So I’ve finally decided to share what I made during LD. I was running late, so I wasn’t able to finish it by the jam deadline, but did finish up about 5-6 hours later. You’re not going to find me in the set of 891 games though.

Fighting some Bats

You can try it here: http://www.alonethe.com/prototype/

- Best played in Firefox, in Full Screen (F11).
- F5 to reload (WHEN you die, MUAHAHA!)
- If using Flash Block or NoScript, enable Flash. It needs Flash Player 9+ for Sound.
- Arrow Keys, Mouse, or Touch Screen.
- Works on all current Browsers. Some may lack sound.
- Works on all current Mobile Browsers too! Best in Firefox Mobile (w/o Sound).

You can find an extended postmortem on the game on my blog.

Thanks everybody for making Ludum Dare 22 great!

The smoke has finally cleared, and by the end of 3 intense days we have a total of 891 entries (stats)! Holy cow!

For the next 3 weeks, we’d like to invite all participants back here to the website, and ask you play and rate the games. Visit the Rate Games page for a list of 20 randomly assigned games, just for you.

Left side numbers are Compo, Right side are Jam, number in brackets is how many ratings

The random list will grow over time if you need more, and you’re free to pick and choose what games you play. If we can get everyone to play at least their assigned 20 entries, that will give us a good baseline set of stats overall. And if you can play more, that would help a lot!

With Christmas next weekend, it’s understandable that people will be busy. I will be sending a reminder out to the mailing in about 2 weeks, so if you’re not already on it you should sign up. Then be sure to stop by January 10th for the results.

Ludum Dare 23 – April 2012 – ** 10 Year Anniversary! **

It’s pretty crazy when you think about it, but the next Ludum Dare event coming up in April will be our 10 year anniversary. Yes, we’ve been doing these silly events for 10 years now! Wow! Be sure to stop by in April for the big one! Lets break 1000!

Ludum Dare at the Game Developers Conference

Phil and I are regular attendees at the Game Developers Conference, so if you too are attending, stay tuned. Last year we did a meetup as well as an afternoon Game Jam at NoiseBridge. It was a lot of fun hanging out with with everybody. We don’t have our plans figured out for next year yet, but stay tuned!

You are all awesome

Thanks everyone for coming out and making this another record breaking Ludum Dare.

Additional Links

To tidy up the front page, here are some posts worth looking at.

• Post Mortem Survey by Breakdance McFunkyPants
• “The downloads of many LD games suck”, Packaging Tips, with Sos

I have enemies swarming you now, and a type of auto-targeting working.

Targeting the one in green

Next up is combat mechanics, though I have a bit of running around to do shortly, followed by some “end-of-compo” administration to do here on the site. Player is currently equipped with “Bare Hands”, and enemies with “Weak Bite”.

Fun fun.

I’ll be periodically updating the numbers through the evening.

Compo Deadline

6 Hours Left – 101 Entries
1 Hour Left – 370 Entries
30 Minutes Left – 433 Entries
20 Minutes Left – 449 Entries
15 Minutes Left – 462 Entries
0 Hour – 521 Entries
5 Minutes Over – 537 Entries
10 Minutes Over – 551 Entries
15 Minutes Over – 567 Entries
20 Minutes Over – 578 Entries
25 Minutes Over – 603 Entries ** NEW RECORD **
30 Minutes Over – 625 Entries
35 Minutes Over – 635 Entries
40 Minutes Over – 655 Entries
45 Minutes Over – 667 Entries
50 Minutes Over – 683 Entries
55 Minutes Over – 692 Entries
60 Minutes Over – 700 Entries ** WOW **
65 Minutes Over – 706 Entries
70 Minutes Over – 709 Entries
75 Minutes Over – 711 Entries
80 Minutes Over – 719 Entries
85 Minutes Over – 720 Entries
90 Minutes Over – 723 Entries
105 Minutes Over – 725 Entries
120 Minutes Over – 734 Entries (720 Compo, with 14 people submitting Jam early)

Jam Deadline

30 Minutes Left – 798 Entries
20 Minutes Left – 803 Entries
10 Minutes Left – 811 Entries
0 Hour – 833 Entries
15 Minutes Over – 851 Entries
40 Minutes Over – 866 Entries
60 Minutes Over – 887 Entries
75 Minutes Over – 890 Entries

Now that I have the “actually difficult” code in and working, I thought I’d do some benchmarking on weaker systems.

