Ludum Dare Will End In October 2028
After 20+ years, six more events, and a community that built a legend — Mike Kasprzak has announced the final countdown.
If you've been in indie game dev for more than about five minutes, you know Ludum Dare. It's the jam that helped launch Hollow Knight. It's where Celeste got its first 48-hour prototype. Inscryption, Broforce, a dozen other titles that ended up on people's Game of the Year lists — they all started as Ludum Dare submissions, hacked together in a weekend on caffeine and theme-driven panic.
So when Mike Kasprzak, the jam's longtime caretaker, posted that Ludum Dare would officially end in October 2028, it hit harder than the usual indie dev news cycle. This isn't a pivot or a rebrand. He's drawing a line.
Six more scheduled Ludum Dare events over the next three years. The 64th event in October 2028 is the last one on the calendar. A possible unofficial encore in April 2029, and then "Ludum Dare returns as needed." The name retires with it.
Why 64?
Kasprzak has always been a numbers guy about this — he ran the entire April-is-Ludum-Dare-month tradition on the strength of ritual alone. His reasoning for stopping at 64 is that the next number that meant anything to him was a power of two, and LD 64 lines up with October 2028. It's unsentimental on the surface and deeply sentimental underneath. That's Ludum Dare in one sentence.
There's more to it than a milestone, though. Kasprzak took most of 2025 off and cancelled all scheduled events that year, citing personal reasons and a tough year of job-hunting. He came back to run Ludum Dare 57 in April 2025 ("sponsored by GameMaker," as the site still reads), but the writing was on the wall. Running a biannual global jam, for free, as a labor of love, for over two decades — that catches up with a person.
What About Someone Else Taking Over?
This is the part that's caused the most community friction. Kasprzak has explicitly said he doesn't want anyone else running Ludum Dare under the Ludum Dare name. His reasoning, roughly: the brand is the community he built, and he'd rather see that community start something new and learn from LD's mistakes than have a successor dilute what Ludum Dare was.
On the Ludum Dare forums, longtime community member Sheepolution pushed back in a post titled "A Better Ludum Dare; or, How to Ruin a Legacy," arguing that refusing to let the name continue puts everything at risk. "The current envisioned future for Ludum Dare is blurry," they wrote. It's a debate that's been playing out across Discord, the forum, and BlueSky since the announcement dropped.
Both sides have a point. Kasprzak built this thing on specific principles — no entry fees, no corporate capture, themes voted on by participants, everyone welcome — and he's right that a successor doesn't automatically inherit those principles along with the name. But Ludum Dare was also, for a lot of devs, their first jam. Their first finished game. Losing that name means something.
Why This Matters For Indie Studios Like Us
Ludum Dare has always been more than a competition. It was a functioning proof-of-concept for what the indie scene can do when it organizes around constraints and community. 48-72 hours, a theme, no budget, a global pool of players voting on each other's submissions — that model shaped how a lot of small studios learned to ship.
Our team at Second Shot has been kicking around the idea of having apprentices participate in jams as part of the onboarding process. Nothing teaches you scope control like being forced to finish something by Sunday night. If you can build something playable in 48 hours, you can build anything on a reasonable timeline — you've already done the hardest version.
The practical takeaway for indie devs right now: if you've been thinking about entering a Ludum Dare, the clock is legitimately running. There are six left. That's it. The last LD happens October 2028. If the jam is on your bucket list, don't wait for a "better time" that isn't coming.
What Comes Next
Kasprzak has encouraged the community to build a spiritual successor — not a copy, but something better that learned from what LD got right and wrong. He's promised three more years of transparent behind-the-scenes posts explaining how the event actually worked, so whoever picks up the torch isn't starting from scratch.
There are already alternatives with momentum. Brackeys Game Jam runs twice a year and pulls huge numbers. Global Game Jam is the closest thing to LD in scale. Itch.io hosts hundreds of smaller jams constantly, with new ones launching weekly. The ecosystem isn't going away. It's just losing its biggest name.
Which, honestly, might be the point Kasprzak is making: Ludum Dare was never the ecosystem. The ecosystem is the people. The jam was the excuse to show up.
LD 59 — April 2026 (just wrapped)
LD 60 — October 2026
LD 61 — April 2027
LD 62 — October 2027
LD 63 — April 2028
LD 64 — October 2028 (final scheduled event)
Unofficial Encore — April 2029 (possible)
If you've never done one, pick a weekend, pick an engine you already know, and go. You have six chances left.
— Posted from the studio. If you're running a game jam team in Utah and want to collab on an LD entry before the final event, hit us up at contact@secondshotstudio.com.