"Hold the line" for sure. :)

Hello! First time for Ludum Dare and not sure how to sign up. Is there a button I'm missing somewhere? Or do I click on "My Game" and make a game? Also can't find the "follow" button for some reason.

Yes, it’s possible to get a live person at Comcast Email Customer Service. For getting a live person at Comcast Email Customer Service, customers are supposed to visit the support page of xfinity.com, and click Chat with Xfinity. Apps: In the My Account app or Xfinity app, you should click the chat bubble icon in the upper right-hand corner. From the More tab in the Xfinity Home app, customers should click Chat with an Agent. https://www.webemailtech.com/comcast-email/

This will be my 8th LD in a row. I'm looking forward to this.

My Tools

• Godot (for the game)
• Gimp (for textures)
• Audacity (for audio manip)
• LMMS (for music)
• sfxr/bfxr/jfxr (for sound effects)
• ~~Coffee~~ A sleep schedule (for energy)

(i use arch btw)

Hi, I recommend you : https://heavenlyfamily.com . We believe that our aim is to spread the Word of the Lord through the production of Christian clothing, thus becoming a "walking word" giving others a glimpse of the truth. Know God with these things .

Hoping construct 2 will last until the end of the year :smile:

Hark back to LD in 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKujcnlPV88

My name is Arseniy, I'm 16 y.o and I'm from Ukraine, and i already was there. It's my second Ludum Dare, and i hope 10th grade won't prevent me to participate, he-he. I participated in 50th LD in Compo, but i don't know will i participate in Compo or Jam in this one yet.

Tools: - Godot 3.5 (probably Mono) as game engine - Aseprite as sprite and bg editor (classic) - Visual Studio Code as code editor (who would doubt) - Reaper for music and SFX (can it be used for something else at all?) - Blender for 3D modelling (not so many chances that I will use it)

UPD: I forgot to wish good luck, so good luck!

Done with the slaughter :) I kept 88 this time.

My absolute favorite was "Fictional physical phenomena"

That just filled my head with thousands of Ideas for games instantly and works for every genre of game. You can come up with a weird phenomenon as a mechanic in a platformer or you can create a story around a mysterious phenomenon. Just so many possibilities.

Thank you to whoever submitted this

I have done many game jams solo before but i want to join this jam as an artist. I can make 2d pixel art and cartoon-like art as well. I use PS, Pencil2D and aseprite for art. I can code in python and use Godot for making 2d games but i will join this jam as an artist only. LETS TEAM UP AND WIN

Discord: Dreamn Skull#7988

Hello everyone! I am participating to LD for the very first time with some friends, but I am a bit confused about how we can find and follow/add each other. I don't seem to find features like "search user" but probably it's just me being a noob.

A DLC of my game Phil Alone is on Steam, click on the "Wishlist" and buy it when it releases! ❤️ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2129820/PhilAloneGameDev_Book/?beta=0

Hi,

I have been practicing a lot with AI art generators for the Jam. Currently I am trying to get animations to work.

I played around a lot with stable diffusion and managed to get it to generate the following Animations of a woman and a lizardman (No edit in photoshop later straight out of stable diffusion)

I used frames from a stock video of a man running as a starting point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWGg0iPmI8k

It seems tougher to get the animations consistent the further you stray away from the starting frames

I'm in

I'd like to work on a game dev team for the first time. So my plan was to make a post like "hi I'm looking for a team, I have x skills, I'd like someone with x skills" but a lot of potential problems arose my mind.

The Questions:

• What if the guy seemed cool at the start but then turns out to be troublesome?
• How troublesome can "troublesome" get?
• What if we just decide that we don't like each other mid-jam?
• What if the guy's profile just looks creepy? Can I just say "no thanks"?
• How to prevent these problems?
• What should I expect?
• Is there a better way to find teammates on internet?

Come on, tell me horror stories. I wanna have realistic expectations.

Whenever I try to run any of my exported projects a warning pops up saying its from an unknown publisher. This hasnt really been an issue because I have mostly just shared these files with my friends, but is it going to be an issue for Ludum Dare? And is there a way to become a known publisher?

but u made me feel Seen here at 12:48 AM slaughtering themes all alone lol

didn't keep a list of my faves but i can remember these ones off the top of my head:

• ascend to froghood
• president squid
• rat king
• giant new york rat
• the ship's cat
• the landmasses are escaping

not that I'd know what to do with them if those became the theme but :nerd: i just like those concepts, there were other great ones too but i forgot them, next time I should remember to keep a list as I go lmao

Me every Ludum Dare

Here's a video about the previous games I made. Can't wait for the Jam!

https://youtu.be/Zp-lK-3-Vtk

There are bot comments under many recent posts. I think there needs to be a quick fix for this. I suggest banning people who have not yet published a game from posting links. Not a pretty solution, but the bots are really annoying right now. So I see way more benefit than harm in such a temporary solution.

