripting (Lua), and its novel approach to asset creation (kitbashing).

Let’s take a look at what folks made in Core.

Galactic Card Quest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLIUFTEN2mo

This is a deckbuilding battle card game. You get 3 energy per turn, and you spend them to play cards. You collect items and new cards as you play.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/galactic-card-quest

This game does a great job of showcasing what the asset pipeline of Core does for you. The graphics are stunning, especially for something made over a weekend. The card game mechanics are pretty good. Once you figure out the basics, you can power through many stages, but the enemies do eventually get strong enough that you need to really plan your actions. I definitely think there’s potential here.

Creaky Castle

This game made great use of the theme. You jump between platforms collecting treasure, fighting monsters, and levelling your character. The team at Core let me know this was a solo effort from one of Core's largest creators. Nice! Welcome back randomphantom. :smile:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/creaky-castle

I really like the simple RPG mechanics here. Missing a jump can be frustrating, but it works in a “flappy bird punishment” sort of way. This was the game I spent the most time playing. I never quite made it onto the scoreboard, but I keep thinking about giving it another try.

Portal Town Rescue

This game is essentially an escape room. You can’t leave until you’ve harvested enough resources and built structures to de-corrupt the portal.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/portal-town-rescue

The team admitted to being a little lost creating this, but I think they did a fine job. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you get there. I haven’t played much with Core’s physics, but I was quite amused seeing the trees flop around after cutting them down.

Corrupted Core

This endurance game has you activating machines, using your magic to uncorrupt them. Keep this going as long as you can before the reactor blows.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/corrupted-core

My best time was 1:35.

More Games

• AlchemyChaos - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/alchemychaos
• Unstable Multiplayer Speed Runner - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-multiplayer-core-speed-runner
• Unstable Worlds - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-worlds
• The Unstable Challenge of Space Time - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/the-unstable-challenge-of-space-time
• Unstable Universe - https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/unstable-universe

Wrap-up

Wrapping up, I want to give a big thanks to Core for sponsoring us. I’m really excited about what they’re doing, and the potential to really shake-up how games are made. I look forward to seeing what folks make in Core next time.

If you would like to check out Core before Ludum Dare 50, grab it from the Epic Game Store for free at: https://bit.ly/Core-LD49, and check out the list of tutorials and documentation in my original post about Core.

Ludum Dare 50 is kind-of a big deal. It's been 20 years since we started, and no joke, our anniversary event begins on Friday April 1st. What a curious date? :wink:

We're still getting setup here, but in the mean time feel free to go make some Theme Suggestions. For this event the Theme Selection will be the same as usual: make suggestions, slaughter, 3 rounds of theme voting plus a final round.

We are making some changes though.

New Decade, New Rules, New Event Format

Behind the scenes I've been making some of the biggest changes. Everything is still open source, but for clarity I've spun-off the code that runs this--the event website--into its own project. In time the project will become less "Ludum Dare" specific, but one step at a time.

Next, the rules are being moved. They're not live yet, but the new rules will soon be available on ludumdare.com/rules. The move will make it easier for anyone to contribute fixes, changes, and translations via the ludumdare.com project on GitHub.

Finally the rules are being heavily reworked, for the first time in nearly 5 years. The core will still be the same--hopefully easier to understand--but we had to make room for the new event format: Ludum Dare Extra.

Ludum Dare Extra

Like the "Compo" and "Jam" formats before it, games can now be submitted in the "Extra" format. Ludum Dare Extra games are like Ludum Dare Jam games, but you have nearly 3 weeks to submit them, until we stop collecting feedback and ratings for the event. There are no final scores given in the Extra format, and thus no winners. What Extra does have is feedback. When you submit a game in the Extra format, you still get to take part in the feedback and rating process. You are encouraged (incentivized) to submit as early as possible, to give ratings and feedback, so you get feedback on your game.

The goal of Ludum Dare Extra is to make taking part in Ludum Dare more flexible. Time is not always on our side, and to have to wait 6 whole months between events because it landed on a bad weekend is extremely unfortunate. The new Extra format effectively gives you 2 more weekends to make a game and still be a part of Ludum Dare 50: April 9th weekend and April 16th weekend, but you are also free to choose your own schedule. We like weekends, but you do you.

Ludum Dare Extra submissions will be open from Friday April 1st to Thursday April 21st.

Results for the Jam and Compo events will go live later in the day on April 21st.

Wrap-up

That's it from me for now. Feel free to tweet at me or e-mail me if something breaks.

To kick-off LD's 50th event and 3rd decade, I'm thrilled to announce that Ludum Dare has a new format!

In addition to the Jam and Compo, you can now choose a 3rd option "Extra" when submitting to Ludum Dare.

• The Extra format is a modified Jam format
• There are no winners in the Extra format, but you still give ratings and feedback, and get ratings and feedback
  • NOTE: Extra ratings are unused. In the future they will let you compare against the Jam/Compo
• Extra format games are due on Results Day: April 21st, nearly 3 weeks later! Choose your own schedule!
• Again there are no winners in the Extra format, but you are incentivized to finish to get feedback with everyone else
• IMPORTANT: Please only use Jam, Compo, and Extra for finished games. Otherwise choose Unfinished.

