Hi everyone!

At long last, the Final Week is upon us. :fireworks:

Theme Voting has kicked off. We're doing 3 rounds of 16 themes each (48 total) and a Final Round of the Top 16 of those 48. The 2nd Round will kick-off later tonight, the 3rd Round on Tuesday, and the Final Round Wednesday Night (roughly 48 hours before Ludum Dare starts).

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/37/theme/

Shout-out to @rnlf, @voxel, @the31, @tijn, and @sorceress for helping me find and remove the duplicates from the theme list (TODO: make @names work). Here's a look at the surprise credits page they left for me in the spreadsheet:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/silly-cats.png

Silly. :smile:

So, what's coming up?

Like I said a few weeks back, this will be one of the rougher Ludum Dare events we've run in years. That mainly involves waiting and a lack of a lot of polish.

Theme Selection aside, the most important feature of a Ludum Dare is being able to submit a game. That is at the center of what I'm focused on right now. That said, I want to make sure that we one-up the old website by having the ability to submit Team Games. If you solo that's less of a big deal, but we've officially allowed team games for over 5 years now, and the old system has never felt right there.

I'll come back to this.

Now the other important thing is Judging. Judging will not start immediately after the event ends (as it usually does). But rather than outright cancelling Judging, I hope you agree that Late-Judging is better than no Judging. My safe estimate is it will start the Friday after Ludum Dare, but I will be shooting for much sooner (be forewarned, I might end up sleeping-all-day the Tuesday after Ludum Dare, :smile:).

So this is what I mean by a rougher Ludum Dare. One lacking the polish, promptness, and refinement that we all expect.

The key here is that I want us to go through as much of the Ludum Dare process as possible. This is a brand new website written from scratch, from the ground up. This time around, I want us to be able to catch issues, and fix them outright, instead of compromising with WordPress hacks as we've done for the past 9 years. And it's also fully open source, so it's something we can fix together.

Breakdown

Things to expect

• Following Users, and making Friends (i.e. mutually following each other is considered a Friend)
• Creating a Game Page for your Submission (the way you make a Team game is by adding Friends to a game)
• Making blog posts attached to your solo/shared game (Hey BTW, this and all posts/pages use Markdown now)
• Adding links to downloads/etc to your game
• "Publishing" your game to the Compo or the Jam

Things that will follow as soon as they're ready

• Image Uploading - This is coming! It might be a little janky at first (Game Screenshots Only), but eventually it will be good for everything.
• Comments - These are also coming! Commenting is a key part of Judging, and the whole feedback process. They're just slightly less important than submitting games.
• Notifications - This may slip to just-after Judging starts, but if you notice the speech bubble in the navigation bar, it has a home.

I'll have more to say on these individual features as they become available.

Thanks again everyone for your patience, and I hope you enjoy yourself this weekend! :D