Phew! And Ludum Dare 51 has ended.

Thank you everyone that joined us over on Twitter and my sincere apologies for the results schedule mix-up! :sweat_smile:

Results

The results for each category can be found here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/results

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

Congratulations everyone! You made a game!

Schedule for 2023 is live! 3 events!

We're trying something new next year. We've added an early January event and adjusted the other dates accordingly.

• Ludum Dare 52: January 6th, 2023
• Ludum Dare 53: April 28th, 2023
• Ludum Dare 54: September 29th, 2023

I like the end-of year events to be as early in October as possible, but lol, we again have a year where October 1st is on the weekend. Gee thanks calendar. :sweat_smile:

Next event: Ludum Dare 52, January 6th-9th weekend

A Ludum Dare in January?

That's right! I was curious how early we could realistically run a Ludum Dare event. Then one thing lead to another and ... :sweat_smile:

I am a "new years resolution" person, and I'm also well aware how common it is to abandon resolutions by the end of January. I don't yet know how practical January 6th is so close to the holidays, but it sounded like a fun experiment, and we wont know until we try it.

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay informed.

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

Or follow us on Twitter:

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

Thanks to our Sponsors

Big thanks to our sponsor Akamai Technologies, and especially a big thanks for their help adding uploading to Ludum Dare.

I learned so much about securely embedding games, and I really appreciate everyone's patience, especially the Godot users. I'll have this cleaned up and streamlined for January's event. :construction_worker:

Thank you for a great 2022!

Phew! In hindsight, I definitely bit off more than I could chew this time around. Who knew getting married, having your car die, and "health stuff" would eat up so much time? :sweat_smile:

Personally, I feel I missed too many of my goals for Ludum Dare this year, but the year isn't over and I'm excited to take another stab at that.

See you in January!

I'm working a longer blog post since there's so much to talk about, but with Twitter imploding (TL;DR mentioning other social media is now a TOS violation), if you use a Mastodon/ActivityPub compatible social media, you can find us over here:

• Official LD account: https://jammer.social/@ludumdare
• RSS feed: https://jammer.social/@ludumdare.rss
• Me: https://jammer.social/@mike

EDIT: What an insane weekend. Twitter has back-tracked on the new policy, deleted the tweets and knowledge base articles. That said, message received. It's definitely time we became less dependent on them.

Happy holidays...is what I want to say 😅

~~~This is embarrassing, but it being our first January event I wasn't aware of Orthodox Christmas (January 7th) when I originally scheduled Ludum Dare 52 for January 6th-9th. I also didn't appreciate how little time myself and others would have over the holidays. :face_palm: ~~~