32 enemies total, brute force O^2 collision checking.

On any decent computer, I do ~30 FPS easy (~60 too), no matter the browser. On lower end computers though (Netbooks, Tablets, Phones), I’m getting the following performance:

32^2 = 1024 Compares

AMD C-50 Firefox 8: ~20 FPS
AMD C-50 IE 9: ~17 FPS
Intel Atom Firefox 8: ~10 FPS
Intel Atom Chrome 16: ~11 FPS
Intel Atom IE 9: ~10 FPS
iPad 2nd Gen (Safari): ~15 FPS
iPad 1st Gen (Safari): ~8 FPS
BlackBerry PlayBook (Webkit): ~10 FPS
Kindle Fire (Android Webkit): ~9 FPS
Nexus S (Android Webkit): ~3 FPS
Onda VX610W (Android Webkit): ~4 FPS
Nintendo 3DS (Opera): Too Freaking Slow

So I guess HTML5 Canvas 2D is less up to snuff than I thought. Ah well.

16^2 = 256 Compares

EDIT: Some tweaking later (less objects). With a proper partitioning in place, performance would be more like this:

AMD C-50 Firefox 8: ~30 FPS
AMD C-50 Chrome 16: ~22 FPS
AMD C-50 IE 9: ~29 FPS
Intel Atom Firefox 8: ~26 FPS Idle, 24 FPS Active
Intel Atom Chrome 16: ~24 FPS Idle, 13 FPS Active
Intel Atom IE 9: ~19 FPS
iPad 2nd Gen (Safari): ~24 FPS
iPad 1st Gen (Safari): ~17 FPS
BlackBerry PlayBook (Webkit): ~14 FPS
Kindle Fire (Android Webkit): ~25 FPS
Nexus S (Android Webkit): ~10 FPS
Nintendo 3DS (Opera): 1 Frame per 10-20 Seconds

So in other words, good enough to run stuff, but what you run on it still needs to be carefully designed. You can’t just spitball sprites and expected to get 30-60 FPS.

Just another shot showing the collisions with the scenery working.

Pushing the baddy in to two blocks... ya, you like dat, don't ya?

Back to the TODO list now ‘eh?

So hey, I finished up my collision code (right at the 24 hour mark). I have a bunch of functions for checking for the nearest point on an AABB, as well as triangular shapes I’m nicknaming “wedges”. So now, with that, I have all the collision tests I need. Phew! Math!

The nearest point on a wedge is always in the direction of the normal... except corners

To celebrate, I whipped up something nice for dinner.

Chicken a-la-King. Rice, chicken pieces, topped with Salsa. Bon Apetite!

Hey look! A FoodPhoto! It’s totally like I’m actually doing an LD again.

Phew! Some 4-5 hours ago I was tired, too tired to post, so I took a nap.

Here’s what I had then:

The Red Collision. The green circle means the other two are touching.

So as it turns out, the theme was absolutely perfect (and no, I didn’t rig the vote). I’ve been working on a commercial game for the past couple months called “Alone, The“, but it’s big, it’s 3D, and taking a long time. So during Warmup Weekend, I had the wild idea of doing a de-make of the game in HTML5. To be honest, I’ve never seriously worked in JavaScript before, so there was much to learn (and still learn).

So over a few hours last weekend, I managed to create some simple art, and get some tile-map rendering working. I put the code online in a slightly modified form as my basecode/library, in case I had a good idea for a Compo game. But I’ll be honest, I really want to make this demake of my primary project, and I like the page of art I’ve done so far, so to be fair I’ll be entering the Jam instead.

