This weekend Ludum Dare 20 will be held. You don’t know what Ludum Dare is? First of all: shame on you. Second of all: more shame on you!

Ludum Dare is a 48h game development competition. Usually you are given a theme and then create a game from scratch in two days. It’s a breeding ground for great indie developers, and quite a bunch of “famous” people take or took part. Here’s a time lapse of Notch (creator of Minecraft) creating Metagun for Ludum Dare 18. (You can find a libgdx port of the game in our demos folder btw, see SVN).

Seriously, if that doesn’t wet your appetite for wasting enjoying 2 days of pure game development goodness then you shall hand in your geek card. Now!

Libgdx is mature enough to be used in ludum dare. On the plus side you have stand-alone, applet and Android versions of your game out of the box. Cross-platform even! So let’s show those Unity snobs! (Seriously though: Unity is awesome, go check it out! if you don’t know it and essentially lived under a rock for the past years).
For those among you new to libgdx i suggest reading the DOCUMENTATION section on the Google Code main page very carefully. We have full javadocs, tests showing off functionality and full demo games. We also have a growing number of Wiki articles. Fetch the links to all these things from the Google Code page, that should make you read it

This also brings me to our first “Beginning Android Games” challenge. Enter the Ludum Dare competition, create a game in 48h with libgdx and actually submit it in time! Since there might be a chance that multiple people enter and complete the competition i’d say we hold a community vote on who should be declared the winner. Maybe i can talk Apress into giving out more copies so everyone is a winner :p.

Don’t disappoint me. I’m serial!