When Daniel Mullins took to the stage at March’s Independent Games Festival Awards, amid all the usual family members and collaborators thanked during his four acceptance speeches for awards for Inscryption was a more surprising name: Mike Kasprzak. At least, it was a surprise to Kasprzak, who is a fan of Mullins’ debut game Pony Island but isn’t sure he has ever actually met or spoken to the man.
At the time of his IGF cameo, Kasprzak was busy preparing for the 50th instalment of the Ludum Dare game jam, an event that marked its 20th year. And it’s this which secured Kasprzak’s place in the acceptance speech. Inscryption started life as a Ludum Dare game, as did Pony Island. On the night, Mullins was fairly clear about its importance: “I actually don’t think I would be doing indie games if it wasn’t for Ludum Dare”.
He’s not the only one. Ludum Dare has long been a testing ground for indie-game royalty, the likes of Terry Cavanagh and Edmund McMillen. It features in the origin stories of Hollow Knight, Mini Metro, and Papers, Please among many others, and has played a role in the founding of studios across the world, including Shiro Games in France, Free Lives in South Africa, and Death’s Door developer Acid Nerve in the UK.
“It took me a while to accept this,” Kasprzak says, when we catch up with him in April, partway through LD50’s three-week run. “But yeah, we have had an impact.” Throughout our conversation, he remains self-effacing about his role in all this, but – as the man who pretty much singlehandedly runs every event these days – it’s fair to say that Kasprzak is the reason Ludum Dare is still going strong after two decades. All the more remarkable, given he initially stumbled into the whole thing as an outsider.
The first Ludum Dare was the brainchild of Geoff Howland, a developer who was active on the gamedev.net forum around the turn of the millennium. After hearing about the Indie Game Jam in 2002 – generally considered to be the first jam event – Howland’s immediate reaction, as Kasprzak tells it, was: “Dang, I want to be invited to something like this”. Followed quickly by: “Screw it, I’m going to make my own, and invite everyone on the Internet”.
Kasprzak, barely out of his teens at the time but already just in time to join Howland’s own IRC channel for Ludum Dare #0 that April. “It was basically just a bunch of friends getting together in a chatroom and saying, ‘OK, let’s do this’,” he says. They challenged each other to make a game from scratch in the space of 24 hours. “And we very quickly learned that’s not enough time. You kind of end up with some graphics on a screen, and that’s about it.” With the format tweaked to a 48-hour weekender, Ludum Dare #1 followed three months later.
