Rules and Fine Print

Ludum Dare is a solo, from scratch competition.

In 48 hours, you build a game entirely on your own based on the given theme. No premade content, and no teams.

Your game belongs to you. After all, you made it. Ludum Dare and any of its affiliates claim no rights or ownership to your game.

The organizers do request the right to use your game for purpose of publicizing the competition. If you do not wish your game to be publicized in this way, we ask that you make an effort to inform the organizers and downloaders of your request (notes in README, title screen, forums, etc).

The competition is open to anyone of any game development skill or experience. We regularly get entries from all sides of the game industry. Developers with retail game experience, people involved in the Indie and Casual games spaces, students and hobbyists.

See Platforms, Libraries, Middleware, and Tools.

See Submission Guidelines.

One or more weeks before the start date of the competition, the community is given the opportunity to suggest themes. From phrases to short words. To suggest themes, add them here.

After a sufficient number of themes have been collected, 2 or more rounds of voting begin to reduce the number of options. The last round of voting will be on the day before the event. 24 hours later at the designated start time, the theme decided by majority will be announced in IRC, on the Website(s), and sent to the mailing list.

Everybody that enters a game is a judge. A judge rates each submitted game.

There are no physical or cash prizes for the competition. Your prize is your product.

We have 10 categories your game will be rated in, plus 2 community categories:

• Graphics - How good the game looks. Nice artwork, excellent generated or geometric graphics, charming programmer art, etc.
• Audio - How good the game sounds. A catchy soundtrack, suitable sound effects, voice overs, etc.
• Humor - How amusing a game is. Humorous dialog, funny sounds, or is it so bad it's good?
• Fun - How much you enjoyed playing a game. Did you look up at the clock, and found it was 5 hours later?
• Technical - Wait… you did THAT in 48 hours??? From scratch? Wow!
• Innovation - The unexpected. Things in a unique combination, or something so different it's notable.
• Effort - You pulled together a lot of great things, wrote a 3D engine from scratch, but the game didn't turn out. Oh well.
• Polish - A rating of overall completeness and refinement. Whats missing?
• Theme - How well an entry suits the theme. Do they perhaps do something creative or unexpected with the theme?
• Overall - Your overall opinion of the game, in every aspect important to you.

• Food - Your score for taking good during-compo food photos with interesting commentary about your LD dieting habits.
• Journal - Your score for keeping an entertaining / high quality journal.

Votes in each category are given a rating from 1-5, or N/A if not applicable (i.e. no sound).

One or more judges can choose to bestow a special trophy. These are to highlight achievements that we couldn't cover in our broader categories. It's recommended a proper trophy graphic is created as the award.

Examples:

• allefant's “Elephant Award for Most Effort in Creating an Engine from Scratch”
• philhassey's “The Chestival Memorial Award of Excellence” (likely given to the best entry involving chest hair)

• Rules for LD #4: http://hamumu.com/LD48/ld_faq.html
• Rules for LD #6: http://www.mechanicalcat.net/tech/ld48/rules