DDRKirby(ISQ) here reporting that team Cocoa Moss will be joining Ludum Dare once again.

Last time around we made Hide and Seek, a horror game with an emphasis on atmosphere and storytelling. We ended up with a 1st place medal in the "Mood" category.

This will be my 24th time doing LD and my 15th time working together with @xellaya, who will be helping with art and animation while I take care of implementation and audio. Concept and design will be a joint venture between both of us, of course.

My starter code is split between two repositories: This one which is the shared "library" of scripts and such and This one which is the project template itself. Neither of these two are mature projects so I would not recommend using them, but they contain a bunch of common useful stuff like screen transitions, basic audio handling, site-locking code, some basic UI effects, and that sort of thing. As you might expect, it tends to expand bit by bit with each passing LD as I find more and more things that are useful to have around.

We have been moving towards making more games with a focus on dialogue, so I have been working towards adding support in this framework/template for RPG-style text boxes so they don't have to be re-implemented from scratch every single time.

As a heads up to all Godot developers, Godot 3.3 has just recently released and is a recommended upgrade for pretty much everyone. There have been some changes to the way that HTML5 exports work, so that is worth familiarizing yourself with -- in particular the availability of threaded builds, which seems great but unfortunately is not yet supported across all browsers.

In past LDs we've had a funny thing happen where we end up having a pretty high bar for ourselves in terms of making polished and well-thought out games -- in particular trying to make very cohesive narratives. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but perhaps not entirely well-suited to a jam timeframe. We're thinking to maybe take things a little more loosely this time and treat LD as a time for free-flowing experimentation, but, well...you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men...

See you all at the starting line, where you know people are bound to be hating on the theme that's selected, no matter what it is! ;)