I have faith (like every time i participate) that i will finish my game and publish it, and you know what, you will too !

ps : Writing it to boost my motivation

Finally I can convert images to Tausly!

Now I think nothing stands in the way of a good jam. Only 1 week left, then it starts :heart:

For those interested, you can check out my BASIC-ish programming language and interpreter - Another live demo https://steinalt.online/tausly/editor/#map - and of course my repo: https://github.com/themelektaus/tausly

I also somehow managed to create a ~7MiB Windows application that can execute Tausly files :sweat_smile: - https://github.com/themelektaus/tausly-player/releases (Achieved with tauri)

Our little team participated in :joystick:Ludum Dare 47 and it was great. We also followed 48 and 49. This time we want to get involved again and develop a nice White/Black Pixel game. We've already decided on the style and mechanics that we want to implement in the project, but we need your help in choosing the genre.

Action and Fun :crossedswords: or :sunriseover_mountains: Adventure and Story? This is an unusual event and the preferences/expectations of the participants may be different from the classic, so we need your comments.

https://www.twitch.tv/pomothedog

(Update: stream is over thanks for watching!)

Looking forward to this upcoming Ludum Jam. I've participated in a few other Ludum Dares in the past, roughly 5-7. Out of those I've only finished about 3-4 (we won't talk about the last one I submitted).

Thankfully, after taking a break for a bit to sort out some tech stuff and existential stuff I'm back. This time I'm happy to say, for the first time, I'll be uploading a game made with some friends of mine, and using Game Maker Studio 2 instead of Unity.

Big changes. Big hype. Let's have fun everyone!

I've been into game development for about 3 years now, and into programming in general for a bit longer, made a number of small-medium scale projects, few jams as well. but I've never ever worked in a team before (apart from occasionally contributing to open source projects). I really have no idea how working with other people is like, I mean I'm sure it has its own set of problems to manage and so I would love to hear your experiences working in a small or a big team, regardless of whether or not it was in a game jam. -did you have issues communicating with each other ? -how did you handle opposing ideas and difference in preferences ? -is it better to work solo ? -and is it possible to have more than one person working on the same section of the game ex(2 artists or 2 composers)..?

I do plan to work with a team one day, maybe next jam or on other occasions, but I guess for now I'm sticking with the ol' lone-wolf mindset lol

btw I might remove this whole post if the idea of a team suddenly scares me yay

I've been a solo hobbyist game dev for like 5 years now. I've finished like 7 jam games all on my own (art, code, audio, every single part) and I've decided that I wanted to look for a game dev team for the first time to jam this one off.

As a developer:

• I can code. I have years of experience in Unity C# (although newer versions than 2018.4.5 run terribly slow in my computer) but I picked up _Godot_ like a week ago and turns out that I'm pretty fluent in it and I like it quite a lot. Plus, it runs bLaZiNgLy fAsT in my computer. But I've only tried GDScript at the moment although Mono should be easy because of all the time I've spent with Unity C#.
• (I'm also pretty good at Python and many aspects of web development, if that matters)
• I can make art. 2D art and pixel art in many styles. I'm best at 2D art as Blender still confuses me, but I'm (almost) competent with low-poly and I like to make cute characters with primitive shapes. Don't ask me to rig, though.
• I can(?) make music mostly just 8-bit-ish stuff but I haven't made any soundtracks since that one time I almost blew up a streamer's headphones (it was a Ludum Dare and it was late at night and I pulled up the AudioSource volume by accident) so I guess I might not be as good at it as before.
• I have a real nice 2D platformer character controller written in GDScript :D

As a person:

• I have a sense of humor :D (well it depends on the day and topic. Also I can't believe that this is not obvious but NAZISM IS NOT FUNNY)
• I used to be an atheist but now I'm pretty religious and I will refuse to make games that show blood or NSFW or themes like horror or any kind of supernatural / magic / witchery / fantasy / elves kinda stuff.
• English is not my first language and my accent is kinda weird.
• Zoom's privacy scandals are creepy so I will use Discord for communication.
• As I said, this would be my first game dev team so expect questions like "uhhhhh... so who will do what?"

Enough about me. Let's talk about YOU:

• I will not trust someone who hasn't completed a game jam before.
• Teammates from somewhere in America would be best for me because I've heard nightmares about timezone issues.
• I'd feel most comfortable with someone of my age range so teammates between 15 and 22 years old would be preferred.

Wow this post is huge! But I wanted to make sure to make stuff clear from the start.

(Right now, I will not link to my itch or my previous games because I'm afraid that someone will try to cancel me because I said I'm religious and that's also why there are no submissions in this LD account, it's an alt.)

Edit: At the end I think I will not join this Ludum Dare, but thanks to all of you for your support :D I will certainly try next time!