The Extra format has many other uses:

• It can be used to opt-out of the competitive side of Ludum Dare
• If you miss Ludum Dare weekend, you have 2 more weekends to choose from: April 8th-11th and April 15th-18th
• If you're unable to finish by the Jam deadline, or you need an extra day, you can take it and not miss out
• If you want to spend a week on a game and get feedback (by giving feedback), you can do that now
• This isn't supported yet: In the future you will be able to submit multiple games
  • One Jam/Compo game, and any number of Extra games
  • To get ratings and feedback for all your games, you'll have to give 2x-3x more feedback and ratings
  • IMPORTANT: Your Jam/Compo and Extra games should be different games
• If you want to create and rapidly evolve a game over ~3 weeks, trading feedback for feedback on updates, you can
  • NOTE: While this is allowed, it is not well supported
  • The problem: Our prioritization is logarithmic; It takes and more and more feedback to get the same effect
  • We plan to improve prioritization to better enable this (and fix other algorithm problems)
  • IMPORTANT: Today this is only allowed in the Extra format. You give up placing in the Jam/Compo
  • However, we are exploring evolving Jam/Compo games into a hybrid, with separate scores and feedback

Setting aside a weekend to jam isn't always possible. With Extra, I hope more of you can find the time.

The Future

I've left the ratings enabled for Extra games because we have a use for them, but it may take a while before we do it. Calculating stats and metics happens on the same servers as the website, and I've had to put hard limits on calculations to keep the website responsive. Once all of this is offloaded to different servers, we can do some serious number crunching. :fire:

Submitting multiple games, this has come up a few times. Before, when events were only 48 and 72 hours, I would tell people to "pick one"--their best, their favourite--and submit that. Now with a nearly 3 week window to make games, I can't really do that anymore. The feature is closely related to blogging between, team building, as well as managing and deleting content (posts and games). All of those are tentatively scheduled for LD51 as part of a major code cleanup and triage. When that is finished, we can come back to this.

The name "Extra" comes from its original goal: To let you add new games to previous Ludum Dare events. I was waiting to add this after migration was finished (BTW: it's finally happening end of 2022/early 2023). But as inspiration hit, Extra grew to encompass many exciting new ideas, and it became worth trying sooner.

Finally, the thing I'm most excited about is that last bullet point: evolving a game over the ~3 weeks. We're not stopping anyone from doing this today, but you will run into roadblocks. Ludum Dare was never designed for this, but I'm so excited about the potential. For years I've racked my brain for good ways to drive engagement to ratings and feedback process. Introducing Extra games was the start, but the next step is to extend some of what Extra offers to all games.

The tricky part: Submissions to the competitive events--Jam and Compo--need to be unaffected. Once managing multiple games is supported (LD51), we can let you add a "post-event" Extra game as a child of your Jam/Compo game. These will work the same as other Extra games, but we can avoiding showing the same game twice, and send players to your Extra game once you have enough Jam/Compo ratings.

Fundamentally this requires a new game prioritization algorithm, one suited to ongoing feedback. The algorithm we use today is more feedback focused--we nerfed the rating lots of games quickly exploit--but it was still designed to diminish the value of ratings and feedback over time.

To get the most out of Ludum Dare, give feedback to others. In turn, you'll get feedback.

For 20 years, Ludum Dare was about coming together and challenging ourselves to make something. I'm excited to see Ludum Dare grow from game creation into game iteration.

Welcome to Ludum Dare 50, and the 20th anniversary of Ludum Dare!

Yes, we ran the very first Ludum Dare 20 years ago, back in April of 2002. That's a lot of caffeine ago. :sweat_smile:

Without further ado, lets get to it.

Final Round Theme Voting has begun

Cast your vote here: :ballot_box: /events/ludum-dare/50/theme

For rules and other info, visit the event page here: :trophy: /events/ludum-dare/50

If you don't want to figure out timezones, the theme announcement is when the clock (top-right) reaches zero.

TIP: The ldjam.com website gets really busy before the Theme Announcement. We recommend you follow the official Twitter account, and sign-up for the E-mail Newsletter.

NEW: Extra, the new casual Ludum Dare

I'm thrilled to announce that Ludum Dare has a brand new format!

When submitting your game, you can now choose between the Jam, Compo, or the new Extra format. Extra is Ludum Dare's casual format. There are no winners in the Extra format, but you get to choose your own schedule. Create and submit your Extra games anytime between Friday April 1st and Thursday April 21st--that's nearly 3 weeks! Submit early, and you still get to be a part of Ludum Dare's feedback process: Give feedback, and get feedback.

Learn more about Extra here: /events/extra-the-new-casual-ludum-dare

Rules updates: Extra format, optional Theme, Unfinished games

We'll be publishing a brand new version of Ludum Dare's rules soon. The main difference is the inclusion of the new Extra format detailed above, but there are few other changes I'd like to highlight:

• You can now optionally opt-out of the Theme category. This is not required.
• Please only submit finished games using the Jam, Compo, and Extra formats.
• If your game isn't finished, choose Unfinished instead.

That's everything new this time.

We will continue to evolve the Extra format over the next few events. See the future section for a sneak peek of what's to come. We'll have more to share in September/October for Ludum Dare 51.

On chat communities, and future plans

I shared a short Twitter thread the other day. The TL;DR is that I've been told several times that some folks don't feel welcome on the chat servers that represent Ludum Dare. We don't run any, but that may have to change. This unease is in part due to the "male skew" of gaming and technology, but also because nobody is really trying hard enough. If you'd like to share your experience, my inbox is open. Sometime after LD50, I'd like to engage and chat privately with folks about it.

I don't use public chat rooms, so I don't have ambitions to create some "ultimate" chat server or anything, but it has become clear this isn't something we can ignore. I've always intended for Ludum Dare to be a welcoming and inclusive community, a place for creators new and old to come together. Chat rooms play a vital role for many.

I'll work out the details in the coming months, but my intention is to hire someone to run and moderate an official Ludum Dare chat and help channel, someone that isn't a cis-white-dude like me. I do my best to be conscious to the issues, but I could do one better, and bring on someone with life experience. Their job will be to run and moderate the chat (a potentially quiet chat between events), and they'll have a direct line to me for anything that needs escalating. I'd like to find other ways they can help out, if nothing else, steering me in the right direction when it comes to issues a cis-white-dude might be blind to. I don't have a huge budget for this, and I don't expect them to be glued to the chat, but I'd like it to be worth their while.