Eicking up where I left off, I now have map scrolling and object vs object collision (not to mention actual objects). I added some debug functionality to show the radius of objects, the radius of their currently equipped weapons, and the volumes of the per-tile collision. Right now though, I need to make object versus tile collisions work. I kinda wish I had spent time during the week getting all the collision stuffs working, but that’s alright. I’m jamming anyway. If I can get that done in the next 4 hours, that’ll have me in a good state for day 1.

So my goal for the 72 hours is to get a basic playable game working. It wont be very fun, but should be functional. I plan to continue working above and beyond Ludum Dare, but I should be able to get a very strong foundation working within the 72.

Stuff I’d like to finish:

• Dummy map, manually created in code (skipping random generation for now).
• Several enemies with very basic AI (if enter sight, go towards you)
• Basic Combat
• Several weapons to pick up (knife, sword)
• Multiple Attacks per weapon type (slash, stab)
• Barebones Inventory
• Sound and Music

Doable for sure, it just has to be done. The Ludum Dare website seems to be running great (at least I haven’t seen any problems), so my interruptions shouldn’t be too many (just a few hours tomorrow, and a few Monday). I’d like to have something playable by the time the Jam clock strikes zero.

Anyways, it’s 6 PM now, which means 3 hours. Back to work! Gotta finish the collision!

So yes, pending some catastrophic failure of the Ludum Dare website, I should be participating in LD22 too.

I typically do (highly portable) Native C++ development, but for a change of pace I’ve decided to try HTML5 Canvas 2D development in JavaScript. The past week (in what little time I’ve had), I’ve been building a small library of JavaScript code. Stuff found in my Native C++ codebase, ported over to JavaScript. You can find the latest snapshot on Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/gelhtml/

And the demo app looks something like this.

Is it Towlr?

Good luck everyone!

It’s nearly time to kick off our latest and greatest event yet: Ludum Dare 22. Final Round theme voting now live, so go cast your vote for the theme. Prior results are here.

Like last time, join us LIVE in the #ludumdare IRC channel on irc.afternet.org for the Theme Announcement! Can’t make it? Follow us on Twitter, or sign up for the mailing list.

This time around there are several real world jams and gatherings going on over the weekend, far more than we’ve ever had. For a complete list, go here.

Also, since live video streams seem popular lately, we’ve set up a link on the front page for them. Find a complete list over here.

We’re running on a brand new server, introduced (unfortunately) half way through the last event. We (Phil specifically) went through and did a lot of optimizations to our site code. Removing excessive SQL queries, disabling unnecessary plugins, and making numerous other tweaks. We’re hoping this time we have it right. We’ll be keeping a close eye to make sure everything still works. If we’re lucky, Phil and I will have a chance to make entries ourselves!

On with the festivities!

(more…)

So I’ve been working on a Warmup game today. Typically I only ever write native code (highly portable cross platform native code), but for-the-heck-of-it I wanted to play around with HTML5 / JavaScript / Canvas2D. I’ve been under the impression that HTML5 has been “good enough” for a while to make most typical 2D games. I can’t really say without any certainty though until I try it.

So to contrast my 3D main project, I started a 2D demake of it in HTML5.

I’m using the C64 palette, but not to spec. I didn’t like how my art looked with double-wide pixels, so I’m keeping 1:1. Objects will usually be 1 color, sometimes 2.

Just a tile map renderer and and animated bat so far, but I have the ground work ready to do procedurally generated maps. The rooms are currently a bunch manually placed rectangular areas, and I run a post-process on the map file to add in the edging. Fun.

But now, sleep.

Surprise! Warmup Weekend!

Teacher just walked in, said good morning, and started handing out a pop quiz. You panic. You start regretting that you stayed up late playing games. The exam is next week, and admittedly, you’re not ready for either.

