Ludum Dare, 48 Hour Indie Games Dev Competition Kicks Off

Every four months, the independent games developer community get together for a competitive yet somewhat cooperative dev session, Ludum Dare. The idea is to create a game within 48 hours. At the end of the weekend, all the games are made available and members of the community play and rate each game based on certain crieria: Innovation, Fun, Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Community, Coolness. The top three games in each category are awarded gold, silver and bronze, with an overall winner taking top recognition for the event, as there are no actual prizes involved.

This event captures the spirit of the indie game dev community. Competitive yet friendly, it’s all about the games. Developers keep all Intellectual Property Rights to their games and many are improved upon and released as full working titles after the Ludum Dare events.

This weekend we see the 21st Ludum Dare event taking place. The theme this time around (as voted for by the community) is ‘Escape’, therefore all the games entered will feature some kind of escape mechanics or story.

Follow the #LD48 hashtag on Twitter to see what’s going on. Indie game dev celebrity Notch (Markus Persson, of Minecraft fame) has entered the competition, and is live-streaming his dev session over at lifestream.com. This should make for an interesting experience. Any budding games devs who want to see how the pros do it – tune in within the hour, when Notch is expected to start coding.

Team GodisaGeek wish the best of luck to all entrants, and we look forward to trying out some of the games that come out of this! More details are available over at the Ludum Dare website.

[Update]

48 have passed, the competition is now over and there are over 500 submissions on the Ludum Dare website. Now it’s over to the community to get downloading, playing, and voting! I know what I’m going to be doing for the rest of the week…