Ludum Dare 20 Starting April 29th

Ludum Dare 20 is only 10 days away! Great, what the heck is Ludum Dare? Well its only the most awesome video game creation contest on the internet, thats what. While originally for the hardest of the hard core, it has recently been split up into 2 events so everyone gets to have some fun.

The Jam is pretty relaxed in the rules. Lets say you and 4 buddies want to make the ultimate zelda remix using fan sprites and free music. This is where you want to be. Its there to give people who want to join in the fun but not make serious obligations.

The Compo is the real deal for those who are insane, or really good. You are given a theme at the start of the contest and 48 hours. You must then work solo and create all original content to use within your game. You can however use premade frameworks, game engines, libraries etc to accomplish your goal, but if you really wanted to you could make a 3D engine with brain fu*k during the competition. (though I would not advise it)

Prizes include internet bragging rights, and quite possibility the best darn feeling of accomplishment possible IF you manage to come up with some form of game, based on a voted theme, by yourself, in less than 48 hours.

Be sure to check out the rules and guide page for all details and I hope to see you there.

9 thoughts on “Ludum Dare 20 Starting April 29th

  1. Cool idea, down sides being that it’s not exactly a fair competition. For instance, I have a friend who has designed 1000’s of sprites. Entering the contest, he can easily pull from those sprites and not have to create them in the 48 hour period.. same goes for many other aspects of game design.

    Overall, it should be very fun to see what comes of it, there are some pretty off the wall ideas posted.

  2. well thats one of the rules …

    “”All game code and content must be created within the 48 hours.””

    1000 sprites a head of time does no good in the compo =) and your not really competing in the jam

  3. @Kevin:

    And who is going to go through the contestants HDD and check all the dates of content? Not to mention all the pre-existing code one might have to use. ctrl+c, ctrl+v = game in under 1hr.

    Back on the contest itself, great things could come of this. I love indie games, I live on newgrounds.com

  4. I’ve done game jams like this several times. While they’re fun and a great test of development ability, with no payoff it’s not really that useful of a competition.

    “Awesome! I spent the last 2 days building this game! Mine’s the best! What do I win?”

    “An independent game created in the last 2 days!”

    Not to mention I have a massive library of code which nobody has ever seen. I could easily copy from previous indy game attempts on my system and submit it for this.

    If you want a FAIR contest, make people do the coding/work in front of some sort of organizers. That’s how all of mine have been done for game jams of the past.

  5. @jaqen: …and have all USB ports plugged up with chewing gum. And make sure there’s neither bluetooth or WiFi on those boxes nor any card readers, or else they’ll just ship in the stuff on their mobiles and upload it (memory cards can be hid anywhere these days anyway).

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