Warming-up for Ludum Dare is nothing new, but here’s us encouraging you to do it.

Between now and Ludum Dare 22′s start time, you should really make sure that your tools work. Make some art, import it, and draw it on screen. Make some sounds, import them, and play them on cue. If you’re using a new development tool, learn it.

Mr McFunkyPants proved it. Look at his top-3 “what went wrong”. If you’ll indulge me, you could attribute all 3 to poor preparation. Or to keep up the schooling angle “You didn’t study!”.

Bullet point summary:

• No rules or limits. This is practice.
• Learn your development tools! Write some code, run it.
• Make some art, get it on screen, make it move.
• Print some text to the screen. Print some text to a log (if applicable).
• Make some sound, get it in game, make it play.
• If you’re motivated enough, make your experiments in to a game!
• Make something that should take “hours”, not 2 days.
• Then package it up, put it online.
• No time or day limit. But if you have no other plans this weekend, why not?
• If you’d like to work with a theme, try this tool

If you like what you’ve done, feel free to share it.

Don’t worry, the quiz wont affect your grade. But be warned, the exam is all-or-nothing.

Viewers, look below. Participants, post a comment with a link to your live video stream.

Here’s a list of real world game jams taking place over Ludum Dare weekend:

• United Kingdom – Cambridge – CB Indies
• South Africa – Cape Town – Flier, SAGD Website

If you’re hosting a Ludum Dare related gathering, let us know! Make a post here on the site with details, and we’ll add you to the list!

More Ludum Dare Community News

And to tidy up the page, here’s more things going on in the community.

• Last day to do your “I’m In” video (optional but fun) <– DO THIS!
• Gift Exchange is on! Participants! If you haven’t already, mail your gifts ASAP!
• Crunching to finish your October game before LD22? Xmas Club!

Hey everybody!

*sigh* Well it looks like October is really finally done now. You know, I wish it was just 2 weeks (months?) longer myself. I’ll see if I can convince that guy that made Calender to make October a tad longer next time.

I am going to leave the submission form open for another day, just to be sure we catch all the timezones around the world. Submit now!

If you are finished you game but waiting around in submission queues, looking for a sponsor, or pounding away on those last minute submission bugs (and expecting to submit any day now), then I would like to encourage you to submit. We don’t require you have to earn your dollar by months end, but want you to have done everything possible in the time allotted to make it happen. And when you do earn that dollar, ‘cmon back and tell us all about it.

I sincerely hope this was a good month for you and your project. I’ll have more to say once we get all the submissions in.

Until then, crunch faster!

I’ve been getting a number of messages about opportunities people can utilize to reach the goal, so I’ve decided to collect them in one place. If you’d like to share one, post a comment below or send a tweet to @mikekasprzak.

Opportunities

• PC (Windows & Linux) – Desura – Looking for quality indie games
• PC (Linux) – Gameolith – 90% royalty rate until December
• Web – Intel AppUp – First 200 quality apps win $250 USD

Launching or Closing Soon

• All – Independent Games Festival – Highly regarded event with cash prizes, due Oct 17th
• PC (Windows & Mac) – Indie City – New Indie Games portal coming soon
• Web (Flash) – Flash Player 11 – Launching Soon (3D). Release Candidate Available

Marketplaces

• Mobile (Android) – Android Marketplace – Android phones and tablets ($25 one time fee)
• Mobile (Android) – Amazon App Store – Amazon Fire Tablet (First year free then $99 year)
• Mobile (Apple) – iOS App Store – iPhone, iPod touch, iPad ($99 year)
• PC (Mac) – Mac App Store – Apple’s built-in App Store ($99 year)
• PC (Windows & Linux) – Desura – PC Game and Mod storefront with a Steam-like client
• PC (Linux) – Gameolith – Linux gaming store with 70% and 80% royalty rates
• Web (Flash & Unity) – Flash Game License – Put your games up for auction
• Web (Flash) – Flash Portals – Too many to list. Many can be contacted directly
• Web – Chrome Web Store – Sell content to Chrome browser users ($5 one time fee)

