*** 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!

Thanks everyone for you patience. It looks like we finally have the performance problems solved. Way to help us break-in the new host!

I think we are ready to run a Ludum Dare now! (Oops!)

As you can imagine, Phil and I had an INSANE couple days pounding the website in to submission. Here’s a re-telling of what happened.

(more…)

Something I like to do as we get closer to the deadline is track the number of entries as they’re coming in. And now that the server is working (hurting, but still going), I can do something less stressful now, such as this.

Here are the figures so far.

+4:30 – 112 Entries
+4:00 – 122 Entries
+3:30 – 140 Entries
+3:00 – 161 Entries
+2:30 – 176 Entries
+1:30 – 223 Entries
+1:00 – 255 Entries
+0:00 – 359 Entries

GRAAAH THE SITE IS DYING I CANT DO ANYMORE!!!

Hi Everybody!

If you’re seeing this, then we are in luck!! Welcome to our new shindig, Ludum Dare now on its fancy new VPS server.

Phil and I have been working tirelessly all day and night to get things back up and running. To say I couldn’t have done this without Phil’s help would be an understatement. I may be the pretty face everyone associates as Mr Ludum Dare, but Phil is the man behind the scenes and hero of the day. My sincerest thanks go out to him.

So, where were we?

The submission page is up! Be gentle! Also new: Jam Ratings! Each event has its own set of voting categories 1:1, but Community and Coolness are shared across both.

Thanks to everyone for your patience, and welcome back to Ludum Dare 21!

Hi everyone!

Phil and I are proud to announce several improvements to the rating system were finished just-in-time for this event. The big one is that JAM ENTRIES CAN NOW BE RATED!

Specific details will go live later this weekend, but we’ve heard your cries, and now Jammers and Latecomers are no-longer left out to dry.

In addition, we’ve made a small change to how final rated scores are calculated. Those details will go up later this weekend too.

That’s all for now. Go watch the keynote, and go vote if you haven’t already.

And don’t forget, join us on IRC where we will be announcing the theme FIRST!

Hi everybody!

It’s nearly time to kick off the latest, and what should be yet-again our biggest event yet: Ludum Dare 21.

Theme voting is well under way, with Round 4 closing soon, and Round 5 to follow with ~20 of the highest rated themes from Rounds 1-4. If you haven’t already, go cast your vote:

Hoping to avoid a repeat of April (15 minutes late ’cause I couldn’t flick the theme switch), we’ve since gone ahead and added a caching plugin to the website. Also this time, I’ll be checking the results early, before the swarm hits us.

And *NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK*, IRC and Twitter will be getting the results FIRST!

On to the festivities!

Keynote DOUBLE FEATURE!

Headlining our 21st event with a keynote is Breakdance McFunkypants. Check out this fantastic combination of hip shades, mad-skilled infants, and puppetry:

Sos is back with more of what you love, YOU!

Declarations of intent intermixed with some fine LD game footage. Check it out:

A huge thanks to both Sos and McFunkypants for making such extravagant videos. You guys are the best!

That’s it from me. Stay tuned for your Final Round theme voting, and the event. Good luck!

Hey all.

At the request of our webhost we have now installed the caching plugin W3 Total Cache on the Ludum Dare site (I can hear you laughing at us for NOT running one). The process has so far been smooth and painless, but we’ve only been running it for minutes and not days (nor during an event), so we’ll still have to see if there are any issues.

If a part of the site isn’t working right, please let me and Phil Hassey know! We’ll be on IRC as much as we can this week and during the event.

I have avoided cache plugins in the past since there were “promises” of incompatibilities with some of the plugins I was investigating. We never had the time to really determine the issues, but thanks to our outside encouragement, it’s trial by fire time.

So far everything looks to be working fine, but the big test will be Friday night.

There’s this great thread on MollyRocket about adding facilities to your C and C++ code that automatically check your source code for changes.

https://mollyrocket.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=556

Something like:

float Value = _H(1.0f);

And when you go in to your C/C++ code and change the contstant in the brackets, a hook can be set up so that ALT+TAB’ing back in automatically refreshes that value (call refresh when you get Window focus back). A super useful utility for us C/C++ coders given the whole C/C++ dev-time disadvantage.

I remember us talking about this in IRC some years ago, and as it turns out, Jovoc (Joel) wrote an implementation and shared it (Compatible with GCC and MSVC). You can find some commentary in the very last post of the MollyRocket thread, and a the files here:

http://code.google.com/p/ld48jovoc/source/browse/#svn%2Futil%2Ftweakval

I had to make a few changes to get it working, but it really works great. You can find my fixes after the jump.

