Over the past weekend we took part in Ludum Dare 30, an international game development sprint that takes place a couple of times a year. Each Ludum Dare has two distinct parts, namely an individual 48-hour competition, and a more relaxed 72-hour jam that also allows working in groups.

We’ve previously taken part in the jam for Ludum Dare 26, for which the theme was “Minimalism”. That was actually the first time we made a game together as a group. It was during that weekend that we developed Loki (now Polygone), which you can still go and play over here right now.

This time around, we decided to each do the competition on our own. For those of you who don’t know, the rules of the competition are as follows: You must work on your own to develop a game over a 48-hour period that fits the provided theme. All code and assets must be developed during the 48-hour period. Publicly available programming libraries and tools are allowed, but all art and sound assets need to be self-created during the competition.

So yeah, we had a pretty busy weekend involving little sleep and a lot of work, but we do have three games for you to go out and play. The theme for this competition was “Connected Worlds”. Francois made an artsy endless runner called Neon Highway. Hilgard made a game about galactic conquest called Trading Strategy. Finally, I made a word game about exploration called SpellChain.

Go check out our games and let us know what you think! It was a fun challenge to do and I hope you enjoy the fruits of our labours. As mentioned last week, this brings our weekly frenzy of prototyping to an end, so we have more time to look at some of the more promising prototypes we’ve released in the past 10 weeks. Stay tuned for updates on those soon!