It's kinda strange scrolling back through old posts from years back and seeing how the games evolved. I'm sad I couldn't find all the original music source files.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plLcBzIRoBQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxpi9cH1q3A

When does the them voting start? It is only 6 days to jam and at least in the previous jams there has been 4(?) voting rounds.

I feel like Ludum Dare would benefit from a clear timetable for the different stages of the event and then automated process to handle it. The automation might however be rather tricky because of the manual work in combining the different themes.

Will you revive the legend in this Ludum Dare ?

This is a tournament to get the high scores in games that will be submitted for LD 51! The first one was a lot of fun and we are excited to return for our second one. If you are interested in participating please join our discord and read the rules, the event will be live streamed somewhere to be decided at a later date! https://discord.gg/FhP4jaZ7KS

Here we go!

From Ludum Dare # 45 - Start with nothing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mrbZ4utXHk

Anyone happen to know a way to see the entire theme List or my entire voting history?

I saw a theme that triggered a great idea for a game that I wanted to work on outside of LD, but 15 themes after it, I had lost the idea due to distractions, and I couldn't go back to see the theme that triggered it.

If I decide to use any AI art generating tools, does that count as a compo submission or a jam submission?

Edit: It seems after posting this that its an overwhelmingly confusing area in regards to the use of AI generators in the compo. With that, I personally will be respecting the gray area and WONT be using them to generate art this time around. A good point that a user brought up that matches my opinion is that using a game engine or application like photoshop to create a compo game is like getting a leg up - the same way using an AI art generator helps with asset creation. Its a "leg up," but the mechanics and orchestration of the game are still created from scratch by the developer. Personally, I think the use of these generators, since its free to all and cannot generate an entire game by itself, makes it fair to use. But again, I will respect the gray area. I would like my submission to be judged with the highest chance of success.

Back again for my fifth consecutive LD and my second one with a team, can't wait to dive into this craziness again!

My first Ludum was #24 and entered off an on since. This is my first one in a while and will be entering the Jam with https://twitter.com/ceceedraws. I'll likely be streaming a lot of the jam. :)

Follow me here: https://twitter.com/BradleySmith93

Hi everyone just launched a kickstarter to finish a game that begin in Ludum Dare, Roadout [https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/roadout]

The kickstarter will make it possible to create game content in a safer way for everyone in the studio, allowing our first release to meet our expectations and the expectations of players, thank you for your attention and take a look at the project page. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rastrolabs/roadout]

I can't wait for the next LD, what will come out?

Hey there, Godot devs! I'd like to share some goodies to help your Godot 3.5 projects go more smoothly.

The first is what I call the Godot Project Starter. If that looks/sounds familiar, it's because I've posted about it before. It still contains pre-made scenes that you'll most likely want (title, how-to-play, credits) and other UI/UX items like scene transitions, and a HUD with pause menu and game over dialogs. Recently I've added a settings dialog/scene so that you can include key rebinding and other settings (mouse sensitivity, invert mouse y, volume settings for music, sound and master) in your game. Settings are also saved to disk. There are a few other things included. Just check out the github repo for details.

The github repo page is https://github.com/jhlothamer/godotprojectstarter

I also made a helper pack with useful utilities and components. You can checkout the github page for that here: https://github.com/jhlothamer/godothelperpack

The helper pack has a github wiki describing everything in the pack. One recent addition is a tool that distributes meshes in the MultiMestInstance2D node. I used this to create the levels in a game we made for one of the recent Metroidvania Month jam. The tool also carves up the collision polygons in a StaticBody2D to create the walls of the levels. You can check out the game at https://jlothamer.itch.io/glowstar-empire if you want to see the results.

All repos are MIT license and free to use, no attribution required or necessary. Hope some of this helps! If not directly in your game, then maybe you can get some ideas from it.

I got there in the end though!

I skipped last ld cuz i think i forgor it was happening, anyways excited for this!

I know it's hard to remember all the themes in the slaugher (assuming you've done some slaughtering), but from what you can remember, what is the one theme that you won't feel bad if it ends up winning!

I think my favorite was something like "you control the level", but again I can't really remember them all

Why didn't I think of that as a theme. Facepalm emoji.

I think I should make my game just like Theme Slaughter. You have 15 minutes to remove all themes that have never been chosen ... thinking face emoji.

Greetings!

Over the years, I've participated many game jams in order to improve my skills in game design. This Friday will be my first ludum dare. Looking forward to working on something amazing!

I will be participating.

Hopefully will do better than last few.