Again, I have no interest in dethroning or replacing any of the chat servers out there. I just want is ensure there is a place everyone feels welcome and safe talking about Ludum Dare.

NEW: the Ludum Dare & Game Jams Twitter community

Twitter recently launched "communities", a new way for groups to tweet about a shared topic. Naturally we created one for ourselves. Community feeds are public, but interactions within the community (tweets, comments, likes) are limited to members only. To start, it's wide open and anyone can join. If we need to restrict or moderate it, we will.

I also decided to cast a wider net with it. Right now, Ludum Dare events only happen twice a year, over a couple 5-8 week periods. That's a lot of inactivity. So because "why not", I decided to try and make it the community for Ludum Dare and other Game Jams on Twitter. They key is that we (Ludum Dare/Mike/Interactive Snacks) are taking responsibility for it. If it becomes something, we'll give it the attention it deserves.

Join the Ludum Dare & Game Jams Twitter community at the link below.

twitter.com/i/communities/1509183497361104896

NOTE: Be sure you're logged in to Twitter, else this link will fail.

Keynote: Keynoter's Reunion, 20 years in the making

At long last, it's time for your featured presentation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC2KGu__2Ws

Thank you everyone that contributed to this. :wink:

Wrap-up

That's it for me. See you Friday for the main event.

The competitive Ludum Dare weekend has ended, but we're still here and we're still making games!

Welcome to Extra, the new casual Ludum Dare

Unlike the Jam and Compo, Ludum Dare's extra format doesn't have winners. What it does have is over 2 weeks left to make something and still be a part of Ludum Dare's feedback and ratings process! :sunglasses: :tropical_drink:

If you didn't finish your Ludum Dare in time, no problem! Take another day!

If you missed out, no problem! Try again this weekend (April 8th-11th) or next (April 15th-18th)!

Pick what works best for you!

Don't wait too long though! Extra submissions close on results day (April 21st), and if you're not early, you'll miss out getting feedback on your game!

See the full write-up for more ideas on how to how to make the most of the next couple weeks.

NOTE: We still collect ratings on Extra games (for future use), but you can opt-out of ratings entirely for a pure casual Ludum Dare experience. When you opt out, you can still give and get feedback!

Time to Play, Rate, and give Feedback

For everyone did finish a game this past weekend, now's your chance to play, rate, and give feedback on games.

If you'd like to get a score at the end of the Play+Rate+Feedback period, be sure to play other games. We prioritize your game when you give ratings and good feedback. The system is most heavily weighted towards feedback, and we encourage you to like :heart: good feedback when you see it. :smiley:

Everyone making an Extra game can join us once they finish. :slight_smile:

Keynote Reunion, celebrating 20 years of Ludum Dare

In case you didn't hear, Ludum Dare 50 is also Ludum Dare's 20th anniversary! We're old!

To mark the occasion, I reached out to every previous Ludum Dare keynoter, and ask them to join us for this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC2KGu__2Ws

Thanks everyone for helping make this happen!

Wrap-up

That's it from me. Thank you everyone that came out for Ludum Dare weekend, and thank you everyone that's now joining us for the Casual Ludum Dare.

Ludum Dare's 50th event is coming to a close. At the time of publication, we have a day and a half left. See the sidebar clocks for specific times.

Jam and Compo

If you'd like to receive a score on results day, you should play, give ratings and feedback to other submitted games. You can find recommendations of what to play on the homepage, or the full list of recommendations here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/games/

If you're a Mac or Linux user, you can use the following links to find games you can play:

• https://ldjam.com/tags/platform/apple-macos
• https://ldjam.com/tags/platform/linux

IMPORTANT: This is a workaround! These pages don't act the same as recommendations. You're less likely to be credited for feedback on games found outside of recommendations. Also, these lists include games from previous events!

Extra

Extra games are not scored, but we do collect ratings for future use.

There is no submission hour for Extra games because we wont disable publishing of Extra games. However, we will disable "joining" the event once results go live. So as long as you join before results go live, you can still submit an Extra game.

This requirement will be relaxed in the future. This is simply a limitation of how the website works today.

Though ratings will end, Extra game authors are free to continue playing and giving feedback after the rating period ends. Recommendations from feedback should continue to work, but we expect the number of active players to diminish after results day.

Use this link to browse recommendations:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/games/

What happens after the rating period ends? Why 6 hours?

We run some scripts behind the scenes to calculate results. Then we audit the results, make sure the winners are the legit winners. This process typically takes 1-2 hours, but if when we find something or something goes wrong, we've given ourselves some buffer time.

Once finished, we start our final preparations to kick-off the results ceremony.

Results Ceremony! Top 15 Countdown on Twitter!

To make the end of Ludum Dare more interesting, we've started live-tweet the top-15 games from the Jam and Compo.

https://twitter.com/ludumdare

Every 10 minutes, we share a new pair of games: one from the Jam, and one from the Compo. We do this for 2 hours and 30 minutes. About 5 minutes after the last game is revealed, all results will become available.

The goal is to eventually move the ceremony here to the website (or rather, do both), but all I'm promising today is the live-tweeting.

Also my apologies to those in the EU, but the ceremony and the results do go live pretty late. We will be moving the times up next time.

Live Stream the Results Ceremony on Twitch!

This is where I need your help!

A pair of tweets every 10 minutes isn't very exciting. What's more exciting is watching people play the winning games.

During Ludum Dare 49 we had 3 streamers playing the winning games. This worked out great, since some streamers needed more than 10 minutes for each game. As a viewer, you could use the sidebar tv widget to "flip channels" and see the other games.

