Despite being a pretty active participant in Ludum Dare, I've never pursued the October Challenge yet.<p>Working on the last 10% of a game (the polish) is the hardest part of the development process; not only is it a lot of work, but at that point you're much more likely to be burned out from working on said game.<p>Despite this, I'm currently working on a game with great potential that I hope will end up somewhere :)
This is general to Ludum Dare (not to this challenge) but since it's infrequently discussed here I thought I'd post.<p>I'm not really sure what the point of Ludum Dare is. I participated once in the main competition for LD23. I produced a pretty horrible game with the time I had allotted but did enjoy having a reason to screw up my schedule and drink too much coffee.<p>The winning game I thought was innovative and I actually played it for more than 10 minutes. There was one other game that I played (I played twenty or so to vote on them) that was fun to play. It also (deservedly) ranked well. The rest (based on an admittedly small sample) simply <i>weren't</i> games, at least not yet.<p>My observation is that if Ludum Dare is about creating games -- if nothing else than for the sake and love of games -- then the format is completely wrong. If you look at the industry as a whole there is an abundance of poorly made games (largely made in Flash, though iOS, Android and most other platforms have their share) that do nothing for the developers or the limited number of people that play them.<p>This October challenge reemphasizes the misplaced focus of Ludum Dare: make something overnight that makes just $1. The world doesn't need any more games worth $1. Here's a better challenge for the game development community: Make a game in a month that makes (over its life) $1,000 - $10,000. I want to play those games. A month is still insanely short, especially assuming most could only put in their free time, but it's infinitely better than 48 hours. A simple game has some chance of being polished in that amount of time.<p>Instead of Ludum Dare squandering the significant amount of attention is generates on 1000s (it broke 1000 entries in LD23) of shovel-ware games, why not encourage and then help promote a smaller number of reasonably well produced games. Raising the bar for entires would cut the numbers dramatically so it would be win-win.<p>You could say that I already answered my question when I said I enjoyed participating. I did enjoy it yes, but I don't think I would do it again. I also don't think that it has any value for the game development community or people who love games for the reasons I've already outlined. The emphasis is all wrong. You don't want to <i>just finish</i> a game. Games aren't made that way. Instead shift the emphasis to creating, <i>polishing</i> and even marketing simple games.
I googled to learn what "ludum dare" means (I know some Latin and could guess that was an expression) however people kept translating as simply "to give a game" which obviously makes no sense.<p>So I looked it up and according to Lewis & Short it means "to humor or indulge someone". So there you go.
Glad to see Ludum Dare getting some exposure on HN. It's come from such a small thing to something that's having a serious impact both for beginners and experienced game developers. (The first Steam Greenlight approved game, McPixel, was originally a Ludum Dare entry.) They pretty much have the online hackathon idea nailed down.
First time hearing about Ludum Dare and so far the community + concept look fantastic!<p>Since anyone can write a post, is it hard to get your post seen? (Not sure how many new posts get written per day)