April 14, 2005
Ludum Dare
The sixth annual Ludum Dare 48-hour Game Programming Competition, aka LD48, starts tomorrow at 10pm US EDT. As of this moment, 21 hours and 36 minutes before competition begins, there are currently 123 entrants, ready to go with their compilers and libraries of choice, and presumably large caches of caffeinated beverages, frozen burritos and power bars.
Latin for “to give free play to“, Ludum Dare (pronounced ‘Lude-um Dar-ay’) “is a ‘mostly from scratch’, timed, solo coding challenge where all willing game developers spend their allowed time making the best game they can under a common theme”. Voting is almost over for choosing that common theme, which includes ideas such as “repetition”, “kitchen combat”, “goop”, and “that tickly feeling in your stomach (not quite love)”.
So, if you’re not doing anything else this weekend, and you have a masochistic bent to you, why not register and join in the fun! Check out last year’s results for inspiration.
April 15th, 2005 at 11:08 am
Do they say of the winner, “ludum habet” (he/she’s got game)?
The competition sounds pretty cool – and not too dissimilar from a long version of the 2-hour SpeedIF contests that we interactive fiction folks, setting aside the Direct X 8 hardware for a bit, sometimes do. I’d be more interested in LD48 if they allowed small teams (2 or 3 people) to collaborate, though.