My personal "stretch goal" for Ludum Dare 50 is to get a jumbo TV widget front and center during the results ceremony. It might be a little rough around the edges, but I really enjoyed the channel flipping experience. If that doesn't work out though, we'll be sure to highlight what's going on, and where to find the streams.

All current Ludum Dare streams on Twitch can be found here:

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/all/tags/c8d6d6ee-3b02-4ae7-81e9-4c0f434941cc

Wrap-up

I believe that's everything. If I missed anything I'll either update this, or post in the comments.

I have one final news post to share after the ceremony, with details how to check your scores, and perhaps some other announcements. :wink:

See you Thursday!

And the big five-oh has ended!

Did you join us for the live results? Let me know what you thought about it in the comments below.

Shout-out to PomoTheDog, MarcMagus, HonestDanGames, Aarimous, badcop_, potkirland, and Crefossus for streaming! :smile: :thumbsup:

Results

The results for each category can be found here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/results

You can check your game page for your individual results (via the My Game link up top).

Congratulations everyone! You made a game!

Ludum Dare 51: September 30th-October 3rd weekend

October 1st fell on a Saturday, but no big deal, we'll do LD51 on September 30th instead.

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay informed. Also, sign up to find out when we switch away from Revue. :wink:

https://newsletter.ldjam.com :mailbox:

Or follow us on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/ludumdare :bird:

New Sponsor: Akamai and Linode

I'm thrilled to announce that Akamai Technologies has sponsored Ludum Dare. Also, we'll be using their services to improve our infrastructure! Be sure you come back in September to see what we've done. Will game embedding make it's triumphant return? :wink:

Akamai also recently acquired Linode, our server host for the past 7 years. Nice! :smiley:

I was a big fan of Linode before, and the two companies really compliment each other with their offerings. I'm extremely excited to see what we can do with Akamai and Linode helping us out. :cloud: :cloud_lightning: :cloud:

Press release here.

Thank's for making these past 20 years amazing!

We're not done yet, but what an amazing run so far. I'm extremely excited about the potential for Extra, and how it might change or shape Ludum Dare in the future. :smile:

Thank you for being a part of this!

We will see you again in September/October. :ghost:

Hey folks!

Ludum Dare 51 is coming up in a few weeks (September 30th to October 3rd weekend), and we have some exciting new things we're about to launch. Most significantly: game uploading and embedding!

Sign-ups for Ludum Dare 51 should open by the weekend, but until then, this week we're deploying and testing out this new feature. Uploading and embedding is a big change for us, and we want to be sure it's working well in advance of the event.

With that in mind, you may see some funny stuff on the website over the next couple days. :sweat_smile: Feel free to leave a comment or send me a note if anything problematic persists.

The next few days are internal testing. We do plan to do a public stress test shortly after (either later in the week or next week). I'll share more details in follow-up posts, and on our Twitter.

https://twitter.com/ludumdare

Thank you for your patience!

Hey folks!

There's lots to talk about, so lets get right to it.

Theme Suggestions are open! Pick 2 instead of 3

Since this keeps coming up, earlier this year we were having a conversation about the Theme Selection process. "The Theme Sucks" is a popular meme within the community, which is why we have multiple rounds of selection. But once you drop the crude and senseless themes, the true "quality" of an individual theme becomes more gray. Like pizza toppings, we'll never have a consensus on pineapple. :pizza: :pineapple: :yum:

Aside from denying some users the right to vote and make suggestions (yikes), a less controversial suggestion was to simply lower the number of suggestions everyone can make. The proposal was to give everyone 1 suggestion, but that felt too low to me. I think 3 is a good number, but given our size, I have been concerned about the amount of work giving everyone 3 suggestions has been creating. Not everyone completes the Slaughter, but those that do are heroes of the community, and I don't want them to get sick of it. :sweat_smile:

So for Ludum Dare 51, you can only make 2 theme suggestions, and we'll see how that goes.

The Theme Slaughter, like all systems, has its flaws. It lets us broadly find preferred themes and bury inappropriate suggestions, but it leaves a bunch of cleanup work after the fact. Currently this means I need to take an hour to manually filter through the top 100 themes, and remove themes I decide are too similar ("Shadows" vs "In Shadow" vs "Shade" vs "Shadowrun"), until I get the final 48. I'll be honest, this is probably my least favorite "running Ludum Dare" task, but I also feel extremely uneasy calling our process democratic while I personally control the theme list.

I'm not kidding, this genuinely bothers me.

An alternative system I've been meaning to try is something I call "Theme Fusion". Instead of "swiping left or right" to yay/nay a theme, themes are presented in pairs. "Evolution vs Swarms", which do you like better? This format also lets you help me find suggestions that are too similar. "Flying Islands vs Floating Islands", these are really close so you flag them as "the same", but you still choose a preference like Floating. Right now when I remove similar themes post-slaughter, the highest scoring theme is added to the list. It doesn't matter if I prefer the wording of a later suggestion, highest wins. I think shorter more concise themes work best, but the "highest wins" rule means "Flying Islands over the Atlantic" might beat "Floating Islands", to get crushed in the later voting rounds. Grouping (fusing) same themes together, AND deciding a favorite among the grouped (fused), I think this should yield better result than "highest wins".

Theme Fusion isn't without its flaws. The biggest thing I worry about though is the amount of work required to "complete it". It's exponentially more than the Slaughter! I don't like wasting anyone's time, so I don't think I'd be comfortable switching to Fusion until we've reduced the amount of extra work it creates.

Today unfortunately the Theme Fusion isn't ready, and the Theme Slaughter has been stagnant. Later parts of this post should help clarify why, but in short term, reducing the number of suggestions should make completing the Theme Slaughter less work, and I think that's the least we should do.