Uncle Chris

This one (mostly) paid off in terms of keeping to a simple idea and not throwing in too much complexity to bog down gameplay. I still don't think it was much of a game, but it was 'finished', and a home to one of my favourite vocalists/front-men taken too soon.

https://youtu.be/B2PrdGNPrko

ludum dare 51 will be my first game jam as a game developer XD hoping to make some memories here (I started developing 4 months ago btw)

didn't record my votes last jam so when i went back to see them i was disappointed lol

I'm not going to explicitly endorse or decry any particular themes, but I will offer my thoughts on a select few of them which happen to catch my eye:

Out of Bounds - This is an interesting theme to me. Video games often have, like, a "play area" where all of the action takes place. Normally, leaving this area is impossible - you can't go "out of bounds" of the game. But what if a game let you leave the usual play area? This is an interesting concept - however, it also feels conceptually limiting...

Ascend - This theme is interesting to me because it suggests both gameplay-related and story-related ideas. "Ascend" could be well-suited to a simple game where the player tries to jump or climb as high as possible. One could imagine a simple mobile-game platformer where the main character simply tries to jump up to higher areas. But "Ascend" also lends itself to ideas of progress, becoming stronger, etc. Basically any game where a player surpasses their earlier self could fall under this category.

Side Effect - I think this theme is interesting since it immediately invokes trade-offs. Many games feature mechanics where you get some benefit at the cost of some detriment. There are countless games which could be envisioned with some central trade-off at the center: the player gains some notable benefit, but is saddled with its corresponding "side effect" which they must deal with.

Everything has a Price - It's very common in games for actions to have a price in terms of some in-game resource. So one sense in which you could interpret this theme is this: what if in-game actions which normally do NOT have a price, actually did have one? I think this is an intriguing design question, but again a limiting one.

Ecosystem - I think this theme is interesting because "ecosystems" are complex and natural things. For a game to have an "ecosystem", it would need to have some fairly complex set of rules which already existed even before the player became involved. This could lead to all sorts of interesting rulesets... but in some ways, the idea is an antithesis to many sorts of games. In many games, the actions of the player are most important, but "ecosystem" suggests that the functions of the player's environment are perhaps more important than their own decisions...

I'd be curious to see what other people think of the various themes in this round!

Hello my old friend "Everything has a price", aka "Your life is currency", probably better known as "Sacrifices must be made". I see your doppelganger "Side effect" is here as well. How glad to see you two again. Also hi "Keep it moving"! I see you've upped the requirement from merely being alive, but isn't that a bit inconsiderate of our plant friends? Inclusivity, remember! ...Oh "10 seconds"! Of course, wouldn't be a jam without one of you timer homies. Bestest of regards. Anyway I've got to go. See ya next LD!

Now that I took part in quite the number of gamejam, I think a lot more about what make a good theme. Still no solution. However, I've noticed that I judge themes more by thinking about the game testing phase than the creation phase. Which theme won't give multiple copies of the same game, which theme is too complicated to apply to a jam with so many people including many newbies. I find it interesting to have gone from an individualistic vision of my theme choice to a collective one, precisely by spending time to note and analyze the games of the others.

Is that tool as any other or not?

Please either disable motion blur or add an option for players to disable it.

That's all. Happy jamming!

I've learnt a new Game Engine and I'm working with a friend who I haven't worked with before! I'm very excited! :D

I'm joining this jam with a team of 2 people so far: - Me - Composer

We are looking for a sound designer, but if you think you might fit us otherwise do contact me as well! I'm using GMS2 and Aseprite

Here's some games I've done in earlier jams:

Morning All, Looking for a programmer and and artists to join my team. We currently have me(programmer) and a wonderful musician if your intrested please message me on Discord at KingOfNova #9334. I will do my best to respond quickly. Have a good day all.

Alright, the obligatory "I'm in" post

Setup

• Haxe/Heaps
• Base Library / Template
• Aseprite for graphics
• ChipTone for sound effects.
• Beepbox for music ???

Tips/Advice

As usual, tips for new jammers.

1. You have 48 hours (72 for Jam), but in reality you only have about 20 hours.
2. Despite having only 20 hours, spend 1 to 2 hours planning and thinking out what you want to do. It is worse when you realised your idea is a bad one a few hours into development.
3. Plan out your scope and cut it by half. At the end of the first day, cut whatever is left by half again. (If are new, you might want to cut it by 75%).
4. Identify your MVP, and beeline to a it ASAP. It is more satisfying to add to something playable, than to just blindly stare at code. Ideally by the end of the first day, you should have the core loop finished; core loop being menu -> game -> gameover/victory.
5. Spend your last 2-3 hours playing the game, fixing bugs and balancing instead of adding more features.
6. Don't make your game too hard. Most people will give up after 5 minutes.
7. If you can, have a browser build. It is easier for people to try your game, and it will have less issues.

Alright, the tips is copied from LD50, but hey, don't change what is not broken :).

Shameless Plug

The last LD happened when I was working on Dice tribes ambitions. The game has launched and is receiving a big content patch this Wednesday :). You can find the game here https://store.steampowered.com/app/1965800/DiceTribesAmbitions/.

I am almost finished with the content for the game, so I am hoping that LD can provide me with my next game. so please no bad theme this time okay ?