~~~We don't typically change dates, but we may if a majority think we should. The alternative date will be a week later, January 13th-16th.~~~

~~~Please share your opinion in this poll: https://forms.gle/yyTHh1EB6KLAc1Vs6~~~

Thank you so much, and I wish you the best for the rest of 2022 and ahead into 2023. :wine_glass:

EDIT: Thank you everyone for your feedback! We've decided not to change the schedule date. Ludum Dare 52 will continue to take place on January 6th-9th weekend.

Also FYI: Theme Suggestions will close soon! Be sure to get yours in.

Go here for event details: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52 (TL;DR same as September)

My apologies for the spottiness of details leading up to the event. I didn't appreciate how difficult it would be to pull together an event around the holidays, nor did I expect to become ill right after Xmas. Suffice to say, if all goes well we'll be doing our next January event on the 2nd week of 2024, not the first. :sweat_smile:

I wrote and was planning to share a blog post talking about the craziness of 2022, from the insanity of Twitter and them shutting down our newsletter, to the social media community fragmenting (we're on both Twitter and Mastodon now), to being overwhelmed by spambots, and all the difficult questions about AI that have essentially made many of our rules archaic and obsolete, but it was more important to kick-off the event. :laughing:

To put things mildly, we and so many others got a wake-up call in December as our outreach partners (Twitter, Revue) basically imploded. My task this weekend is to add more ways for you to connect with us, so you can be notified and reminded of upcoming events. Our current active list includes:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ludumdare :whitecheckmark:
• Mastodon: https://jammer.social/@ludumdare (also me :whitecheckmark:
• RSS: https://jammer.social/@ludumdare.rss :whitecheckmark:

Some new/updated methods may include:

• E-mail: https://newsletter.ldjam.com/ (our host Revue is shutting down in about a week) :x: :wrench:
• iCAL: TODO :wrench: (I believe we can generate a calendar URL that Google, Apple, and Proton can subscribe to. TBD)
• LinkedIn: TODO? :question: (begrudgingly, but it does look like we should take this one seriously)

Let me know in the comments below if there's some way you would like to be notified (i.e. YouTube, TikTok, Hive?).

Thanks everyone, and best of luck this weekend!

:eyes:

Hey folks!

As you may have seen, the spam problem is out of control. Though you might no longer see spammers on the homepage, the spamming is still happening at an outrageous rate. :sob:

Over the weekend I pushed an update that both broke the API in case it would help (it didn't), and added what I'm calling a "trust score" to every node (user, post, game) and comment. The homepage feed was updated to only show posts with a positive score, and users with a negative score can no longer add or change content.

To start, I flagged a hundred or so spammers and their posts with scores of -1000. That included ~3000 posts from the previous 4 days. *sigh*. It didn't last long. :upside_down:

The plan is to eventually introduce several metrics for determining trust score, such as a user's history on ldjam.com (number of events participated in, likes from other trusted members), moderation, and some machine classification models (i.e. AI).

The reason you don't currently see a homepage filled with spam is because of a little cheat: I marked everyone with an account created before April 30th 2021 as trustworthy. NOT an ideal solution, but an easy one to get us started. In the coming days I'll do more to let more users appear on the homepage.

EDIT: Yikes, I still found 2 spammers a few pages down, each with 2 year old accounts. :face_palm:

All that said, this doesn't solve the comment spam, just homepage spam.

Sign-ups for Ludum Dare 53 should open later today.

My apologies for the delay! This was supposed to go out on Monday, but I was sleep deprived from the weekend.

The plan is to start with one big Theme Voting round, and the top themes will go on to the Final Round as usual.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/theme

I'll have more to share Wednesday regarding the ongoing spam fight, and future plans to resolve it.

Hey folks! It's April and that means it's time for Ludum Dare!

Final Round Theme Voting

Final Round Theme Voting has kicked off! Cast your vote here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/theme

Due to an unfortunate weekend I had, the initial Theme Voting round kicked off rather late, but I took the opportunity to try something new: one BIG theme voting round, instead of 3 smaller rounds. Initial response has been positive (Twitter, Mastodon). While I do prefer the hype build-up we get by releasing the theme lists over 3 days, one big round might have some practical advantages:

• We can release it "bright and early" Monday morning instead of at weird-o-clock Sunday.
• There no need to explain the previous pages (tabs) of themes.
• There's no risk of the "day one theme list advantage" phenomenon that folks worry about.

The post-sluaghter theme list has been getting smaller over the years. It began with about 60 themes (20 per round), to 48 in recent years (16 per round). For this event I further reduced the count to about 40, to not overwhelm folks. My goal was 36, but IMO there were some gems near the bottom that I wanted to get their fair shake. I'm not yet sure which way this will go, but it's given me a lot to think about.