Core Software Upgrades

Some really big fixes and changes to the website are about to drop. The first lines of the code used by ldjam.com were written nearly 8 years ago, and if I'm honest I was not an experienced web developer back then. :sweat_smile: I've been building software since the 90's, and as much as I would like to "start over" with a clean slate, that would suck and we'd be left stagnant (again) until I finished.

So I've gone back, and I've been cleaning things up. I've upgraded dependencies and removed some fat (goodbye Internet Explorer support). There's some initial TypeScript support in there, and in general debugging works a lot better. Builds are still slow and take several minutes, but groundwork for switching to a fast compiler (transpiler) is almost finished: minutes to seconds. There'll be lots more to do post merge, but if you wanted to know why fetaure X or Y hasn't been done yet, besides the lack of time the TL;DR is the code got kinda gross these past 8 years. :sweat_smile:

Anyways, I hope to get this pushed in the next couple days. There's a lot of little fixes (things I haven't mentioned like the cache bug), but the point was to make working with the code more sensible and less of a pain. As things stand, the page styles are a little broken (meh), but more importantly game browsing is broken. We probably want that to work before this goes live though. :sweat_smile:

Game Uploading and Embedding is coming soon!

I'm really excited about this.

I've been working with Akamai to support uploading and embedding your games right here on ldjam.com.

Security in the web browser changed a lot this past decade. It used to be fine to create an <iframe> and stick another website in it. That's how we supported game embedding back when web games were Flash. Today we need to be careful of side-chain attacks (Spectre), malicious JavaScript, or data leaking though something as harmless looking as an <img> tag. We also need to explicitly set HTTP headers to allow or deny features, like putting our own website inside an <iframe>. It's complicated and it kinda sucks, but that the price we pay for the breadth and flexibility of the web.

When we launched ldjam.com, we locked everything down. No more off site images, no more embedded iframes (except a short list of approved websites like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Twitch), no more HTML styling of posts. With web browsers constantly adding new features AND getting exploited, that the safer approach was to opt-in to a feature than to opt-out.

There's also the cost: storage space and bandwidth isn't free. Services offer it for free, but the costs are paid in some other way. I think I'm pretty good at keeping my server costs low, but I didn't have burden of file hosting (only images).

So when Akamai and I were brainstorming what we could do together, we agreed that making embedded web-games a part of Ludum Dare again would be the perfect project.

We've been testing this feature out for the past couple weeks. We found some problems, fixed some problems, and we're nearly ready to open this up to you. I think the UX is a bit ugly, so I'm working to finish the core upgrade mentioned above, and then give it a polish pass.

Early next week I'd like to host a short public beta test. Follow us on Twitter, ~~sign up for the newsletter~~, or check back this weekend for details.

Until then, for a sneak peek, you can check out the embedding guide page:

https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/

The guide is brief, but it will be expanded as we go. We were quite aggressive with our security sandbox. Cookies, storage (local, session, DB), and making outgoing HTTP requests are all disabled. That may require you to tweak your library code. In our testing, Safari halted games that used storage when the sandbox blocks it, where Chrome and Firefox errored but let the game run. Our environment is cross origin isolated, so WebAssembly exported games should run at full speed with precision timers.

Oh, and you can upload your "regular" games to Ludum Dare as well--It doesn't have to be a web game.

We have no plans to stop anyone from linking off site. All existing links will continue to work, and you can add more links in the future. To me, the point of all this was to bring game embedding back to Ludum Dare, but as a side bonus we also support "regular" game uploading. If nothing else, it means we could host a backup copy for you.

In the future, I would like to support tracking download numbers, provide statistics, and do some analysis on uploads themselves. The last one is something my friend Lars and I have chatting about. Last year he did some work with SteamDB to detect what tools Steam games were built with (Unity, GameMaker, Godot, etc). We unfortunately have years of untagged games in our catalog, so I would love a way to auto-populate that data. Not to mention, once we had this data, we could see what tool trends have emerged in Ludum Dare over the years and compare them to Steam. As an example, I have anecdotal evidence from watching Ludum Dare events that Godot usage is growing fast, but since it's still early, the number of published Godot games on Steam is still low.

Lots of exciting possibilities here, not to mention it will make submitting games simpler for new users.

Spam

We're working on it!

Akamai is helping us investigate our suspicious incoming traffic. I'll save the details for another day, but a shocking bit of early data was that in "the off season", nearly 50% of all requests to ldjam.com are clients probing us for an attack. Things like requests for ldjam.com/wp-admin.php. While technically yes we did used to run WordPress, that was on ludumdare.com, never here.

Basically, if we weren't running custom software, our spam problem would be much worse. :sweat_smile:

That said, just because bots can't spam us doesn't mean people can't. I wish I could remember the name, but there's a good documentary about this modern "human assisted" spam business. The TL;DR is that humans solve captcha's, create accounts, find textboxes to dump in, and run macros that spit out bile.

What's funny is our SEO is completely broken (on the TODO list). The way the website currently works (100% JavaScript), search engines can't index us properly. We're being spammed, and the spammers get zero return from it. Someone is being paid to dump trash where no search engine will see it, and no user will ever care. :laughing:

Anyway, it's one thing to hunt down and delete spam, and another to solve it.

In the near term, I'll be adding a report button to comments and posts. That might be a week or so from now, sometime after the Core Software Upgrade goes live. As we collect data, we'll see what we learn, what patterns emerge.

Sometime after the event, I'll go back and add what folks have reported on GitHub:

https://github.com/JammerCore/JammerCore/issues/1775

SEO issues aside, now that Ludum Dare hosts games, we will potentially become an even juicier target. I've had to be extra careful with how we added uploading and embedding. I guess what I'm saying is that I do take this seriously, but it's not enough to just delete a few posts. I don't see this getting better without studying it, and some engineering.

