The Ludum Dare October Challenge: Finish a game, Take it to market, Earn $1 | Hacker News Reader

The Ludum Dare October Challenge: Finish a game, Take it to market, Earn $1

ludumdare.com

98 pointsSodaware27 comments

Despite being a pretty active participant in Ludum Dare, I've never pursued the October Challenge yet.

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.

Despite this, I'm currently working on a game with great potential that I hope will end up somewhere :)

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." —Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

That last 10% is a killer. :)

aka 'if your work is 90% complete, you are half way done'

I participated in the first October Challenge two years ago. The timing was perfect for me since I had a project that was nearly done, but I was getting burned out, like you said, on that last 10%. The addition of a deadline helped me focus and get through it.

This is general to Ludum Dare (not to this challenge) but since it's infrequently discussed here I thought I'd post.

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.

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 weren't games, at least not yet.

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.

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.

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.

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 just finish a game. Games aren't made that way. Instead shift the emphasis to creating, polishing and even marketing simple games.

I had a similar experience to yours -- when I was in college. LD was run on an infrequent basis then. I participated in two, as well as some student-run ones, and figured, "ah, I think I've done enough jams, I should do bigger games. These little ones aren't serious, they aren't what I want to be doing."

Years later, LD started getting run more frequently and got more popular. Remembering having a good time with it previously, I participated again and put in a lot of effort, thinking I could crush it with more experience, and soon realized I was wrong about both my experience and my prior perspective. Here's what I realized:

- Most of the time I spend on a big project is spent on learning something specific to that project. Minimizing the schedule means that I only learn things necessary towards finishing. This is not an easily dismissed skillset. It isn't the only skill, but it's your most easily monetized one.

- Tangibility is really really important towards motivating future work. This is why prototyping software is worthwhile in the first place. When it's finished, you have a reference, one which you own and probably understand better than anyone else. The reference isn't the code(which is probably butchered) or the assets(which are necessarily cheap) but in the possibilities suggested for future improvement.

- Prototyping - and creation itself - is a fractal endeavor. Each time you build a new feature, you have to do the same kind of work that goes into a game jam in order to prove and flesh out its capabilities. This is repeated the whole way up the ladder, until the project is complete. At each step you can prototype until you hit tangibility, polish it a bit, then move on to the next feature, etc.

While I agree that of 1000 entries, most are going to be half-baked, that's kind of the point. You're being encouraged to go in and pick up the experience of every stage of the project, so that when you want to expand scope, it's not hard or surprising, it just involves more learning and specialization.

As well, it helps you in identifying bad, unmarketable ideas faster, which is the real problem that plagues game developers - a lot of time and money sunk into something that could never sell.

I absolutely see the value in "getting down to it" and producing and MVP or demo or whatever. I think iterative, agressive development is the way to go when making any software product (which is what I do for a living).

My point is to criticize the emphasis on turning out "just enough" and then moving on. This isn't only within LD but I've seen plenty of it in the indie game development community in general as well. As a strong undercurrent in the community I think it's harmful.

If LD is to be about game development as a craft in its entirety (and maybe that's not LD's role) then I think it has to be about more than just producing a quick demo of an idea.

$1000-$10,000 is a difficult goal for people who are learning or starting out. Realistically, if your game is good enough to make $1, it will probably make more than one dollar, but the goal of the October challenge is to finish a game that is good enough that you want to sell it. I'd argue that the emphasis is finishing and polishing vs. LD48's emphasis on game rapid creation and innovation. In either case if you want to have an inclusive community that also emphasizes learning and experimentation, you can't apply an arbitrary quality bar to entries, it's just not in the spirit of the jam. That's not to say it wouldn't be cool to have a depth, quality or value jam, but you'd have to limit the entrants to skilled game developers.

There are also games that have come out of game jams that have made $1000-$10,000 or more. Galcon, Depict1 and McPixel come to mind as games that started in LD48 or Global Game Jam and have had decent commercial success after the fact.

> Realistically, if your game is good enough to make $1, it will probably make more than one dollar, but the goal of the October challenge is to finish a game that is good enough that you want to sell it.

I don't really agree with that. It's entirely possible to produce something that can be put on Kongregate or even submitted to an app store that makes a few bucks and nothing more. In fact that's pretty much my whole complaint. We don't need more games that make $23.65 over their lifetime. People don't need to make them and other people don't need to play them.

> LD48's emphasis on game rapid creation and innovation

I do agree with you there. And the better entires I played from LD23 were innovative. However, those were a minority. If the goal is innovation then I think LD fails most participants.

> you can't apply an arbitrary quality bar to entries

I wasn't suggesting that a wall be put up. I was suggesting that by changing the format more emphasis would be put on quality automatically. I think if you can set aside a full weekend for game development you can likely set aside n hours over the course of a month as well. Not in all cases of course but in enough to keep the event open and inclusive.

> Galcon, Depict1 and McPixel come to mind as games that started in LD48 or Global Game Jam and have had decent commercial success after the fact.

Picking Galcon because it's a game I'm familiar with, the success of that game over the years had a lot to do with continued work on it, adding features, moving to new platforms, etc. Sure, it may have started in a jam but I don't think LD was a necessary condition of that game's success.

