First timer here! Unfortunately missed the theme suggestion period. Wishing everyone a fun Ludum Dare!

For LD54, I made Inferno Collapse, a 3D platformer with 2D billboarded sprites.

This year's game will probably use a similar cartoony style, but significantly improved thanks to both feedback I got from the last one, and having improved my skills since then.

Looking forward to my third Ludum Dare!

:smile:

Could consider this for the theme.

Last year, I took part in Ludum Dare 53 as my first gamejam (with DETOUR which took 8th place in Innovation)

Since then, basically the world turned upside down for me: I opened a tiny game studio with my wife (https://nozomugames.com), we made 6-ish games in 2023 (4 of which were made on gamejams) and working on 2 more now, even participating in showcases with our games and talking to publishers!

And LD53 was what made me think that we can go bigger. Happy to hop onto the upcoming LD55. Hopefully many more gamejams to come!

I have missed 6 ldjams, after a perfect streak of 11 completed jams in a row. But I am not missing this one.

Hope to make something nice!

Well I can't say that I was ready for how painfully mid all of those themes were. Most of those either feels like it's found in a billion other jams or is painfully obvious that it's a troll theme that would lead to nothing. I did managed to find ones that could be interesting (yes even the fire in the hole one).

As for my themes, yeah 34 had to be removed because that would go horribly wrong. As for Expand, I was about to suggest that, but there were so many themes that feels just like that idea that I couldn't even supported... In the end, Polarity was the best out of them all, as I think it could give a lot of interpretations.

I've done both, but I don't know what to do this time. Most of the time I do these solo, but I occasionally like to find someone to collaborate with.

Are there any teams out there that could use a musician/game designer? My specialty is music, especially dynamic music.

Is it possible to know the theme a little bit earlier (for us)? We are doing a public in-person game jam in Germany and want to do it from Friday 17:00 to Sunday 17:00. Unfortunately, the theme is revealed Saturday at 03:00 here in Germany, which is pretty late and also makes it harder to grind 48 hours, since everyone needs to work at Monday, so a bit more sleep would be nice. :D Not to mention that we also need to clean up the place where we do the game jam.

As I'm slaughtering I thought I would write a couple of my personal opinions for what makes a good theme.

When I think about the themes I think about:

1. If the theme makes me excited to participate.
2. How varied everyones games would be.
3. If I would be excited to rate everyone elses games.
4. How much freedom vs restriction it gives the developer.
5. How many possible interpretations there are.

As an example, while slaughtering I saw the theme "Pirates". I honestly really like this theme even though it feels pretty generic, there are so many different aspects of being a Pirate, like cannons, the crew on board, mutinies, the boats, the swordfights as well as gunfights, treasures, exploring oceans/islands, it could also be modern pirates, or cyberpirates. It is however very visually limiting, I think a lot of the games would look similar, which is not as fun. But overall I would be very excited to see what games people make with this theme and I would be excited to rate them.

A type of theme that I'm personally not a huge fan of are the ones that feel like rules. Like "Every 10 seconds", it felt more like a rule that I had to follow than a theme to inspire me. Even though the games that came out of that were really cool, to me it felt frustrating to think of something with that theme.

Theme measuring metric?

I think the ratio of sign ups to submissions could also be a metric of what makes a good theme. If people aren't inspired enough to finish their game or even come up with one then I think that is a sign of a bad theme:

If we use this as the main "good theme" metric, then "A Small World" is our golden standard for themes (so far).

My favorite

Personally my all time favorite theme was Game Off 2022, which was "Cliché". It felt like a million possibilities but it's still a theme across all games, there are so many fun interpretations and you basically get to set your own limitations. I didn't get the theme at first but the jam hosts explanation made me really excited to make a game:

Anyways I might just be overthinking this.

Questions for you:

1. What do you think makes a good theme?

2. What has been your favorite theme from previous jams?

3. What theme would you be most excited for from what you've seen in the voting so far?

Hey, I'm looking for a 2D artist who would like to participate in LD 55 with me. I speak German and English, but I prefer German. :)

I may seem a bit picky, but I don't consider things like a specific game genre or type of game (like 2D, 2.5D isometric, Tower Defense, etc) to be a good theme. I also don't really care for things like "Only X Button(s)", or "You are the _". I see Only 1 Button submitted every year. I'm old enough I remember playing a lot of Atari 2600 when I was very young, the iconic joystick with a single red button. The technology has come so far since the early 80's, why limit your creativity that way? :smile:

I try to look for things that I think could be interpreted multiple different ways by different people so everyone doesn't make the same game. I saw quite a bit of variation way back in LD42 for "Running out of Space", but even then there were quite a few people who took the theme very literal and made some type of endless runner game where you were in space. After playing 10-20 of those during the voting round, you start to wish there was more room for interpretation of the theme.

All that being said, I also normally try to not vote for duplicates, so if there were 12 copies of something I DID think was a good theme, I probably only upvoted it once or twice, not all 12 times. Maybe that's the wrong way to do it, but that's what I personally do.

We won't talk about the ones that were flagged as being inappropriate or offensive, as they probably know what they were doing and we don't feed the trolls any more than needed around here :wink:

With that out of the way, here's how I fared for the slaughter round this year:

Hi Hi!

I read the rules of the competition, but I did not find information about the process of publishing the game, how the game application will be sent, whether it needs to be deployed somewhere or it is enough to drop the link to the repository, etc. I would greatly appreciate any information on this.

I also think it would be cool to exchange useful resources like free sprites, assets, generators, etc., which I would also appreciate!

Good luck!