I guess it's one of those "good" problems to have? Signs of success? :sweat_smile:

Other Interesting Threads

Before I go, there's been some good conversations going on that I want to bring your attention to.

• Using AI art/content generators in Ludum Dare? Should they be allowed?
• Is the Karma system working?

Thanks everyone!

Reflecting on twenty years of Ludums and Dares, the “game jam” has become a staple of game development education, recreation, and the profession. Who knew what taking a “dare” too far would do?

How I found myself in a jam

Growing up, I was obsessed with computers and video games. If I wasn’t playing games, I was reading about or dreaming of making them. I read and reread the same books on programming the Commodore 64--my family’s 8-bit computer. I repurposed stacks of perforated printer paper as sketchbooks. I doodled maps and chunky pixel fonts on every sheet of graph paper I found. I’d hang out with friends to play their Nintendo or Sega Master System to expose myself to more and more games.

I was that kid.

The obsession continued through my teens. In high school, I was building role-playing games, coding real-time graphics on MS DOS, or showing my computer teacher what to teach the class. By college, I had a portfolio of computer games and homebrew GameBoy games I’d released freely on this new thing called “the internet.” In 1999 I dropped out of college to accept a job as a professional game developer. I was 19.

I’d like to say things slowed down for me, but they didn’t. I was a game-obsessed man child that fell into a career, somehow thrived in that career, and went on to develop and lead numerous kid games for GameBoy, PlayStation, and mobile.

Making games professionally was different though. I was a hired gun, a programmer, doing client work. I wasn’t creating and designing games like I was before. Instead I was working (indirectly) with Disney or brands like Barbie, creating what they wanted with my team. Getting paid to do it was nice, but I missed the old days. I missed making my games.

My friend Geoff started an online forum. He wanted to build a community for developers that were serious about making games. The problem is websites like Flipcode and GameDev.net were already home to large forums discussing game development. Why should anyone care about this one?

He posed an unusual question: Does anyone want to try making games from scratch in 24 hours?

“That’s impossible! You can’t do that! Games take months or years to make!”

“I’m in!”

A few dozen of us got together on the forum and chatroom and did exactly that. The games varied wildly in how playable they were, but by the end we had 18 brand-new things that didn’t exist 24 hours before. We were exhausted--many of us didn’t sleep (not recommended)--but we were thrilled by the result.

“Let’s do that again!”

And we did. 24 hours was hard, so we decided that next time would be 48. I drafted the official rules, we picked a date, and we ran our first of many 48 hour events. Over 100 people showed up and (amusingly) created 48 games.

It was clear we were on to something, but more importantly we were doing it for us. This was something we wanted to exist because we wanted to take part in it.

It was motivating.

We all wanted an excuse to make more games. There was nothing stopping us from independently doing it, but something about doing it together and competing was far more exciting.

We didn’t invent the competitive programming competition, nor were we the first online programming challenge. But everything else was either an in-person event, or an online event tied to a specific tool (Allegro, Python, etc). There was no online crossover event, no place for the Python developers, the C++ developers, and the Flash developers to all come together and create.

Geoff’s forum never took off, but with our friends we created something amazing together. I never expected to still be running it 20 years later--more than a decade after the other co-creators moved on--but I suppose this is what became of my life long game obsession. We kept the name: Ludum Dare.

Reflections

Over the past twenty years, our community has grown larger and more prolific than we could have ever imagined. Our first event saw a respectable 18 games submitted, while our most recent event saw 2900 games from over 8000 people that signed up. Numerous games that began in Ludum Dare have gone on to become hits and bestsellers on mobile and Steam, as well as across every console from the current and previous generations. Many creators cut their teeth making games with us, or took a break from their jobs to test and hone their skills. So many new creators continue to join us to see if jamming or game development is right for them. I’m humbled that so many of you continue to join us after all these years.

Something I’m really proud of is what we did back in April of 2020. Everyday a different conference, trade-show, or event was being canceled. Not us, because Ludum Dare is an online event. We went on to break every record of ours as over 13000 people signed up and created just shy of 5000 games. It was an incredible thing to see during such a nerve wracking and uncertain time. With so many things changing every day, I think it meant a lot to have something that didn't.

Given my history, I never expected web development to become a big part of my life, and something I really enjoy. I remember hacking away at the WordPress theme of our older website, but I remember distinctly trying to avoid getting too deep into PHP because “I was a game developer, not a web developer". I’m glad I got over that, and that the lines between games and the web have blurred so much. My forte later in my career was making my code run everywhere. “Write C and C++ code to this older specification, because console vendor Y ships an old GCC, and vendor X uses Visual C++, so I can't use this”. Nah, forget all that, just target the web. There’s no better way to share a game: send a link; recipient clicks and starts playing right away. No download required!

The rise and fall of development tools is something that’s fascinated me. We had a front-row seat to the fall of Flash and the rise of Unity. Flash used to be everywhere, until one day Apple decided, “nah,” and the industry (including Adobe) accepted its fate. Even though I've been doing this for 20 years, I never had a great excuse to try-out and explore other game making tools: I already used the advanced stuff. But this past year, I've had the privileged of helping my wife learn to make games. I would crash-course myself in a tool so I could answer her questions. This meant I finally had a chance to learn Game Maker and PICO-8, both well loved tools that have been around for so many years.

Oh by the way, I got married back in July.

Last year we achieved the impossible: the original “48-hour game jam" ran its 48th event. This year we hit Ludum Dare 50, and the impossible age: Ludum Dare is 20 years old. I used to joke about these happening.

I need a new joke.

What we do here is incredibly important to me. I've been nervous about changing what we do, but having achieved even our jokes, the only way forward to evolve. 20 years is an extremely long time. Few of us make games like we did 20 years ago.

