Welcome to the Academy!
The Jammer Academy is an initiative from Mike as part of Ludum Dare.
As I began reorganizing and structuring the new ludumdare.com website, it became clear we needed a place for education content. How to use tools, how to start making games, and what to do after making a game.
Instead of letting that content get lost, burried, or overwhelm the new ludumdare.com, I decided to spin it off as the Jammer Academy.
The Academy and Ludum Dare will continue to be closely tied, but by separating it, we can better define the goals of each.
If it's about Ludum Dare (rules, frequently asked questions), it goes on ludumdare.com.
If it's about making games, it goes here, in the Academy.
If it's about making games for Ludum Dare... I'm leaning towards keeping ludumdare.com as to the point as possible, which means keeping them here. On the plus side, if we collect Ludum Dare advice articles here, it gives us something to build on. Not to mention, those articles can sit alongside more general jamming advice, and advice for other events. Including advice for other events might seem counter intuative, but we're not at island. I've always been supportive of others running game jams. In fact, I would love to see articles here on running game jams.
Ludum Dare's goal is to inspire. The Academy's goal is to educate.
When the Academy launches, it will probably be as "Jammer Academy, by Ludum Dare", or something like that. Some day the Academy may stand on its own, but today it exists to compliment Ludum Dare.
Ludum Dare has a YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/ludumdare
It also has a Twitch and a Twitter. Many people may not realize it, but Twitter is a capable live video platform as well.
Short of keynote videos and the odd teaser, Ludum Dare doesn't itself generate much video content. We experimented with a live software showcase during the lead up to Ludum Dare 48. Technical issues aside, I was really happy with that.
I want us to do more of that, but entirely isolating the educational content from Ludum Dare would hurt more than it would help. It can be compartmentalized though.
Yes, free and open source. To be clear, that does not mean public domain.
The Academy will have costs and overhead, but like with Ludum Dare, I'd rather make someone else pay for it (i.e. sponsors).
Between calling it a university, college, school, or institute, something about academy resonated with me. I have a complication relationship with schools, so put another way "academy" offended me the least. 😉
Like ludumdare.com we will be building the Academy using the Zola static website generator. Articles will be written in markdown. Video-only content will be annotated using front matter in stub pages. The goal is to build a database of content, be it written, video, or both.
I would like to explore getting our videos mirrored on Odysee, as well as running a PeerTube instance to support that cause. Both projects strive to push free education, and that's kind-of the goal here as well.
When there's something to share. 😉
At the time of this writing, my focus is on populating ludumdare.com's knowledge base. Updating the rules, adding frequently asked questions, etc. We will soon get a point where we need to share things that aren't specifically Ludum Dare issues. As an example, last year I made this video about how to upload releases (executables, binaries) to GitHub. Details like this need to go somewhere.
Anyway, that's the Academy. I'm excited to see where this goes.
- Mike Kasprzak, the Ludum Dare guy