(PS: Thanks @shreemp, calling it "Mike's Top 40" made me chuckle :laughing:)

The plan coming out of January's experimental "New Years Resolution" event was to dive in and rebuild the Theme Voting system ahead of April, but something more sinister pulled me away.

Hello ~~darkness~~ spam my old friend

Over the past few months we've seen an unbelievable uptick in spam. This is a huge ongoing problem still, but thanks to some code changes and some help from my friends at Akamai, we've been able to fight back.

The most regrettable change is that we had to limit who appears on the ldjam.com homepage: everyone with previously rated Ludum Dare games. It wasn't enough to go with "published" creators (such as Unfinished and Extra creators), as there's no simple way to tell them apart from the spammers. :cry:

I'll be working to bring more creators into the home feed while you all prep for the event and build your games. :thumbsup:

I need to give a huge shout-out (:heart:) to the community here. It saddened me to see many of you trying and failing to be active while the spam flowed--I'll never look at John Wick the same way. But once the feed was clean, many of you came back and immediately starting having conversations again, which was humbling to see. :blush:

You're the reason I keep going, all of you that care so much of about what we do. I can't thank you all enough. :two_hearts:

The recent changes and fragmentation of the developer community on Twitter has given me a lot to think about. I was well aware we depended too much on Twitter, but I didn't appreciate that many of you might want to make Ludum Dare your home community, like how many of us did with online forums decades ago. Making connections with "your people", like-minded individuals with similar interests is incredibly valuable. Seeing the homepage filled with event and game making discussion after the torrent of spam reminded me that folks are here for that too. :handshake:

It's been ~20 years since Ludum Dare was a forum, and I wonder if that's something we should strive to be again? :thinking:

Things get nasty

Back on the subject of spam, a rather scary thing that has been happening recently is that Google has been getting DMCA takedown requests for the spam pages on our website.

When the first DMCA notice showed up, I immediately disabled links posted by "untrusted" users. If you see <link /> instead of actual links in your published posts and comments, that means the website doesn't (currently) trust you. You'll see these in the raw feed (and possibly in previews, until I fix a bug, oops :sweat_smile:).

Unfortunately they adapted, and I'm still getting take-down notices. :cry:

I was honestly shocked to see that our pages were suddenly indexed by Google, given that our website is generated by JavaScript. That must have been a fairly recent change, or one I hadn't noticed until we were overwhelmed by movie piracy spam.

We're setting records in Google search for all the wrong reasons. :face_palm:

Putting an end to the problem

There's a few sides to the spam problem:

• our value as a target
• the spam itself
• that spammers can sign-up in the first place

Spam is a long game. The users above account for about 5% of the accounts I blacklisted by hand. These few were from this month, but the vast majority are older than that. Some of these names are obviously spammers, but others not so much. We can't infer from name alone if someone will be trouble or not.

Until someone misbehaves, we don't know they are a spammer.

Luckily our current spammers are obvious to you and I, but detecting them with code is non-trivial.

I'm frustrated that I've had to switch away from improving the event to this, but I guess this is what it's like to run an online service these days.

Here's a few things I'm working on:

Improving our SEO to control our search rank

Being a well established website makes us a valuable target to improve the search ranking of others. The crazy part is that we do next to nothing for SEO, yet we're still big enough for the spammers to care. :shrug:

The DMCA notices were a wake-up call for me. Our lack of SEO effort made us easy to manipulate it. It's ironic that we're going to have to take steps to improve our search rank to fight spam, but here we are.

The last thing I need is John Wick breathing down my neck. :wink: :gun:

Restricting sign-ups, invitation codes

While I've had reCAPTCHA suggested to me a few times, I'm not confident it'll make much of a difference, especially down the road as AI/machine learning becomes so much more available.

Starting shortly after Ludum Dare 53, sign-ups for the website will be closed until a few weeks before the next event (mid September). To bypass this, you can use an invitation code. Invitation codes can be generated by established users.

I'd like the bar for becoming an "established" user to be really low. Something like, as soon as you get some posts/comments approved, that's enough for you to start inviting your friends. Educators and jam-site operators can reach-out to be whitelisted, but my intention is to make the bar to become "established" extremely low.

Consensus moderation

