Hey everyone! This is my 11th Ludum Dare and my 28th-ish game jam overall and I wanted to share some sage advice.

Setup your build pipeline RIGHT NOW. Before the jam even starts.

• Create your itch page right now (leave it as a Draft). Set the URL to "ld57" or something generic because we don't know what the theme is yet.
• Setup your IDE / game engine / template project / whatever. (you should really already be doing this)
• Write a script that will make an upload-ready production build of your game. (some engines make this easier than others)
• Write another script that will upload your game to your itch page (look into the itch tool "Butler" if you haven't heard of it!)
  • I suggest separating these scripts so you can smoke-test the build before you upload it
• Test the pipeline now! Just upload a blank test project, just to make sure the whole system works. Don't worry, it's not "cheating" to upload a blank project to the internet.

This way, you can upload whenever you want as frequently as you want!

This also streamlines playtests. You can set the page to password protected and then you already have a link you can send people. No awkward google drive / dropbox links!

In the final hours of the jam while everyone is panicking to upload, you're able to chill out (or spend those last precious minutes adding final polish to your game :wink: ).