I'm loving a lot of the themes so far, but I figured I'd list my favorites:

Use it or lose it: I love concepts that require the player to make sacrifices and choices that matter, so having a stipulation that means you'll lose an item or resource if you don't use it seems interesting

Breaking the chains: I'm all about stories of liberation, and there are a lot of them, so this one has a lot of potential for self-expression and profound narratives

Leave something behind: again, love sacrifice as a game concept, and there are plenty of narrative variations as well as game mechanics that could come from this concept. First that came to mind for me was a system that encourages players to abandon items, and rewards them with buffs for sacrificing more powerful ones

Overall, I'm really excited. Lots to think about. Probably gonna try to get some generic art assets together this week!

Thought I might experiment with how many election memes I can repurpose for LD voting. I'm actually not personally as fussy about the themes as some people. I can usually work with whatever comes up.

Me and my friends want to ditch the theme this time and make a 2d platformer. Problem: these are normally played on a controller. And currently my Input System which I plan on using doesn't have gamepad support yet. So I've decided to at least attempt adding it before LD starts.

Gamepad support required me to completely rewrite core systems inside Cablebox (aka. the input system). And the result of that is better, more flexible code + 689 different bugs in the editor.

Here's a list of what's broken and has to be fixed before the jam:

• every method inside of the Input Manager
• Input Map Editor window
• Input Map inspector
• reading keys

And here's a list of what's broken and would be cool if it was fixed before the jam:

• rebinding
• referencing
• saving
• commands

My progress

Today I wanted to start out with the Input Map Editor, as it's almost like a brain of Cablebox. It holds every information about input in the project and is required by almost everything. The main problem currently is that the inspector is completely busted. In the old version, everything UI related was handled inside of one script under a big switch which was a hassle to work in. This is why the new version uses different classes, reflections and other garbage to make it less painful to add new features for me.

However I might have screwed up a little bit, as I wrote the drawers before I added support for them. I used a lot of serialized objects & properties and turns out, you can't just create them from a simple class. I am a little bit stuck, because I want to use them, but I think I will have to ditch them for the time being and use the old Unity GUILayout calls instead.

Closing thoughts

Today I didn't have much time, but I still have high hopes. Worst case scenario I will scramble some janky xinput implementation during the jam alongside an old version of the input system. Wish me luck

Earlier this year I participated in my first Jam, the GMTK Jam. I had a lot of fun and the game I made was one of my best ever. Following that I made a game for LowRezJam (64x64 limitation), and that one did not turn out so well. I am excited to see how this third one goes, after taking a month off game making due to busy life it should be fun to get back into it. :)

This will be my third time doing a ldjam game, as the 3d modeling side of our team using blender. I'm definitely out of practice with animating though since I usually just make 3d prints.

.. and really looking forward to the compo. I'm almost coming up to 8 years of LD compos and jams

I plan on spending this week up until Friday cleaning up and refactoring my engine code which I have been using since pretty much the beginnging.

I'll also be spending a little time thinking about what kind of game I what to make (I usually pick the genre before the weekend starts and shoehorn the theme into it).

There's been a few other things I'm on the fence about: * maybe join a team for a change, but not really sure how to go about it * instead of starting another new game - taking one of my previous entries and updating that for the weekend. Obviously, this'd exclude me from the ratings, but it would be nice to get a more polished entry for once.

Since the last time I participated in a LD I decided to go full team game developer and I started my own game development company called Gare Games

Development is live streamed on Twitch

We are making our first game called Smash Hyperdrive which takes the good from both Smash TV and Xeno Crisis and makes something new.

Look forward to seeing yall this time around. LD 51 get ready!

This is my first ludum dare game jam and my third game jam. I'm still thinking about joining a team, luckily it starts on Friday so I don’t have to worry about any school work. See you guys there.(Is anyone here from the recent Brackeys Game Jam)

What DO y'all mean when you say cut the scope in "half" or "75%"? Like how do you quantify "half" of a scope? How DO you pare your scope down?

Just questions I've got on my mind as the jam approaches....

I'm working on an art generator for video games:

https://linseed.io

It's in beta, but please give it a try! It's free, although probably not kosher to use for compo (not open source). But might speed things up if you just need a gold coin asset or a ray gun or whatever. E.g., 30-second pirate ship:

It does best-effort on transparent backgrounds.

Let me know if you try it out, I'd love any feedback or suggestions!

Looking forward to another jam! Using Godot 3.5 again.

Unfortunately I forgot that I scheduled a dentist appointment on Monday, so our Jam will likely be cut short a bit. I think we should be able to still make something in the time we have though! Still feels bad cutting into the time available when working with a team.

I always enjoy the jam and never regret it! Hoping to regain some motivation in the process! Good luck to all!

-Unity C# -Visual Studio -Aseprite -GitKraken

A couple wallpapers for this jam! Feel free to reuse.