Instead of selecting and vetting individual moderators, every user with a published and scored game is automatically part of the moderator consensus group. Actions such a flagging spammers and approving new users will require consensus from multiple users.

Exact amounts we'll figure out as we go, but it's likely that after 2-3 posts/comments get flagged, those accounts will be locked.

We are lucky that spammers haven't begun compromising existing user accounts, but that's something we'll have to be careful of.

Fighting fire with fire

I honestly never had much interest in machine learning, but due to the recent AI explosion, it seemed important that I become an "overnight expert". :wink:

Ha, I'm not that good yet, but the past several weeks I have been crash coursing myself in machine learning everything, from tooling to how it even works, to upgrading and searching for cheapest ways to start taking advantage of and training natural language models.

I had to learn Python too, which is something I've avoided for the past 20 years. :sweat_smile: :snake:

Machine learning isn't my forte, so no I wont be handing moderation duties over to GPT4. That said I will be exploring ways of making things easier. As an example, we could feed comments into an existing language detection model. A somewhat lazy assumption we could make is that non-English (or non-Germanic) posts and comments are suspicious, and should be reviewed by the moderation consensus group.

I don't want to set the bar too high, but I know we'd all rather spend our time making things. So once we're sure we can trust it, I'd like to get the monotonous tasks off everyone's plate.

The road ahead

I've gone on long enough, so I'm going to stop myself here.

I'm frustrated that I need to focus on so much that has nothing to do with the event, but we need the website to organize and share. It makes me appreciate the days when our only problem was that the servers couldn't handle the load. :laughing:

Anyway, thanks for coming out and best of luck this weekend!

Hey folks!

If you're new here and you can't see your posts, please make a post introducing yourself (or talking about your game). We've been struggling with an outrageous spam problem, so I'm currently digging through the raw feed approving users that seem human to me. If you don't say anything, I can be sure you're real. :wink:

Thanks! :sweat_smile:

EDIT: I'm browsing posts in reverse chronological order (i.e. latest first), so making a new post (or having made one over the past couple days) is the best way for me to see you.

EDIT 2: Post, as i blog post! Not comment! Post! :sweat_smile:

EDIT 3: I've disabled signups from hotmail and outlook, and reset everyone's passwords from both domains just to slow things down. I've whitelisted many and blacklisted 650 users... and that only goes back 18 hours. :cry:

IMPORTANT: If you had problems with your Jam or Compo submissions over the weekend, publish it as an Extra category game and reach out to me over email and I can help out. If you were unable to create an account, do note that we had to blacklist hotmail.com and outlook.com email addresses, as well as reset passwords from these addresses. Follow this link to reset your password.

Yowza!

By now you've hopefully submitted your games and either had it or your account whitelisted. Regrettably this was something I was doing by hand. While y'all were making games, my day(s) looked like this:

When I was lucky, they looked like this.

Using that script and some hand crafted snippets of SQL, I managed to crush 6000 spammer accounts, and flag 26000 spam posts or spam games. I spent most of the weekend barely able to keep a few hours ahead, but a lucky few patterns discovered along the way were a huge help.

The first was mentioned above, the fact that a vast majority of spammers had hotmail.com and outlook.com addresses. New accounts were created every few minutes, from completely different IP addresses (both IPv4 and IPv6), and sat on for a few days not to arise suspicion before beginning their assault. Stopping signups from both domains curbed the sign-ups, but when the spam kept flowing from dormant accounts, clearing every hotmail and outlook users passwords was the best way to slow it down.

🎉

That didn't stop all the spam, but the volume now was far more manageable (only a few per hour). The problem now was the huge spam backlog accumulated over the past few weeks and months.

I got lucky a few times, that the super-spammer had some obvious patterns in their work. Many of their usernames looked like 0blahToaster, with a single number prefix and single upper case letter (or number) in the middle. That and a few thousand posts had consistent signatures in the body text, which I appreciated. :laughing:

After flagging those, it was a lot of grinding, searching for terms like livestream, john-wick, robux, and after a quick inspection flagging the whole lot of them.

By Monday nights end, I was finally through the last 4 weeks of new users, posts, and games. There are still many thousands more pieces of content left to review (roughly 60k pieces of content since I'm aware the spamming started), but the last 4 weeks covers everyone that created accounts while sign-ups were open. :sweat_smile:

Next step: Comments

Comments are a separate table in the database, so when I finish my errands today, I'll dive into those and start cleaning them up.

Switching to "Invite Only" between events

