It's time for my usual refresher on Theme Suggestion & voting tips! People often complain about LD themes being bad, so this post is a drop in the bucket to help you choose better themes, especially if you are less experienced!

3 guidelines to come up with a good theme:

• Keep it simple: The more descriptive or specific your theme is, the more restrictive it will be (in a bad way) and the more difficult to scope. You can do more things with "Season" than "4 Seasons"!
• It's a theme, not an idea/restriction: Don't rob the creative genius away from your fellow jammers. Instead, send them in a direction with a genre-agnostic spark that can fuel both game design and aesthetics/fantasy! "Only 2 Buttons" does not help you know what kind of game you want to make, while "Mist" gives you a cool mental image and still has potential for fun mechanics! While it's not always possible, try to avoid pigeonholing people into certain genres (I'm looking at you, puzzle platformers! :smile:).
• Don't try to be subversive: A gimmick theme for the sake of being a gimmick often falls flat and gets slaughtered. Generally "You are XYZ" (ie: You are the Villain) and "XYZ is key" don't work well. Memes and partisan/political themes are also the quickest to get buried.

An easy "gorilla" way to come up with a decent theme, is to focus on an action, and object, or a "thing that does a thing", and to try and abuse the many synonyms/homonyms in the English language. Mirror, Fall, Glass, Land, Horn, Spray, Hair, Superposition, Treat... Try it yourself it's pretty fun!

As for the jam itself, preparation is key! Make sure your tools are all ready, get the machine oiled up with some practice and, if you're gunning for Compo, prepare some boilerplate code to speed things up on the architecture & non-game side such as UI! A game with a nice title screen and working basic settings (volume!) feels already super polished!

I may be participating this time hehe. Good luck to you all and don't neglect your sleep!