What’s next?

At a high level, I want to see big improvements to the experience for both the users that have been around a while, and those that are brand new. I’ve covered some of the short term changes in this post here.

For Ludum Dare 50 we introduced Extra, the first change to the Ludum Dare event format in nearly a decade. Extra will continue to evolve and improve as we go.

Something that’s been on my wishlist for years: Playing embedded games on ldjam.com! We used to support embedding Flash games hosted by anyone, but in hindsight, this wasn’t the best idea. I wasn’t prepared to support game embedding on ldjam.com unless we could do it securely, unless we could cover the costs, and unless we could do it without burdening our servers.

Our work with Akamai

My friend Jesse Freeman has been (rightfully) pestering me for years to accept sponsorships. When he joined Akamai a couple years ago, we got in touch again. This was a rare and exciting opportunity for me. I've used Linode and CloudFlare for many years as my go-to for servers and CDN, and that combination has done a great job creating a fast responsive website. But at the time, that was the limit of what we could do with them. As a gamer, I fondly remember seeing “Akamai” mentioned in game download URLs. I wondered if game downloads were something we could do with Akamai too?

Yes.

I worked with developer advocate Mike Elissen to move our CDN to Akamai, and explore how to best introduce game uploading and embedding to Ludum Dare. Akamai’s NetStorage and Download Delivery are a natural combination for hosting and delivering files, but unexpectedly NetStorage made supporting embedding games really simple: NetStorage can serve files directly from ZIP archives! Finally, we could avoid burdening our servers with files by generating URLs and headers we could safely give users to upload directly to NetStorage. Everything we needed was there.

Mike has been a great help as we dive deeper into the spam problem as well. We’ve been tracking suspicious activity, and have some good data we can use to begin mitigating things. This will take a bit longer to show, but I'm happy to have help with this.

I’m really excited about what we’ve done so far, and look forward to what comes next.

In an unexpected turn of events, earlier this year Akamai acquired Linode. I’ve been a happy Linode customer for the past 7 years, and I think this is great. I think Akamai and Linode compliment each other really well.

Wrap-up

That’s it from me. I hope you join us this weekend for Ludum Dare 51!

Thanks everyone!

The guide is over here: https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/

Discussion is below.

IMPORTANT: Please reach out to me if you're an Unreal user that uses the new HTML5 exporter. We don't yet know if our setup is compatible. Thanks!

Welcome to Ludum Dare 51!

I would like to call this our "autumn", "fall", or "summer is over and it's cold now" Ludum Dare event, but that only makes sense if you're in the northern hemisphere like me. :sweatsmile: :earthasia:

Final Round Theme Voting has begun

Cast your vote here: :ballot_box: /events/ludum-dare/51/theme

For rules and other info, visit the event page here: :trophy: /events/ludum-dare/51

If you don't want to figure out timezones, the theme announcement is when the clock (top-right) reaches zero.

TIP: The ldjam.com website gets really busy before the Theme Announcement. We recommend you follow the official Twitter account, or sign-up for the E-mail Newsletter

SIDE NOTE: We should be moving the mailing list off Revue before the end of this year. Sign up or stay tuned for details.

NEW: Uploading and Embedding games on Ludum Dare!

I've been working closely with our sponsor Akamai the past few months, and I'm extremely excited to announce that Ludum Dare now supports game uploading and embedding!

If you'd like to embed your game on Ludum Dare, I HIGHLY recommend you familiarize yourself with how it works, and try it out! Our sandbox might be more strict than you're used to (no storage, no cookies, no external requests), but it was built with WebAssembly and SharedArrayBuffer support in mind.

We're nearly ready to let folks try it out, but between everything I've been working on, I still need to document it. :sweat_smile:

This thread is way too long, so uploading instructions and discussion will be over here: uploading-and-embedding-games-on-ludum-dare

I have a busy Thursday morning and afternoon ahead of me, but after that (roughly 24 hours before LD), I'll be inviting folks to beta-test and provide feedback on the upload experience. See the comments in the post above, and my personal Twitter for details.

Extra is back! The new casual Ludum Dare

In case you missed it, back in April we launched Ludum Dare's brand new format: Extra.

When submitting your game, you can now choose between the Jam, Compo, or the new Extra format. Extra is Ludum Dare's casual format. There are no winners in the Extra format, but you get to choose your own schedule. Create and submit your Extra games anytime between Friday September 30th and Friday October 21st--that's 3 whole weeks!! Submit early, and be a part of Ludum Dare's feedback process: Give feedback, and get feedback.

Learn more about Extra here: /events/extra-the-new-casual-ludum-dare

The results ceremony will be the next day on Saturday October 22nd (to give me a bit more time to prepare).

Rules updates: Extra format, optional Theme, Unfinished games

We'll be publishing a brand new version of Ludum Dare's rules soon (deja vu). The key difference is the inclusion of the new Extra format detailed above, but there are few other changes I'd like to highlight:

• You can now optionally opt-out of the Theme category. This is not required.
• Please only submit finished games using the Jam, Compo, and Extra formats.
• If your game isn't finished, choose Unfinished instead.

AI content generators in Ludum Dare? (DALL-E, Midjourney, etc)

Since April's event, the world of AI assisted tools has exploded. This "AI thing" isn't exactly new though, as technologies like deep-fakes have been in the news for years, photo editing software (and phones) have been shipping with AI assisted object removal, and graphics cards from Intel and NVidia feature AI enhanced up-scaling with some pretty stunning results. What's new is that it's even easier to use now. Just describe what you want, such as an a classy Ludum Dare inspired fruit jam.

Or a tragic-backstory hero enjoying a bowl of cereal.