In about 2 weeks we're going to make a rather big change: between events, users will not be able to sign-up for new accounts WITHOUT an invitation.

The gist of it is that once a user passes some community "trustworthiness" criteria (TBD), they'll be able to generate invitation codes.

I want the bar for this to be low and not require my intervention, but in special circumstances I can whitelist jam site organizers and educators.

I definitely regret that it's come to this, especially given everything else that needs doing or fixing, but spammers don't play fair. 😢

Phew!

That's it from me! Again, feel free reach out if you're still having issues. I'll tackle them later today.

PS: Name and email changes will come a bit later. I want to push-out invite code support first.

Hey folks! My apologies for the "radio silence". I was extremely excited to get many of you to help me test the new beta website, until the unexpected happened: I caught COVID-19. :cold_sweat:

This was a first for me. After getting over the flu-like symptoms (fever, chills, etc), I was left with a sore throat, body aches, and some serious fatigue. The good news is I have been getting better, but thanks to the fatigue it has been tough to work. :sob:

So again, my apologies for the lack of ... everything.

Final Round Theme Voting

Final Round Theme Voting has kicked off! Cast your vote here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/theme

Invitation Codes

If you need an invitation code, visit one of our social media accounts and check for a pinned post with one.

• https://jammer.social/@ludumdare
• https://twitter.com/ludumdare
• https://bsky.app/profile/ludumdare.com

Wrap-up

Leave a comment below or send me an email if you have issues signing up or activating your account. I'll do my best to get to you.

TL;DR we ran out of hard drive space. :wink:

As the name suggests, GameMaker is a tool for making video games. It's free for non-commercial use, such as taking part in game jams like Ludum Dare :smile:. Games built in GameMaker can be exported for PC and mobile devices, the web (HTML5), and to game consoles (if you're licensed to do so).

GameMaker supports both drag-and-drop visual programming with GML Visual and traditional programming using GML Code. The GML Code language is an original language with a dialect similar to JavaScript.

Setting up

First create an account, then download GameMaker here: https://gamemaker.io/en/download

NOTE: The Linux (Ubuntu) version can be found in the BETA section at the link above. ChromeBook/ChromeOS users can find installation instructions here.

Making your first game, in 15 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwlvT-L9vFg

More resources

• GameMaker Tutorials
• GameMaker Blog
• GameMaker Manual

Embedding GameMaker web games on ldjam.com

(details coming soon)

(At the time of this writing, the embedded canvas is limited to 948x533 pixels, or approximately 16:9)

Acknowledgements

A big thank-you to GameMaker for sponsoring Ludum Dare. :slight_smile:

I can't believe it's April already! It's time again to JAM!

Final Round Theme Voting

Final Round Theme Voting has kicked off! Cast your vote here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/theme

Invitation Code

Use the following code if you need to create an account: Welcome2LD55

Ludum Dare 55, sponsored by GameMaker

GameMaker is back! In case you hadn't heard, GameMaker is now free for non-commercial use! No more jam-specific codes to manage, just download it and start using it. :thumbsup:

I've put together a short resource page to quickly get started: Getting started with GameMaker (2024)

A big thanks to GameMaker for sponsoring Ludum Dare 55. :smile:

Wrap-up

Leave a comment below or send me an email if you have issues signing up or activating your account. I’ll do my best to get to you.

I'm also aware of the comment spammer. I'll be dealing with them as well. :fire:

Do you currently share your source code?

If you don't, what would convince you to start sharing? Would improved visibility encourage you to do it?

If you do share you source, what would make you stop?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

We are back! Woo woo! :train:

Also, happy spooky month! We're finally doing an October event in October! :ghost:

Please excuse the mess, any little glitches you may notice here and on https://ludumdare.com. :sweat:

Final Round Theme Voting

Is that an echo I hear? Perhaps I'm having deja vu?

Final Round Theme Voting has kicked off! Cast your votes here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/theme

Invitation code

If you're new and you don't yet have an account, use the activation code Welcome2LD56 during sign-up. Join us! :smile:

Upcoming events

Dates for Ludum Dare 57 (April 2025) and 58 (October 2025) to be announced soon. :trophy:

Hey Mike! What's up? How's it going?

Hi uh, hello! :sweat_smile:

As some folks know I started a company a couple years back (Interactive Snacks Limited), then pivoted that company into something focused on supporting Ludum Dare, all in an attempt to make running things a bit more sustainable. This was during the early COVID-19 lockdowns, some months after I left my previous job at "Tiny Titan Studios". At the time I'd intended to "get out" of video game development, but when all of my work leads started drying up due to impending lockdowns, it made sense to me to just "do my own thing" in lieu of finding a stable paycheck.

