ludumdare

The first time I remember hearing the term “hackathon” out loud was when I was a couple weeks into my employment on Google’s Developer Relations team. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do to help bootstrap developers for the nascent OpenSocial project. Patrick Chanezon, the Developer Advocate on the project, said something like “we’re going to cold call a bunch of social app authors and hold a hackathon to test out the API” which hadn’t really been done before—we were helping pave a new path for the company at the time. That first event was kind of a mess. I remember stalling for time with a room full of developers since our test server wasn’t booting correctly. An engineer was hurriedly trying to fix things so that the attendees could get to work.

On April 17, 2015, Wes, Kalev and I started work on LD32, our third collaboration on a Ludum Dare weekend game jam.

Our resulting entry, Chromos, is a top-down action game reminiscient of Zelda and (blatantly) Titan Souls. It’s the most ambitious game we have tried to make in 48 hours:

Ludum Dare is a game jam. Every 4 months a weekend is selected and a theme is announced. Thousands of game developers have the weekend to design, create, and release games for a competition where there are no official judges and no grand prize.

It’s been the most rewarding creative outlet I’ve ever had.