I'm also in the process of fixing all my bugs in my previous games. I'm already done with LD48 and working on LD46. (Meanwhile I lost the source for LD44..)

[Link] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPmv19um4uE) instead

In Ludum Dare 48, in April 2021, wife + i made this little game Dome Romantik. It actually changed our lives completely when we started developing it full time this year and called it Dome Keeper. Today, slightly before LD51, it releases! I hope to make the ludum dare community proud with this. Nothing of this would have happened without ludum dare, and you, the amazing community. We'd never have learned how to scope and finish a game, prototype effectively and develop accessible, player focussed games. Thank you so much!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZplRH4PB6E

With all the questions and debate around AI art generation going around, I wanted to give my thoughts on the matter.

In terms of the Jam, I'd say that AI art generation is probably fine just because the rules say you can use pre-existing assets, palette swaps, etc, so long as you opt out of the respective art categories. Since AI art gen typically involves the AI being trained off art from artists who didn't consent to their art being used in such a way (correct me if I'm wrong; I'm all for art generators that are trained off stock images, royalty free art, or art that one has permission to use freely), I'd say it fits fine in the Jam. In the Compo tho? Eh.

In the Compo, I've seen some people say that AI art gen is fine because it's effectively the same thing as the audio effect generators that could be used. And, in the Compo rules it does say:

- Content generators are allowed. In fact, they’re encouraged. sfxr, the popular sound effect generator was originally created for Ludum Dare.

However, these sound effect generators have one major difference from AI art gen tools: they aren't "trained" off the work of others without their consent. And, this bullet point follows shortly after the last:

- Texture masks, brushes, drums, loops, sampled instruments, and similar assets are allowed, but only if they are used to create a derivative work. i.e. a Song, a complex soundscape, a unique piece of artwork, etc.

I'd say that if AI art gen is to be used, due to how it's generated, it would probably best fall into the category of a sampled instrument or loop, and should be used to create a derivative work that is sufficiently different from a simple "type prompt, get art." This would mean generating the art, then modifying and incorporating the generated art into a unique piece created by you.

For the record, I am not against AI art gen as a whole. I do actually see it as a potentially great tool that could be used by artists to create unique art, and that's the main thing, right? These generators aren't artists. They don't have artistic vision, because they are tools; you are the artist.

I think that AI art tools can be developed, ethically, in such a way that they don't use the work of artists without their consent. But regardless of my opinion, or the technicalities of whether you can or can't use it (nobody is gonna stop you), I still think you should listen to this: if you care at all about your game being rated well, it might be better just to avoid AI art gen. In my eyes, it's risky because you will be damaging the reputation of your game right out the gate for some people. Worse, if it's clear all you did was pull a "type prompt, get art, done" move, it may damage the reception of your game even more.

TLDR If you use AI art gen, try your best to be as transparent as possible about how you generated the art and how you modified it to make it unique and fit your game. Art generators don't have artistic intent; that's up to you to ascribe. However, if you are just wanting to use it as a quick way to get art, your game's reputation would be better off if you just did shitty programmer art.

Remember RPGMaker? People thought it was a way to quickly and easily make games without skill, even going so far as to just straight steal unmodified assets to cut down on effort. As a result, RPGMaker gained a bad reputation because of the abundance of cheaply made, low-effort games using stolen assets that spawned from it. On the other hand, some people did use it to make unique, memorable gaming experiences. Strive to be like them if you do use AI art gen.

…So I made this for fun, with some raw Paint add-on :laughing:

Good luck everyone, and don't forget to have lot of fun!

Good day! While kamikaze drones are over the city, we continue to prepare for Ludum Dare. Today we are experimenting with tile size. Which do you like better, 16x16 or 24x24?

I have tried to complete a LDJam for years now. This year, I plan on doing it. I really enjoy watching all the games get made and want to be a part of it too. I will be programming my game in HaxeFlixel. I will be using GIMP for art, Tiled Map Editor, SFXR for sound, and LMMS for music.

I really like many of the theme options and hope to get a good one.

For letting the theme "Garden" die. It tried really hard, may its awfulness rest in piece. :smiley:

It's my first Ludum Dare experience. I already decided the theme of the project and it's music. This will be an interesting 48 hours competition. I hope, this project will be not as bad as my previous ones. Very worrying moment :smirk:

A good idea to boost production speed of your jam game using AI generated art assets! https://twitter.com/ivangarciafilho/status/1574775419357782016?s=20&t=rEkz9jGkdGbR5C-NnYJQJA

This is our first game jam (ever). Do you need to sign up before hand? Thanks!

Introduction

I have finally fixed / commented all of the bugs. Now it's time to finally start re-adding features.

As I said previously: editor is my main priority and luckily I've managed to re-add most of the essential features. I can add and remove items, edit some very basic values and save. I had to jump into the mess that is the content tree and trim out almost all of the code. And finally, here we are.

