You can submit your game anytime from when the Jam/Compo starts up until the end of the submission hour.
To check when the event is ending look at the countdown clock in the sidebar of Ludum Dare site. The Compo finishes 48 hours after the theme was announced and the Jam ends 72 hours after the theme was announced.
Both the Compo and the Jam have an hour of extra submitting time once they finish. Although it's strongly recommended that you submit earlier, as there are all sorts of technical issues, that you could run into. So you want to keep at least an hour free for the submission process.
There are two steps to submitting a game to Ludum Dare.
- First you need to host your game and possibly source code somewhere.
- Then you need to submit it to LudumDare.
Whether you're participating in the Jam or the Compo you'll need to host your game somewhere. The kind of hosting you need varies depending on if you've made a web or desktop game.
The Compo also requires you to supply your source code, so you'll need to host that as well.
There are plenty of ways to host your games for free. Here are a few of the popular platforms. This is by no means an exhaustive list and there are many other ways to host your game.
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Itch.io allows free hosting of HTML5, Flash, Java and Unity as well as desktop games. Check out their getting started guide.
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GameJolt allows free hosting and easy uploading for web and desktop games. Go here to add a game to GameJolt.
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Newgrounds allows free hosting of Flash(swf) and HTML5(zip) games. Go here to add a game.
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Kongregate allows free hosting of Unity, Flash, HTML5 and WebGL games. Check out their guide to uploading your game.
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GitHub Releases allows you to host builds of your game, which is good for desktop games. GitHub Pages allows you to directly host web games from your project's GitHub repository.
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GitLab provides similar services to GitHub. You can host builds of your game on GitLab by using Tags. And GitLab Pages allow you to directly host web games.
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DropBox is a good and simple way to host files such as desktop games, but it's not suitable for web games.
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Drive is very similar to Dropbox and is also a good way to host desktop games. It's also possible to host WebGL games, though it needs a bit of work.
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Free web hosting
There are many sites that offer free web hosting as well as many paid sites that offer free trials. If you choose to use free web hosting, it's advised that you upload a test game before Ludum Dare starts.
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Your own website
If you have your own website or server then your probably going to want to host your game there.
The Ludum Dare Compo requires you to share the source code for your game. There are two main kinds of sites to choose between, source control or cloud storage.
If you are already using source control software such as git then it is easy to upload your source code to an online host. If you don't have experience using source control software, then these sites all have getting started guides. But you might fid it easier to use a cloud storage provider. There are many sites that provide hosting for source control repositories, here are a few
- GitHub. Git repository hosting with support for svn clients.
- GitLab. Git repository hosting with support for svn clients.
- BitBucket. Git and Mercurial repository hosting.
The other choice is a cloud storage provider. It's best to upload a .zip file with all your source code in it.
Before you Submit your game you'll need a few things
- Link to your game that's hosted somewhere.
- Link to your source code that's hosted somewhere (only for Compo).
- Some screen shots of your game.
- An account on the Ludum Dare site.
- A name for your game.
. . . Need to finalize details