Reaching a point where we would officially accept sponsorships was so incredibly nerve wracking, we'd gone nearly 20 years without it, keeping the lights on via the generous support from my Patreon backers and Paypal donors. Special nod to Tom Fulp and Markus for their especially generous contributions. :heart:

Nerves be damned, we finally did it! Ludum Dare accepted its first sponsors for the October 2022 event! :fireworks:

Lifestyle wise this was a big deal, as the company could now offer my wife and I (my fiance at the time) health benefits. Not to bore you with politics, but in Canada, while it's true we have "universal healthcare", dental and many medications do still need to be paid for out of pocket. There's often talk about widening the benefits offered to Canadians, but these things move at the speed of politics, so the average Canadian is in a better place with additional health coverage (AKA benefits).

Now that I was effectively paying for benefits (well, the company was paying for them), I felt obligated to use them. Most importantly my wife pushed me to seek treatment for my ADHD, among other things. In hindsight, I only regret not doing it sooner. :sweat_smile:

How am I doing? Mental health wise today, really great, but that's an even longer story. :slight_smile:

What's not doing well however is the company, and honestly that's okay.

Frankly I'm awful at asking for money. Despite it being obvious to some, I struggle to see what I do here as "worth paying to sponsor", so I feel super uncomfortable reaching out to companies. Of course I've done it a few times, successfully I might add, but I die a little inside every time I do it. I tell myself that once I fix items X, Y, and Z from the infinite todo-list, that I'll feel better about it, but I forgot about item "W" and I need to drop everything and focus on that. :sweat:

I make stuff, and I'm happiest when I'm making. If you're a regular, you're probably the same. Doing paperwork and networking is the last thing most of want to spend our time doing.

So earlier in the year, the company ran out of money. This wasn't the fault of anyone but my own. I was extremely unhappy playing the "beg for money game", so I let it happen. I'd never tried it, but funny thing, if you stop paying your bills, things stop working. :sweat_smile:

While I've resolved most of the issues, if you're curious why the Twitch streaming widget in the sidebar is broken, that's why: CloudFlare nuked our DNS configuration once the domain defaulted. Similarly, Ludum Dare's Mastodon server went dark when the credit card payments started bouncing. :sweat:

Luckily, without ever mentioning things with the company were in trouble, GameMaker swooped in and offered us a really easy sponsorship. Not only did I love that they were shaking up their business model, that deal gave us more than enough to pay off the companies outstanding debts. All that's left is to properly shutter the company, gut the mentions and references from the Ludum Dare websites, and to decide what I do next.

Weirdly, there's not really any reason for me to stop running events, so yes Ludum Dare will continue into 2025! I have some tentative dates for our April and October events, but I need to double/triple check them first, and I'm juggling a few different things right now.

One of those things is finding work for myself.

As mentioned I've been looking to "get away" from game development, but to clarify I'm looking to find work outside of the trenches building games. Working in tools/middleware is something I'd be happy to do. That's actually my professional niche anyway: Low level, system and workflow/toolchain development, Linux stuff, etc. Hearing the news that the Godot foundation was hiring, I'll admit that was something we pursued. Alas, it was a tricky situation, as even though I'm interested I'm almost disgustingly overqualified. They honestly do have a fair budget to hire someone, but I'm an elder in these spaces at 44 (sorry for the call-out fellow olds), having jumped from risky venture to risky venture without a financial win, having burned through my savings, that frankly I do need to choose gigs that pay well enough I can save for retirement (buying a house is out of the question now, thanks a lot Ford).

At the moment I'm doing a small graphic design gig for a friend :slight_smile:, one I'm hoping to wrap-up next week so I can get back to applying for interesting jobs as a weirdo overqualified systems nerd. :yum:

So that's where I'm at, why things are a little messy here. :slight_smile:

The fact that so many of you keep coming back, keep sharing your stories and successes warms my heart. It's a thrill and my honour to continue to keep this olde bucket kicking, even if all it does is kick. :blush:

Thanks for reading, and indulging the writer in me once again. :smile:

If you haven't done so already, go vote in the Final Round Theme Vote!! :ballot_box:

PS: My sincerest apologies for the mentions of things like "See Twitter for announcements" and invitation codes spread across the website. The Brazil thing happened a bit too recently, but if you need an invite code code, read above!

Due to the abhorrent toxicity, the blocking of the country of Brazil, and the complete lack of a viable free API, we are deprecating our support of X (formerly Twitter). With that, I've removed our links to Twitter from ldjam.com, and recommend an alternative instead. We will continue to post announcements there for the rest of the year, but unless we find a way to automate posting, we will stop using it entirely in 2025.

