Ludum Dare 52 staff picks 🕹

Ludum Dare 52, the weekend-long game jam that’s been running for almost 20 years, just wrapped up. This year’s theme was “harvest” and the number of game submissions grew to a whopping 1632!

Ludum Dare is an online competition challenging participants to create a game from scratch in just a few days. The only catch is that entries must adhere to a theme that’s announced at the start of the competition. So, if the theme was “harvest,” you can expect to see lots of games featuring combine harvesters, fields of oats, the grim reaper harvesting souls(!), fruit collection—that sort of thing. Read more about it’s rich history on Wikipedia.

Here are ten of the best entries from Ludum Dare 52 that you can play now, fork, clone, and hack to your heart’s content. Enjoy!

Boba

Play Source

Unity C#

@DanielMullinsGames’ Boba won first place overall with a short, creative, incremental-style game.

Did you know: @DanielMullinsGames’ Ludum Dare 43 entry (November 2018)—Sacrifices Must Be Made—was released 3 years later as a full game. It later went on to win Game of the Year at both the GDC Awards and the IGF awards in 2022, the first game to ever win to win both awards 🤯

Ether Warp

Play Source

Unity C#

Collect Ether Crystals and avoid deadly space pirates.

Fallowtide

Play Source

Python PyGame

Grow and sell crops in this bite-sized farming deck-builder.

Harvest Season

Play Source

Unity C#

Harvest Season is a short horror experience inspired by B-Movie Horror films about a combine harvester that has been possessed by an evil spirit.

Billiard Hero

Play Source

Unity C#

It’s just a simple game of billiards, right? Wrong!

Squirrelativity

Play Source

JavaScript

A relaxing sort-of-mostly-deductive grid-filling-in-type puzzle game with a fun organic twist.

Neighborly Love

Plant crops, water them, sell them, kill your neighbor, and then buy seeds for new crops in this exciting game about growing stuff.

Settlement

Play Source

Unity C#

Harvest resources, trade them and develop your settlement!

Iris’s Scrappy Rumble

Play Source

Unity C#

Destroy evil robots and harvest resources to create weapons to fight on!

Orchard Alchemy

Play Source

Unity C#

Point your browser to https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/games and play through even more cute and creative games. Congratulations to everyone who participated!

Ludum Dare 53 kicks off on April 28! Noobs and seasoned/salty pros welcome!