Look at it another way. Galcon was successful mostly because of the work done after LD. Hassey had the wherewithal to follow through with the game to make it successful. It's really the "after the demo" follow through that matters the most for both creative and financial success. I think LD (or other jams) would better serve the community if more emphasis could be placed there. I think a longer format and higher goals would be a step in the right direction.

I see what you're saying. Basically have a jam that's less of a sprint and more of a marathon that encourages quality feedback and helps people iterate on their game long term and build polished games.

I started a weekly game jam in the Bay Area that's focusing on this goal, although I'm still unsure on whether or not it will be successful.

Do you have a link or any info you can share?

I think you might be missing the point. A large reason that Ludum Dare exists is to get people into making games. Any of the great indie games you've played have been made by people who have previously made dozens of horrible prototypes and "Ludum dare style" games. Developers don't simply go from zero to making award-winning games, there is a large amount of learning and practice that has to happen, which LD facilitates.

As for the October challenge itself, it's a great way to get beginner indie devs used to the process of charging money for games. There is a huge amount of learning that will come out of doing the Oct challenge, including marketing, payment processing, support, and all that fun stuff.

Also, in your post you sounded as if you were worried about how this will affect the current state of indie games, and I can assure that indie games are doing better now than they ever have.

> Also, in your post you sounded as if you were worried about how this will affect the current state of indie games, and I can assure that indie games are doing better now than they ever have.

No, not at all. But I do think it reinforces a trend of quickly producing (and even publishing) unpolished, unplayable games.

> Any of the great indie games you've played have been made by people who have previously made dozens of horrible prototypes and "Ludum dare style" games.

I'd love to see some data on that. Personally I don't think producing a string of "horrible prototypes" is a necessary introduction to game development. There are plenty of aspects of game development that aren't adequately covered by producing 48-hour throwaway demos.

> Developers don't simply go from zero to making award-winning games, there is a large amount of learning and practice that has to happen, which LD facilitates.

Except for some very rare outliers, "developers" (used here in the singular) don't make award winning games at all. An indie darling like Braid was produced at a substantial cost and with the addition of at least one artist as well as musicians. Blow didn't "jam" that game into existence. It was a very long, very difficult project that included throwing out the artwork and starting over at one point (if memory serves).

I'm cherry picking a bit there but make a list in your mind of how many great indie games were "jammed" into existence using well honed "jamming" skills. I can't think of any.

My point is that developing games people actually want to play involves "game jam skills" + n, where n probably represents over 95%. We can all jam out throwaway games to our hearts' content. If we're going to make great games or even just good games then we need to put our time into learning n. LD, given its strong following, could better serve the community by focusing more on n. I have absolutely nothing against LD or its participants, but I think it could be more than it is.

I say I made Filler in around a month back in 2008, but really I made it one night--the prototype, anyway. From there it took a couple of nights & weekends to add some menus, ads, and high scores. I'd say I've booked somewhere in the neighborhood of $50-$75k off of it since then, and it still makes decent ad money today.

A weekend is more than enough time to get a prototype together that's worth devoting more time to. Ludum Dare is an excuse to put aside the rest of your life for that weekend and take a crack at it (especially for people who don't normally make games).

Really? I'd love to hear more about that.

I think this type of thing is exactly what LD is about. Anyone who's tried to build a game knows how easy it is to get carried away with adding new features or updating things with the latest technology. Having a hard limit gives you a kick up the backside to get that kernel of fun out the door.

So having fun means nothing?

this leaves the space open for anyone who wants to start a different type of game-hackathon.

Making 1$ is not the point. Same way as writing single line of code is not the point of the recipe about how to deal with writer block that says "write single line of code".

Also problem with too many crappy games and do little awesome games cant be solved by telling people go stop making bad games and instead focus and make more awesome games.

I believe it's more about encouraging a lot of people to write as many games as they can and build better mechanisms for discovery of awesome games.

When I first saw android market (I skipped the iphone) I was amazed how idiotically simple it was. Newest and highest ranked, few categories and that's all? How am I supposed to find anything amusing for myself with such crude tools. After few hours of using it I could suggest 4 or 5 improvements that would make my experience there immensely better.

I'd like to have something like jinni.com for games. Something that understands what games are and who I am and how those two things relate.

Google obviously doesn't give a damn about games, even less than apple does. The play market is a disaster for discover-ability.

I think maybe there is value to people like me who are not professional game developers and have always wanted to make a game at some point but found the time commitment too much. You may not have a month free to work on something, but you might have a spare weekend.

It doesn't really matter if most of the games are crappy, the only costs are 48 hours of time and maybe a few MB of server space somewhere.

It doesn't seem that hard to me to understand Ludum Dare: it's basically NaNoWriMo, but a month earlier, and for games instead of novels.

I think the point of this challenge is to encourage fledgeling developers to learn how to sell their games, and think about the money side of things, instead of treating sales as an afterthought.

>This October challenge reemphasizes the misplaced focus of Ludum Dare: make something overnight that makes just $1.

The October challenge is for the whole month, not overnight. You submit your game to market on November 1st but you have the whole month to produce it.

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.

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!

Since anyone can write a post, is it hard to get your post seen? (Not sure how many new posts get written per day)

It varies a lot. During one of the big thrice-yearly compos, your posts will fall off the main page within minutes (but there are tons of people reading), between compos a post might stay on the front page for a few days (but no one is checking the site). During the other events like a Mini-LD and the Oct. challenge it's somewhere in between.

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