Deleting items

Everything was easy to reimplement, except for deleting. Currently there are 2 ways of deleting items: by pressing the minus in the content tree (easy) or clicking the delete button in the inspector (hard). Because the inspector doesn't know what and where the item is located I had to make a separate virtual method to handle that for every item separately. So in the end I have this lovely peace of linq code.

Inspector

I unfortunately don't have enough time to add the fancy inspector concept from my previous post, so here's the ugly version...

Normally the keys should be separated into individual lists and there should be a popups instead of the ugly text fields. As you can hear, this isn't that simple or fast to add. So unfortunately I will have to write the paths manually for this jam :/

The same is with axes: normally there should be a button to select a binding, but for now you will have to copy and pase the guids manually.

Broken things

Sadly, not everything is working. This includes: - window preferences - editing groups in the inspector - duplicating items - error icons next to items

They however aren't ascrutial as the other features, so I'm not gonna add them now. Worst case scenario I can just enter debug mode and edit the map in Unity's inspector or edit the file manually in notepad.

Next features

Next I'm gonna work on reading input and hopefully adding gamepad support using xinput. From what I read, xinput is fairly simple to get started with, so I have high hopes it's gonna go smoothly

I have missed LD50, but I am not letting this one go. For the 4th time solo. See Ya all

Hello, what could be better than a game of Roman Legion? Anyone who wants to take part in their biggest battle can prepare to join the ranks by using the Roman Legion demo. It is available for free on our website “ https://automatyhazardowezadarmo.pl/jednoreki-bandyta/ “ and is a great opportunity to test the entire mechanics of the game.

I'm out of town this weekend with no access to my computer :cry:

Might just make a game to the theme next weekend for funsies

How do you rate the mood of a game? I feel like games that are sad or creepy might get higher ratings. Aren't there other moods? What about cheerful games? Something to think about.

Reflecting on twenty years of Ludums and Dares, the “game jam” has become a staple of game development education, recreation, and the profession. Who knew what taking a “dare” too far would do?

How I found myself in a jam

Growing up, I was obsessed with computers and video games. If I wasn’t playing games, I was reading about or dreaming of making them. I read and reread the same books on programming the Commodore 64--my family’s 8-bit computer. I repurposed stacks of perforated printer paper as sketchbooks. I doodled maps and chunky pixel fonts on every sheet of graph paper I found. I’d hang out with friends to play their Nintendo or Sega Master System to expose myself to more and more games.

I was that kid.

The obsession continued through my teens. In high school, I was building role-playing games, coding real-time graphics on MS DOS, or showing my computer teacher what to teach the class. By college, I had a portfolio of computer games and homebrew GameBoy games I’d released freely on this new thing called “the internet.” In 1999 I dropped out of college to accept a job as a professional game developer. I was 19.

I’d like to say things slowed down for me, but they didn’t. I was a game-obsessed man child that fell into a career, somehow thrived in that career, and went on to develop and lead numerous kid games for GameBoy, PlayStation, and mobile.

Making games professionally was different though. I was a hired gun, a programmer, doing client work. I wasn’t creating and designing games like I was before. Instead I was working (indirectly) with Disney or brands like Barbie, creating what they wanted with my team. Getting paid to do it was nice, but I missed the old days. I missed making my games.

My friend Geoff started an online forum. He wanted to build a community for developers that were serious about making games. The problem is websites like Flipcode and GameDev.net were already home to large forums discussing game development. Why should anyone care about this one?

He posed an unusual question: Does anyone want to try making games from scratch in 24 hours?

“That’s impossible! You can’t do that! Games take months or years to make!”

“I’m in!”

A few dozen of us got together on the forum and chatroom and did exactly that. The games varied wildly in how playable they were, but by the end we had 18 brand-new things that didn’t exist 24 hours before. We were exhausted--many of us didn’t sleep (not recommended)--but we were thrilled by the result.

“Let’s do that again!”

And we did. 24 hours was hard, so we decided that next time would be 48. I drafted the official rules, we picked a date, and we ran our first of many 48 hour events. Over 100 people showed up and (amusingly) created 48 games.

It was clear we were on to something, but more importantly we were doing it for us. This was something we wanted to exist because we wanted to take part in it.

It was motivating.

We all wanted an excuse to make more games. There was nothing stopping us from independently doing it, but something about doing it together and competing was far more exciting.

We didn’t invent the competitive programming competition, nor were we the first online programming challenge. But everything else was either an in-person event, or an online event tied to a specific tool (Allegro, Python, etc). There was no online crossover event, no place for the Python developers, the C++ developers, and the Flash developers to all come together and create.

Geoff’s forum never took off, but with our friends we created something amazing together. I never expected to still be running it 20 years later--more than a decade after the other co-creators moved on--but I suppose this is what became of my life long game obsession. We kept the name: Ludum Dare.