• Mobile & Web (Flash) – Blackberry Developers – Phones and Playbook Tablet
• PC & Web – Intel AppUp – Windows and MeeGo (Linux) devices
• Mobile & Console – Microsoft App Hub – XBLIG and Windows Phone 7 ($99 year)

Payments

• Amazon Payments – Payments powered by Amazon
• BMT Micro – Long time favorite of many PC/Shareware authors
• Google Checkout – Payments powered by Google
• Google IAP – In App Payments by Google
• Paypal – Old Faithful

Resources

• Mobile – Streaming Color’s iOS Developer Revenue Survey

October is upon us, and it’s time to kick off the October Challenge 2011!

The October Challenge is a special Ludum Dare event I started last year. More and more people are making games today thanks to Game Jams and events like Ludum Dare. As a result, more and more people have declared “I want to start selling games too”. Well, it’s time to stop talking and start doing. Put simply:

That is your goal. That is the October Challenge.

Disregard all the usual Ludum Dare rules (no restrictions). Finish any game you previously made during a game jam, something else you’ve been working on, or heck, something entirely new. But we know you can make a game. Your goal, if you choose to accept it, is to not only make something, but to finish it and earn money from it. That’s all. No specific rules or platforms. Make good on that goal or promise to start selling games.

Finish your game before November 1st, and submit it to your respected market. That is the challenge. And once you earn your $1, you’ve done it! Easy as that. You’re now a pro.

I’d like to invite everyone to share resources and discuss markets and business models. I’ll help collect your links over the next couple days for others to find. If you need a place to start, you can check out this guide I wrote for last years event.

Also, do share your progress on your upcoming game with us here on the site. I’ll be opening a submission form soon to collect a list of completed games as they happen.

Keynote Invitation

What’s a Ludum Dare event these days without a keynote? Here’s me saying the same thing, in video, with strange editing and ambiance! Give it to your friends who HATE to read.

That’s all from me. No more waiting. Time to get started. Go go go!

Alright! Thanks everyone again for all your feedback.

After much deliberation, we’ve decided to start taking donations again. If it turns out that isn’t enough, we will investigate some of the other options. I’d especially like to thank everyone that contacted me directly about outright hosting, boxes, sponsorships, etc. We may still need you, but for the sake of the community, we’ve decided to try donations first.

To find out how we’re doing, or to make a contribution, visit the following page:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/donations/

It’s important to us that Ludum Dare stay free for all. We don’t want anyone to feel obligated to contribute. But if you’d like to help us out though, it would be much appreciated.

We have control over our VPS, so we can raise and lower our plans as we need to. We’re currently on a $90 plan. There was some unexpected heavy Reddit traffic the other day, and with the October Challenge about to kick off, we’ll be keeping a close eye on this to optimize our costs.

Thanks again everyone. And now it’s time for me to go kick-off the October Challenge.

*** Update! *** See below… (or click here)

Hi everybody!

Now that the smoke has cleared and the results have gone live (as well as me finally being moved in to my new apartment), I’d like to start a discussion about that nagging issue of site costs. Phil and I have some ideas, but it’s you guys that keep us going, so I want to hear what you think.

In case you missed it, during Ludum Dare 21 Phil and I migrated the Ludum Dare server from a $10/mo shared host to a $60/mo VPS… and when that wasn’t enough, to a $200/mo VPS. So as of August, our burn rate went from an easy $150/yr (12 months hosting + domains) all the way to about $2500/yr. That’s not really pocket change anymore.

The root of the problem is that Ludum Dare isn’t a normal website or blog. Most of our content is dynamically generated, in real time, over one high volume weekend every 4 months. I was sent (and very much appreciate the) numerous offers to host us during the the event, but what most people don’t realize is that we’re not a bandwidth hog, but a CPU hog. All that dynamically generated content was A MONSTER on CPU usage, and that’s what raised the warning flags on the shared host.

