I’ve felt contemplative lately and wanted to write a short-ish post about my team’s Ludum Dare history. Ludum Dare 58 was our 17th, dating back to LD 30. We started out creating our games in Stencyl, which at the time I jokingly called “programming with LEGOs”. The downside today is that our first four entries (Melody’s Long Ladder Home, Icy’s Trivial Travails, Dial M for Monster and Driven Insane) were made exclusively for Flash and aren’t publicly playable anymore.

We transitioned to Unity for Box ‘n Bash in Ludum Dare 34, taking that jam as an opportunity to learn how to make a game in Unity. Yes, our LD entry that year was our first attempt at Unity. Really, cramming for the jam and then turning out something at the end in an engine we’d never used before was super satisfying, and highly recommended. There’s nothing to lose by not completing your project on time, and the impetus of a surprise theme and the tight deadline can be invigorating.

I grew up watching Iron Chef, Junkyard Wars and the like, so I love the on-the-fly improv that comes from a short deadline and a surprise theme. Take what you know, use what you have, manage the clock, and create something special. The short timeframe stops projects from spiraling out of control and keeps you focused until the end.

One of the things we’ve never successfully done for a game jam is a multiplayer game. We’ve had some that started with multiplayer in the design doc (Needle in a Neighborhood comes to mind), but it always gets cut.

Our most common genre is the side-scrolling platformer, of which we’ve in five of our 17 jams. The next most common with three are FPS and what I’d call ‘falling games,’ where you control an object falling from the top of the screen and guiding it to safety. The fact that we’ve done that in over 17% of our jam entries (stacking crates in Box ‘n Bash, guiding a bell pepper into an oven in Get Baked, and helping a squirrel catch nuts in Grab Your Nutz) is a little weird, given that it’s not that common a theme.

Speaking of Grab Your Nutz, it just got a high-res release on Android this month. New graphics, but the same basic gameplay. Here’s the original from 2020, compared to the new version from this year:

If you’re interested, you can download it for free on Google Play.