The only concern was that Joel didn’t name a license, but I suspect it’s a sort of PD.

Still, I had to make this thread just to say thanks to Joel for sharing his code.

Thanks Joel!

(more…)

If you’re new, or looking for a new tool, you should check this out:

http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/

Wow!

Another record setting event. By the deadline, we had 352 entries (289 Compo, 63 Jam). Pat yourselves on the back everyone, you just participated in something incredible. It blows my mind how much Ludum Dare continues to grow every time we run one. Thank you everyone for being so awesome!

If you had any problems, leave me a comment and I’ll take care of it in the morning (I too am exhausted, hehe). If you need to make any minor cosmetic changes to you page, use this link right here.

Thanks everyone for participating in Ludum Dare 20!

Be sure you come back and rate some games!

Like usual, I’m recording some totals. The number of entries submitted by specific times as we approach the deadline. So far we have: The results are:

(more…)

Ahoy!

I’ve had an insanely busy couple days, deadlines Thursday+Friday+Saturday, in addition to running LD. I botched my Friday one, but it was no big deal anyways. Today I committed to an apartment I’ll be moving in to, so my folks and I celebrated with lunch. My father is very amused by the FoodPhoto tradition, so he encouraged me to take photos.

Burger Time, with PoV

"Here here, take a picture of what we're having too" he said. Chicken Cacciatore Crepe

But now I have some free time, so I thought I’d start playing with a tech and see if I come up with something for the Jam.

Some of the possibilities include:

• Get a “Bullet Dynamics” experiment working
• Research “OpenAL”, and see where my custom sound/audio mixer fits in
• Benchmark “Pawn” for use in sound effect scripting
• Do something with “Squirrel”, something string heavy
• Test out Cg with OpenGL ES shaders (as they’re apparently supported as input)

I’ve ordered those roughly the order I stand a chance of doing them.

Anyways, I’m off to my comfy chair to read some docs.

You should go here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/04/30/not-really-a-game/

Hi everybody!

It’s just about time for the big two-oh, kicking off our 9th year with the first event of 2011!

2010 was an amazing year for Ludum Dare, with over 800 games created by the community! We’re always optimistic, but have extremely high hopes for 2011! Will we break 1000?

Last year we introduced the October Challenge, a special event that saw 24 people not only finish, but bring games to market (app stores, sponsorship, shareware, donationware, etc). That’ll be back again this October, so stay tuned for that. But we know some people that just couldn’t wait! 1 Month Game started by Sophie Houlden is a shared blog community for those that are up to the challenge. Check it out! And speaking of community, #ScreenshotSaturday is a twitter phenomenon spearheaded by Pekuja that has exploded! Check out the latest images at ScreenshotSaturday.com. And if you’ve ever been curious what the community is up to in addition to Ludum Dare, we have Planet Ludum Dare.

Of course, we can’t forget the Jam at GDC. This past March, on the final day of the Game Developers Conference, several of us attendees met-up at the Noisebridge hacker-space in San Francisco to “hack”. Here’s some photos from the gathering:

Extra special thanks to Terry for suggesting the venue. We hope to see more of you next year.

That’s enough reminiscing. Time to get down to business.

Ludum Dare 20 Keynote, with Sos

Hey cool guy, it’s keynote time!!

This keynote is brought to you by Sos, our first non-admin to do a keynote. Check it out, I think it turned out really great.

That’s all for now. Good luck, and we hope you make something great this weekend.

Share and show awesome stuff from and at GDC here.

Lets talk GDC, San Fransisco, and all things going on Feb 27th-28th and March 1st-5th.

Theme: Alternate universe spinoff of a major franchise

Heh, well the “major franchise” part is a stretch, but franchise yes. . The universe is one without color.

Limitations: Framerate cap at 5fps

No problem. I have a platform in mind where that’s actually impossible.

Rule: Use a tool/language you have never used before

Well technically I have used Java before (J2ME), but that was 7 years ago, and I hated every minute of it. This is Java PBP 1.1, and while I’m not quite hating every minute of it, I am clumsy and moving dog-slow (like anyone using a new language would be).

So what did I do?

Yarg, my shadow looms!

Fully lit game board. I win!

Coming to an Amazon near you.

…

(after I make menus, get all the different tilesets in, and test it on some obscure Kindle kin, but yeah, that’s totally soon’ish)

See you guys at GDC!