Since the migration, Phil has done MANY MANY optimizations to the site. The reason you don’t currently see a sidebar is that some of the DUMBEST things are wasting SQL queries EVERY SINGLE TIME they show up. One of us has to sit down, take the good bits of the side bar, and merge it in to one single chunk of HTML, JavaScript or cache file. We’ll get to this eventually.

As it stands now, we should be able to take a good sized burst of incoming traffic (Hi Markus). That’s not really an invitation (yet), but whatever happens happens.

So we have a website… it just costs a lot of money.

There are probably some things we can do help scale the cost of the site during low traffic times. Amazon has been suggested multiple times, but I have no clue how one runs a wordpress blog on Amazon, nor how to calculate what our costs would be. Again, CPU hog. Cloudflare has also been mentioned a few times, but I have to admit, as a small business owner, I kinda want to save my free instance for me.

So, how can we cover our costs?

Option 1. Take Donations

We actually used to do this, but stopped once people started abusing our generosity. ludumdare.com has a pretty decent site-rank, so we used to offer a link to anyone that sent us money. But the shadiness of some of the sites we were asked to link to convinced me to stop doing this. To be fair to everyone that did contribute, I decided to simply leave the links as-is for the past year.

So, we could open up the Paypal box again. Phil has been looking at some plugins that will sort-of automate the “hey we need money” side of things, but nothing is settled.

Compared to options that follow, this is easy.

Option 2. Regular Kickstarter Campaigns

I really don’t like this option, but would expect it to work. I don’t know Kickstarter’s fee, but I do suspect a direct Paypal deposit is lower. Personally, I’m kinda bothered by the whole “PBS yearly donation drive” mentality. “Give us money and we’ll continue showing educational television. Give us $100 and you get a T-Shirt”. At least, I don’t think that suits us.

Also it’s far more work, as a typical kickstarter offers incentives, and all of us on the staff are busy trying to run our respected gamedev businesses. Ludum Dare works best for us when we have very little to do.

Option 3. Adsense/Advertising

While it’s true banners and ad networks are an option, I don’t think we do enough volume for it to be helpful. Yes, we do lots and lots of traffic in one weekend, but I think for the most part it’s the same 1000-2000 people checking the site over and over again, where those banner avenues are all about uniques.

What we have instead is an EXTREMELY specific audience; Game Developers. People from the industry, students, and indies. Pretty much every facet of game development, we’ve got. So with that in mind, we’d probably be a really good place to advertise middleware, platforms/app stores, and perhaps even companies looking to hire.

I do think, honestly, we are not a good place to advertise a game. But hey, if somebody does really well and wants to give back, then who are we to argue.

Option 4. Take Sponsors

A variation of option 3. Per main event (April, August, December), take on 1 single sponsor that is the sponsor of that event. Whatever we charge sponsors should be enough to cover our costs for the next 4 months (maybe 6 to buffer), even though they’re paying mainly for the time around that weekend.

Unfortunately, this adds a more complexity and work to running LD, as it means I need to approach potential sponsors every 4 months to cover our costs. This might not be all that difficult; I have had some interested parties come to me directly already, and simply putting up a sponsorship invitation might be enough to get more. But I don’t know yet.

Option 5. Hosting Sponsor

All that considered, if someone or some company wants to outright eat our hosting costs for us, then that means we just have to run a site. Simple. We’re game developers here, and our time should really be spent doing that.

I used to say the Ludum Dare website ran on autopilot, and it mostly does, but Phil and I do put a lot of time in to it (like me, right now, writing this post). We learn lots running the site and the community, but I have to admit it might be nice to let someone else do all the server work for us.

Donations vs. Sponsors

That’s pretty much what the above options are. Either we the community pay for it, or some 3rd party does.

In a sense, that’s kind-of where Phil and my opinions deviate.

