tl;dr: I hope folklore wins, it's quite flexible and I'm already going in with baggage of the kind of game I want to make.

I think some of my most creative works from game jams have come from going in as a blank slate and designing entirely around the theme. However on the flip side I don't take part in a lot of game jams each year and usually my main motivator is I have some sort of game concept in my head I want to play about with. In those situations I end up trying to force the theme to fit and it may be less creatively pure but it benefits from a lot of pre-existing motivation and excitement.

My first game project I released publicly was "the white chamber" back in 2005 a point and click adventure game inspired by the LucasArts games I grew up with. Though stylistically it was a lot more inspired by anime, Silent Hill, Twin Peaks and a bit of Event Horizon. People seemed to like it.

I spent a lot of time after "the white chamber" trying to make games that were more creatively challenging for myself and more commercially viable than old school point and click adventure games. To... mixed success. Now 17 years later when I no longer worry about making things that can sell and reach an audience I find myself drawn back to the games I grew up on. I want to make adventure games again.

For Ludum Dare in particular I want to make a classic 9 verb pixel art old school game. I've got some ideas about a setting that I think I can pull off quickly and feel excited to work within. So now I just need a theme flexible enough to go ahead with that plan. So some of the more mechanical sounding themes like "Make Connections", "Single Resource" and "Combine" are certainly workable but not ideal for the corner I've already painted myself into.

So in short, I'm campaigning for your vote for FOLKLORE

Folklore 2022

the theme you can trust to get away with(tm)