Nearly 4 years ago, I last participated in Ludum Dare #40. I had big plans for the next iteration, but then we found out how much of a stinker that ended up being; not long after that, I completely lost interest and decided to leave to do other things, like improve my drawing ability.

Back then, I couldn’t draw to save my life. I would scribble some abomination with Flipnote Studio, then take a photo of it to clean up; and I was terrible at that, too. My profile picture used to look like this:

But in recent years, I’ve grown fond of GIMP, and drawn a bunch of ~~generic~~ different character designs. More recently, I've tried drawing myself; this picture in particular I made specifically for this post:

You can decide for yourself if/how much I’ve improved.

But being good at drawing can only get you so far in a game jam, so what’s changed since?

For my Ludum Dare #40 submission: Shape Invasion, I used Clickteam Fusion 2.5 as the game development tool. I’m not exactly too proud of that decision, even IF it was all I knew back then. I wasn’t very experienced with GameMaker: Studio at the time, and Unity was.... well.. it's still a pipe dream.

Even while typing this, I'm kinda worried about how much experience I DO have with it, as that's what I wanna use for this jam. And I'm specifically referring to GameMaker Studio 1.4, as I've never fully completed a game with it, though I got super close once.

Bosca Ceoil is the popular music creation choice for many a participant, and for good reason: because it's incredibly intuitive! And I certainly used it for Shape Invasion. But I cannot STAND any music I've made! I've reached acceptance with drawing; that my work will easily be outclassed by the other guy, and I don't care. But music has taken the backest of seats. Funny enough, my game scored highest in the Audio category. Despite that, I'm not exactly looking forward to making music for my entry.

But who cares about any of the above? I know you all are just teetering at the edge of your seats to know what themes I've suggested; I know I'd be doing the same, of course!

Well, I've spent a few days with a LibreOffice text document of the themes I've come up with. I came up with two REALLY good themes (in my opinion), but a third one wouldn't come, so I said "screw it!" and typed up the bottom theme in this picture:

Here's the full list of themes that I came up with:

Feel free to use one of these for a personal project, even if I do state why the red ones probably wouldn't be a good Ludum Dare theme.

Apologies on behalf of this post's length; I can get a little carried away. So yeah, have a good one, everyone.