Phil is out of town at the moment, so I apologize for speaking on his behalf, but I think his opinion is we the community should pay for it. I think this is great, but personally, I am a little scared of donations having to cover $2400 per year. We could probably do this fine for a couple years, but I am really worried about this long term. If we could predictably be directly responsible for some Notch-like success stories then sure, but hahaha, you can’t predict that kind of thing.

When the costs were $10/mo, that was easy; We could totally pay that (as we have) or ask a few people throw some $20 bills our way. Done. But we don’t really have that luxury anymore.

So alternatively, I’ve been leaning towards the outside sponsorship option. Give some limelight “Ludum Dare XX, Sponsored by YY”. I do know we have something potentially very interesting to sponsors in our niche (gamedev). And companies certainly pay more money for far-worse advertising opportunities.

But at the same time, I’m like “HOLY CRAP! That’s WAAAY more work for me!”. It’s not like I get paid to do this.

Prizes and Incentives

I still get approached about this every so often (today even). Somebody wants to offer prizes for the winners.

Personally, I think one of the best things we do for both you the participants and us the organizers is our “no prizes; your prize is your product” mantra.

For you, it sets a good precedent. Win or lose, you are creating for you. Win is obviously better, but the takeaway from a Ludum Dare can be quantified in so many positive ways. All it costs is a weekend, some sleep, and maybe a little bit of sanity. That’s fair though.

For us, even though we have somewhat strict rules, we don’t have to enforce them vigorously because no money was lost. In other words we can be a little lazy, but really we are trying to encourage and foster a very positive game development community. Competitive yes, but in the best way possible.

That said, I’m not entirely opposed to prizes and/or things given out to participants, but I fear what our judging process would become if it was directly responsible for rewarding the prizes.

Also if we introduce sponsors, they may want to offer incentives. After all, what better time to crash course learn a piece of middleware than during an LD? I kinda think this could work, but at the same time I would never agree to an event that *only* used a piece of middleware. If you want to give a little something special to those that do, by all means.

Scaling down costs

Of course, probably the best to deal with the increased costs is to lower them in the first place. I briefly covered what has been suggested (Amazon, Cloudflare), but if anyone wants to comment on cost reduction ideas feel free.

We’re on a VPS now, and a little birdie in my ear is saying for that we should be dedicated, but that doesn’t lower the cost really.

So. Ludum Dare. We are complicated

Phew! I think that about covers all the angles, concerns and things we have to deal with. I would love this to be a simple “snap my finger and it’s done” problem, but things aren’t all that simple.

We are committed to making this event happen, since we all think it is incredibly important and valuable to a lot of people, but we don’t have infinite time either. We also think that it should stay and be as free as possible for everyone to participate in (this is the Internet after all).

So that’s what has been going on in my noggin’. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Absolutely incredible. All of us are amazed at the sheer numbers we did this past weekend. When the smoke cleared, we were left with 599 entries! To compare, Ludum Dare 20, an event taking place just 4 months ago did 358 entries (288 Compo). Yowzers!

Of course, this weekend wasn’t without its share of problems. You can visit this link to read my postmortem of how things went Saturday and Sunday.

Even still! After getting the site usable, Phil had to come back several times to HEAVILY optimize the site code. We still can’t even turn the sidebar back on yet due to the extra load! Yikes!

But no matter. We are on top of this. Lets talk judging.

For the next 3 weeks, entry voting (judging) is on. Everyone that entered is strongly encouraged to play and rate games. The Rate Entries page will give you a custom random selection of games for you to play. The more games you play, the better the averages, and better the results. Still confused? Check out this guide by matthias zarzecki.

And remember! Only people that submitted a game can vote!

Still no matter the results, be proud of yourself! Whether you finished or not, you did something amazing this weekend! You did in 2-3 days what large companies take months, even years to do (well not exactly, but you get the point). Job well done!

That’s all for now. Thanks everyone for coming out and making this our biggest event yet!