It's rough, but the results are really impressive. I can't be sure where "Luud Lourid" came from, but bonus points for "Jam Dum". It's pretty amazing what can be done today, maybe a little terrifying.

There's a great community discussion over here about whether AI art generators should be allowed in the Compo. @caeonosphere ran a poll, and the results were far more split than I would have expected.

It's tricky because we've allowed and encouraged the use of content generators like SFXr since its inception, while also having no qualms with procedural generation tools like Houdini. The difference is that the "one click" results are more skillfully done now, versus mashing a randomize button until you're happy.

Again, this happened way too fast. I don't know about you, but I wasn't ready for this. :sweat_smile:

AI in the Compo might be an inevitability, but lets not jump the gun. Let's start slow.

• For Ludum Dare 51, lets not to use AI content generators in the Compo. Choose the Jam or Extra instead.
• We haven't reviewed any license agreement for any generators. It's up to you to figure that out.

As for Jam/Extra entries:

• We recommend that you opt-out of asset categories your team didn't create the majority of during the event.
  • Per the rules, we allow exceptions for things like fonts, samples, instruments, and team splash screens.
• ~~Use your best judgement, but if a tools input is a completely different asset class than the output (i.e. text to speech, text to art), it may not be fair to claim it the asset as yours.~~ Nevermind! I've been foiled by tools like Stable Diffusion's "Img2Img". :sweat_smile:
• Derivative works rules still apply, so any significant transformation an output make sensibly result in something you can take credit for. Use your best judgement.

It does pose an interesting question, whether an AI generator should be considered a co-collaborator or virtual team member. Not because we want to score them, but for curiosity, to be able to look back and see how many games benefited from the assistance of an AI. Similarly, it would be nice if we could lookup games made with assets by prominent open-art artists like Kenney.

Lots of interesting things to think about and explore here.

Sorry! No Ludum Dare 51 keynote. :cryingcatface:

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, we don't have keynote for Ludum Dare 51.

That said, Ludum Dare 50's keynote released late due to technical problems. If you missed out on our big Ludum Dare reunion special, I highly recommend giving it a watch. This was easily the most complicated video projects I've been involved in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC2KGu__2Ws

Thank you everyone that contributed. :wink:

Surprise 2023 schedule! New January event!

We have three events scheduled for next year, and one is sooner than you may think.

January 6th, 2023 weekend will be Ludum Dare 52. Ludum Dare 53 will be the April scheduled event on April 23rd, and Ludum Dare 54 will be this time next year on September 29th. That puts roughly 3 months between each event, with a break in July. The full schedule can be found in the sidebar.

January 6th was the earliest we could realistically hold an event. It's impossible to avoid all conflicts, but this date does avoid Christmas and New Years. It conflict with CES, and we slightly overlap with AGDQ. If you don't want to miss the AGDQ kickoff, you could create a Compo or Extra game. :wink:

Even More Mike

In case you're not sick of me yet (I would be), here's even more Mike.

• The Game of Jamming -- An article I was asked to write about my journey with Ludum Dare, some reflections of things we've done and seen past 20 years, and some of the work we've been doing with Akamai.
• Get Ready for Ludum Dare 51! What's new? -- An update where we first introduced uploading, some small process changes, upgrades, and the spam plan

I recently did an interview for The Developer's Edge on Akamai's YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENstyiK5Jwc

Ludum Deals!

If you'd like to try out GameMaker this weekend, we have a promo code that unlocks additional exporters. The promotion is good until October 6th. Just create a free GameMaker account, login, then click the link below.

https://gamemaker.io/account/promo/ld51 - NOTE: Click this link AFTER logging in

If you get an error telling you the code is already on your account, that's okay! That means you've used one of our previous codes.

Wrap-up

Gosh, I'm sure I've forgotten something, but that's enough from me. We'll see you Friday for Ludum Dare 51!

My apologies for the hiccup! Embedded Unity games were working earlier today, but we had to make a fix that broke them for a few hours. If your game previously worked, it should now work again.

If you deleted your game and need to re-upload, you can use the edit button in the bottom right corner of the game page.

404: how to fix

We've heard that other websites are smarter about finding the index.html file. We'll fix that for next time, but today we're expecting to find it in the root or "top-most" folder of your .zip. We've replaced the unhelpful "blank white screen" with the page above. If you see this, if you recreate your .zip and re-upload, and it should work.

```python

BrokenGame.zip

/MyGame/index.html /MyGame/game.js /MyGame/game.wasm /MyGame/assets/player.png ```

```python

WorkingGame.zip

/index.html /game.js /game.wasm /assets/player.png ```

Godot and libGDX

The embedding guide has been updated with a pair of workarounds for Godot and libGDX games.

https://ludumdare.com/resources/guides/embedding/

Godot checks for serviceWorker in Navigator and libGDX tries to read document.compatMode. With sandboxing enabled, this seems to cause problems. Editing the .js file, and replacing these should resolve the startup problems. See the guide for more details.

Sorry for the outage.

I received a report that some people were seeing ~84 days left on the sidebar clock. Is anyone else seeing this?

I pushed a change that might have fixed it (just refresh), but I haven't heard back from the original reporter if it helped. There's also a small chance that some folks may note even see the countdown clock in the sidebar.

Please let me know if you see any clock weirdness. Thanks!

Whoops! I didn't realize I had set the countdown clocks wrong. Results were supposed to kick-off ~~3~~ 4 hours later (I quite literally just woke up, lol). :sweat_smile:

To keep you from waiting, we'll be honouring the "all results" time. Simply visit your game page to see your personal results (in about 30'ish minutes).

We will go ahead and tweet the top 15 as planned, since I think there's still value in sharing the games on Twitter. I'll be updating the clocks, and the "results" post will go live at the end as usual.

My sincere apologies for the mix up! :sweat_smile: