This will be my 12th or so LD dare - and I'm here to say, I'm in! Yay!

And I guess a little more ...

I love participating in the LD events - for me, it is a chance to revisit my 'engine' in its entirety and make sure it's still working. It also offers me a time-windowed opportunity to try something new (mainly a mechanic or technical feature of the engine) - whether it works or not, it'll only cost me a weekend. The community stuff is also great, reading through the progress reports and tool reviews etc really gets me psyched-up.

However, inevitably, we end up at the theme selection, which by this point to me is just a massive slog. There is just no originality in it, nor benefit to it, and I wonder if we could do things better? For me, it's not only the sheer number of entries to be filtered, and slaughtered and then voted on (although is getting worse each year) - but it is the lack of relevancy and impersonal-ness of the themes. And how can a single theme speak to the 1000s of participants and make everyone happy?

It seems like 60% of the themes are re-hashes or previous themes, 30% are themes that I don't like or speak to some aspect of game-development that I'm not interested in, and then there are maybe the 10% of themes that I do like, but which may not make the slaughter round, let alone the finals. I guess it comes down to I don't enjoy the slaughter rounds any more.

I'd also be willing to bet, that there aren't any newly 'unique' themes this year that weren't also added last year - we now likely just have more variations of the phrase to slaughter.

So here's my idea, as we have two LD events per year, I feel like just having static (non-changing) main themes on the events and just attached some sub-theme for direction would be a good idea.

For example, let the April-event be 'a celebration of the video games industry' - where we use some current or past event in the industry to choose a sub-theme. Meanwhile, the October event could be 'a celebration of the video gamers' where we get a chance to make some personal project with something more ... personal.

These two events would be used to help guide the selection of a theme in a more worthwhile way.

Here are some examples:

April (LD Industry Event): + C64 is 40 years old this year - (re)make a C64 classic + a new take on the hardest video game you ever played + A tribute to your favourite franchise (or company/genre/system/etc.) + reimagine an EA classic

October (LD Players Event): + combine 2 aspects of your favourite childhood games into one + minimalist re-make of a disappointing video game purchase + a game based in/on your old house/neighbourhood + remake a game you used to play outside + a game your sibling/best friend would enjoy

None of these themes are specific to any genre or mechanical aspect of a video game. They are massively open-ended yet should invoke very specific ideas in each of us. Then I don't have to sit through 4000 entries of 'snowman' and 'you only get one'