It’s late, so I’ll be sending the e-mail’s tomorrow. I’ll update this post once I’ve contacted everyone.

E-mail’s sent. 17 18 of the 60+ timelapse videos were chosen. See the comments for the list. Here is the e-mail that was sent:

Hello!

You are receiving this e-mail because you recently participated in Ludum Dare 19, and made a timelapse video we liked.

For the impending 10 year anniversary of Ludum Dare (2012), Phil and I have been discussing a number of ideas for things we should do. Some of them include showcasing great timelapse videos by members of the community (and the games that accompanied them), which is where you come in. Some uses of these videos may include:

- As an example “timelapse video” during a conference talk
- “Ludum Dare Theater” Exhibit, timelapse videos on a TV at an Expo
- Ludum Dare “Exhibit in a Box” DVD

Again, this isn’t a confirmation that your video will be included, nor that the above projects will happen, but your video is up for serious consideration. To be included in one of our video projects, we need a few things from you:

- Your permission to use the video for anything (SEE DVD NOTES)
- Your name (or specifically, how you take credit)
- Your handle (your name on the LD site or elsewhere)
- Your website
- Whether it’s okay to credit you by your name(s)
- Name and license status of your chosen music (if you know)
- A high quality export of your Youtube Video (SEE BELOW)
- A high quality gameplay video (ONLY if not already edited on to the end)

In the case of the DVD idea, understand that WE ARE asking for your permission to potentially profit from your video WITHOUT any license fee or compensation. We recently decided to stop doing “donations for links”, due to the abuse of a few too many 3rd parties donating for the sake of cheap SEO back-links (Paypal refunds aren’t free). So one of my wild ideas was to produce and sell our “Ludum Dare Theater” exhibit reel on DVD, plus a bit to help us cover our costs. That way you get something, and we get the money to cover hosting, etc. Donations may return but without the link arrangement (just our gratitude). We’ll continue to honor the existing donors links for a while (especially you high donors), but may reorganize the page in the future.

How to send me video:

- SEND A LINK, NOT A FILE IN E-MAIL! (If you need space, try DropBox)
- Under 500 MB please!
- DON’T SEND RAW! Use a modern codec like H.264, DivX or XVid with the bitrate set extremely high.
- If you must, you can send lossless. I use Lagarith myself.
- .avi, .mp4 and .m4v containers are preferred (but I can probably convert whatever).

How I will use the video:

- Videos will be fitted to 720p (1280×720 30fps), upscaled and black barred if necessary.
- Your gameplay video will be placed immediately after your timelapse, showing the results of your effort.
- Videos will be faded in (from black), and faded out (to black), unless it already has fades included.
- Each of the videos will be placed back-to-back in the playlist.

Tips, if you want to tweak your video:

- Take Credit! Introduce the event (eg. Ludum Dare 19), the theme (eg. Discovery), as well as you and your entries names (eg. The Discoverizer by Mike “PoV” Kasprzak).
- Show your timelapse!
- Note that the videos will be seen by casually passing expo attendees on a TV. That means they may not see the beginning or end of your video.
- A countdown clock would help onlookers know what’s going on (if appropriate/possible)
- Showing a URL or “good Google search term” at all times might be a good idea if you want to be remembered. Be tasteful.
- Show gameplay footage! Something short. Keep it under 2 minutes, less is best.
- In-game-only sound is preferred for gameplay footage (if there is sound)
- Statistics can be fun, if you have any to share.
- Take Credit Again! We just saw your gameplay video, so how can I find you or your game?
- Add the fade in and fade out (so I don’t have to do anything )

I think that covers everything. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Please get back to me as soon as possible, even if your video files aren’t ready. I’d like to have all the files by next weekend (Sunday January 23rd), but if you need more time just let me know.

Thanks!

If you didn’t receive an e-mail, don’t fret! There were more than 60 timelapse videos created during Ludum Dare 19, and some especially stood out so we’ve used them as the baseline. I’ll post a list once I’m a little more organized. You still have 3 more chances in 2011 (plus MiniLD’s) to make it on the DVD, or be part of our 2011 exhibit reel.

During 2011 we may have the opportunity to exhibit early. We’ll let you know.

Also! If you made an especially extravagant timelapse video in a prior LD, and can meet all my criteria above, post a comment here with a Youtube link, as I may ask for a few more. If you have a great post-compo version you’d like to promote (iPhone port?), feel free to mention that (perhaps a “before” and “after” in your gameplay section).

Like everything LD, if this video thing turns out to be a good idea, we’ll probably do it again.

Thanks!