Where to watch the Top 15?

Right now we're using Bluesky as our main social media feed, and we've made that feed available a few different ways.

• Bluesky: @ ludumdare.com
• RSS: https://bsky.app/profile/ludumdare.com/rss
• Mastodon (or Threads): @ ludumdare.com @ bsky.brid.gy (nb. jammer.social is currently down)
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14195373/ (for resume use)

Why Bluesky? I found their AtProtocol to be extremely easy to use. In the future I'd like to support more open protocols like ActivityPub and IndieWeb, but AtProtocol was the easiest place to start.

EDIT: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/all/tags/ludumdare

I'm doing Advent of Code this year. AOC is a daily holiday themed coding challenge. Every day at midnight UTC-5 (i.e. New York/Toronto time) a new puzzle is dropped. Each puzzle has 2 parts, and there's a global leaderboard of who completed the puzzles the fastest.

For a more chill group, you can join my private leaderboard: 4283248-a39e4c71

I'm using this as an excuse to practice TypeScript (see below) and Go. For the sake of the leaderboard I'm writing my entries in Typescript, then later porting my code to Go.

If that sounds fun, join in, and let us know in the comments below if you're taking part. :smile:

PS: Deno is offering free stickers to participants who build their entries in TypeScript. Follow the link for more details.

Hey folks, Mike here with some sad news.

To the point: I've decided to cancel our scheduled 2025 events.

That doesn't mean Ludum Dare is dead, but I wont be running any events this year, nor will I be able to assist with things related to it (not for several months).

Without getting into the weeds, I made this decision due to a number of financial, medical, family, and health reasons. I value my privacy, but I will say that financially I'm in a bad place, and I need to find work ASAP. I've actually been looking for work since 2024, and not to mince words, I've been screwed over by the long drawn out hiring processes of several companies. Some of those rejections were my own fault though, trying to get concessions for the sake of running Ludum Dare, and others ... I don't know, they probably disliked my use of the Oxford comma. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To be honest, I'm not sure when I'll have everything sorted. It could be 6 weeks, it could be 6 months, I don't know. It's a lot, I'm a bit scared, but I do know I'll be able to handle it better with fewer things on my plate.

I sincerely apologize for having to do this, but I need to take care of myself and my family right now.

You can follow the official Ludum Dare BlueSky account for event updates: https://bsky.app/profile/ludumdare.com

You can follow my personal account to see what I'm up to: https://bsky.app/profile/distraction.engineer

Hey folks!

The response from you and the rest of the GameDev community has been nothing short of incredible! I only got as far as making the post that I would be stepping away before your love and support started pouring in. LOL, I might not have to remove the schedule from the sidebar after all. Thank you all so very much. :purple_heart:

I'm not ready to say we're back on for 2025 yet, but your generosity plus offers from sponsors have left me feeling optimistic. I mean wow, look at that Patreon:

I've never seen it that high! :dizzyface: That plus another $65 via PayPal, thank you all! :purpleheart:

I'll need a couple days to finish sorting through everything and put together a plan, but you've bought me time to do that, and I'm extremely grateful. :purpleheart::sob::purpleheart:

I'm still on the hunt for a gig that will play nice with me running Ludum Dare, but that's a separate topic.

Thanks again everyone for your support! If you don't mind, I'm going to go watch the Pacific Rim speech a few times on repeat. :wink:

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

Hey folks!

No joke, it's time again for Ludum Dare!

Theme Voting has kicked off! To keep things simple, we're doing 2 rounds (instead of 3) plus a final "best of" round. If you haven't already, sign up and cast your votes!

Invitation code: Time4LD57

Come back Tuesday and Wednesday/Thursday for the next round.

:heart: YOU ROCK :heart:

I owe the LD and GameDev community a HUGE debt of gratitude. Admittedly I've been struggling will bills and finding work. I was terrified by some upcoming expenses and began cancelling the April event so I could focus, but before I could finish announcing the cancellation, many of you showered me with support. It's been a difficult few months for a lot of us, but the communities generosity and love made a world of difference for me. Thank you all so very much! :heart:

I've never been comfortable asking for money for what I do here, but it really is appreciated. Admittedly I've made things harder on myself trying to find remote work that isn't game development, military, or a grift (i.e. crypto, AI debauchery). System development, tooling, graphics coding and low level work is my jam (hacking away at the Webkit browser and buggy Linux GPU drivers has been fun). Fingers crossed I have better luck with my job hunt in the coming days. :fingers_crossed: