What made Ludum Dare special (to me)

Apr 15, 2026

#gamedev

Mike Kasprzak recently announced that Ludum Dare would be shutting down (in 3 years). He won’t hand it over, there will be no successor, and he dares us to improve on the LD formula before it’s death-date. I am very conflicted by this announcement.

On one hand, I think that Mike doesn’t owe us anything -in fact, I think we rather owe him quite a lot! However his decision still saddens me. I’ve been the maintainer of somewhat similar projects in the past, and I’ve always chosen to hand them over when it was time for me to move on. I think Ludum Dare could have lived yet a long life.

I guess the only consolation is that the brand won’t be sold off for parts to some AI slop company…

My first Ludum Dare was Ludum Dare 50. I didn’t finish it. Nor did I finish LD51. I did however go on to finish games in the next three jams: Midnight Harvest, Zip Drone Dash, and Penta-mania. And I’m planning on Jamming again this weekend, with Ludum Dare 59!

So while I’m no graybeard, I’m also no spring chicken! These are my thoughts on what made Ludum Dare special (to me), and what I would like to see from it’s successor.

Lots of Feedback!

The world has enough game jams. You only need to browse the itch.io jam calendar to come to that conclusion. And that’s not even counting local (or global!) in-person events.

But not all jams are created equal. Part of what made Ludum Dare so special to me, is the quantity and quality of feedback that I got on my jams. My first ever submission to Ludum Dare had just short of 30 ratings and comments. One person even updated their graphics drivers after catching Vulken errors, in order to provide their feedback. My submission to GMTK in comparison had just 3 comments.

Ludum Dare does feedabck really well. They have an algorithm which drives more traffic to your game, the more reviews and comments you leave. Of course there are always going to be a fair-share of nothing comments (“Nice game!”), but overall I feel like the quantity and quality of feedback on my Ludum Dare games has been really excellent.

I think any serious replacement for Ludum Dare would need to solve keep this feedback system, or something similar.

The Community and Independance

Ludum Dare isn’t just a game-jam website. It’s also a forum! And how refreshing that is. There is technically a Ludum Dare discord, and various Ludum Dare Socials, but it feels like all the real conversation is happening on-site.

People share their jam “stack”. They share their thoughts on the themes. And sometimes, in the quiet moments between jams, they share updates on projects which started as Jam games, and are being finished as comercial projects.

It’s nice to have a corner of the internet that exists outside of Discord/Reddit/Facebook etc. I strongly feel that the Ludum Dare community is so strong because of this distinction. I would hope that a Ludum Dare successor is able to remain similarly independent, and doesn’t become just another itch.io jam.

Theme Voting

I don’t neccesarily view the current implementation of theme-suggestion, theme-slaughter, and theme-voting as critical. But I think it is critical to have something community driven. Compared to other jams, Ludum Dares theme system is clearly more interesting. It drives more discussion, more hype, and indeed -more drama.

I would like to see a successor to Ludum Dare iterate on the theme voting, while keeping the core identity intact.

Uploading?

There are other aspects of Ludum Dare which I don’t view as critical. First and foremost, is the ability to upload games (and web games) to the site. I have to imagine that this is one aspect that makes the site expensive to run, and prone to bot attacks.

In all of my submissions, I’ve always mirrored the game to Itch.io, and that feels sufficient to me.

If the money is there, then sure, invest the time and resources to maintain game uploads. But if it’s not, this is something I would chop. We can still have a good jam, while pushing the game uploads off-site.

What could a successor do better?

I think that a successor to Ludum Dare would need to improve in a few ways. Here is a few:

Final Thoughts

I’m sad to see Ludum Dare go. I can only hope that a replacemtn pops up, and that it manages to capture the same community and magic of the current iteration. If you’re building something cool, please get in touch.