Reflections

Over the past twenty years, our community has grown larger and more prolific than we could have ever imagined. Our first event saw a respectable 18 games submitted, while our most recent event saw 2900 games from over 8000 people that signed up. Numerous games that began in Ludum Dare have gone on to become hits and bestsellers on mobile and Steam, as well as across every console from the current and previous generations. Many creators cut their teeth making games with us, or took a break from their jobs to test and hone their skills. So many new creators continue to join us to see if jamming or game development is right for them. I’m humbled that so many of you continue to join us after all these years.

Something I’m really proud of is what we did back in April of 2020. Everyday a different conference, trade-show, or event was being canceled. Not us, because Ludum Dare is an online event. We went on to break every record of ours as over 13000 people signed up and created just shy of 5000 games. It was an incredible thing to see during such a nerve wracking and uncertain time. With so many things changing every day, I think it meant a lot to have something that didn't.

Given my history, I never expected web development to become a big part of my life, and something I really enjoy. I remember hacking away at the WordPress theme of our older website, but I remember distinctly trying to avoid getting too deep into PHP because “I was a game developer, not a web developer". I’m glad I got over that, and that the lines between games and the web have blurred so much. My forte later in my career was making my code run everywhere. “Write C and C++ code to this older specification, because console vendor Y ships an old GCC, and vendor X uses Visual C++, so I can't use this”. Nah, forget all that, just target the web. There’s no better way to share a game: send a link; recipient clicks and starts playing right away. No download required!

The rise and fall of development tools is something that’s fascinated me. We had a front-row seat to the fall of Flash and the rise of Unity. Flash used to be everywhere, until one day Apple decided, “nah,” and the industry (including Adobe) accepted its fate. Even though I've been doing this for 20 years, I never had a great excuse to try-out and explore other game making tools: I already used the advanced stuff. But this past year, I've had the privileged of helping my wife learn to make games. I would crash-course myself in a tool so I could answer her questions. This meant I finally had a chance to learn Game Maker and PICO-8, both well loved tools that have been around for so many years.

Oh by the way, I got married back in July.

Last year we achieved the impossible: the original “48-hour game jam" ran its 48th event. This year we hit Ludum Dare 50, and the impossible age: Ludum Dare is 20 years old. I used to joke about these happening.

I need a new joke.

What we do here is incredibly important to me. I've been nervous about changing what we do, but having achieved even our jokes, the only way forward to evolve. 20 years is an extremely long time. Few of us make games like we did 20 years ago.

What’s next?

At a high level, I want to see big improvements to the experience for both the users that have been around a while, and those that are brand new. I’ve covered some of the short term changes in this post here.

For Ludum Dare 50 we introduced Extra, the first change to the Ludum Dare event format in nearly a decade. Extra will continue to evolve and improve as we go.

Something that’s been on my wishlist for years: Playing embedded games on ldjam.com! We used to support embedding Flash games hosted by anyone, but in hindsight, this wasn’t the best idea. I wasn’t prepared to support game embedding on ldjam.com unless we could do it securely, unless we could cover the costs, and unless we could do it without burdening our servers.

Our work with Akamai

My friend Jesse Freeman has been (rightfully) pestering me for years to accept sponsorships. When he joined Akamai a couple years ago, we got in touch again. This was a rare and exciting opportunity for me. I've used Linode and CloudFlare for many years as my go-to for servers and CDN, and that combination has done a great job creating a fast responsive website. But at the time, that was the limit of what we could do with them. As a gamer, I fondly remember seeing “Akamai” mentioned in game download URLs. I wondered if game downloads were something we could do with Akamai too?

Yes.

I worked with developer advocate Mike Elissen to move our CDN to Akamai, and explore how to best introduce game uploading and embedding to Ludum Dare. Akamai’s NetStorage and Download Delivery are a natural combination for hosting and delivering files, but unexpectedly NetStorage made supporting embedding games really simple: NetStorage can serve files directly from ZIP archives! Finally, we could avoid burdening our servers with files by generating URLs and headers we could safely give users to upload directly to NetStorage. Everything we needed was there.

Mike has been a great help as we dive deeper into the spam problem as well. We’ve been tracking suspicious activity, and have some good data we can use to begin mitigating things. This will take a bit longer to show, but I'm happy to have help with this.

I’m really excited about what we’ve done so far, and look forward to what comes next.

In an unexpected turn of events, earlier this year Akamai acquired Linode. I’ve been a happy Linode customer for the past 7 years, and I think this is great. I think Akamai and Linode compliment each other really well.

Wrap-up

That’s it from me. I hope you join us this weekend for Ludum Dare 51!

Thanks everyone!

The theme this year is "Hack Ludum Dare's Theme!"

Good luck everyone! But I think we all know I've already won ... :kissingclosedeyes: