My setup:

• Engine: GameMaker or Godot
• Art: Aseprite, maybe Inkscape or i give Photon Studio a try :)
• Sfx: Bfxr, Beepbox, FL Studio
• Music: FL Studio or just also Beepbox
• AI: maybe some claude help for coding stuff

Tips

So what else to say from a veteran ? - Make a game (better a smaller one) - Use tools you know best - If you are planing to going solo on jam please note that you are in competition with whole art teams :) But besides that you have a also a chance. - Have fun - thats the most important part. - Don't hydrate and don't stress out

This is my first game jam so I'm going to work on something simple. I'm strongest with coding but I want to make a bit of everything. I'm going to try for a very short adventure or arcade style game. I'm going to use picotron. Trying for the comp but I'll do the jam if I don't finish in time.

break a leg everybody.

OH YEAH, I'm IN. Or rather - I want to be in, but due to circumstances, I can't promise you a CINEMA. Although I don't know if I'll be able to go all out, I'll definitely try! My setup: Construct 2 (an engine as ancient as a Triceratops) My finger and a phone (Yeah, I draw sprites with my finger) Gemini (the only person ready to listen to my ideas) A free browser-based audio editor A laptop $2 headphones and my genius brain

Good luck in battle, guys! Don't You Dare Skip LudumDare

I've not done one for a while but the stars have aligned and I have a weekend free!

It's been a few years since I last made a game, but excited to dust off the skills and see what I can do!

• Using Unity
• I usually do 2d so I'd like to try and make a 3D game, but depends on the theme!
• Depending on the theme I either want to make a boss battle or focus on a story, we'll see!
• No AI - I have it forced down my throat at work and I want to be free of it for a weekend

Hey Folks,

Its been a few cycles since the last time I was able to participate but this time works for us so we'll be in.

As is tradition here is the common splash screen we use with the Font (LudumDairy) pov made a while back. I throw it on the front of all my LD jam games and we share it here with everyone so you can use it too. Enjoy!

Good Luck Everyone!

Or are we?

Either way, have a generic I'm in post!

Co-Authored-By: @chaosbrick

This'll be my 4th ludum dare and I'm so excited! This time I'm going to try to make a spooky game for halloween! I've never made a horror game and so I can't wait to see what happens!

As always I'll be using: * my custom Floppy Cat Engine (C++/Vulkan) * super old photoshop + procreate for art * ableton live for audio (I recorded some guitar last time which was a lot of fun so I'm gonna try to squeeze some original music in if there's time!) * no ai of course, that would be lame to bring into a wonderful event like this (or to use in any way in game dev imo (or just at all in general lol))

I put a lot of thought into making my engine playable on the web, but I've been very busy actually trying to finish my rpg so I didn't get that far. I did sort out the minimum required assets for the engine though, so my final zip should be significantly smaller this time at least!

Good luck everyone! I can't wait to try your games in a couple days!!

Last time I did a Ludum Dare was 5 years ago. Excited! Didn't even know they were still happening...

Helloo!! I’ve been wanting to join a Ludum Dare jam and I felt that now’s finally a good time to do so! Everything’s about this is pretty new to me but hopefully things will go smoothly! Cheers!

I have to say I'm a little nervous, but happy and excited. I'm not an artist and I don't know much about music and sound, I'm just a programmer, but I decided to join the Compo to challenge myself. Wish me luck!!!:D

Helloo!! I’ve been wanting to join a Ludum Dare jam and I felt that now’s finally a good time to do so! First time Ludum Dare so ai’m kinda nervous, but hopefully things’ll work out.

Cheers!!! IMG_9772.png

Hellooo I'm new here! If the countdown isn't lying, there's about 1.5h left to go until the start; and I'm motivated as hell! Even though I had a very very busy week, I wont let that stop me! After all, Ludum Dare is something I've wanted to do for quite a bit of time now, but I somehow never got around to actually make something. And now that the last 5 five LD's are happening, I think its just about time to change that :) Anyway, lets see how long my motivation lasts and how much I can out of my rather modest gamedev skills. Happy Game making everyone!

I am not adding any value by posting this, but let's goooooo

Kind of hyped, been a busy week and gonna be a busier weekend. Themes are looking promising. Gonna go to bed so bye for now.

P.S. I don't know who this online persona I picked for this post is. Peace out

OH YEAH, I’M IN. Everyone is making blog posts about being in, I'll try my best to be in, just a few points I'll make before get started:

• I will be using Turbowarp for this jam, not a very popular tool, I know.
• I might make a soundtrack using Bosca Ceoil, if I have time, I will also be using sfxr for generating sounds.
• I feel like making my first ever 2D platformer, I might make it as long as I like the theme.
• I will most likely make a jam entry, not a compo entry, If I don't have time I'll be submitting it as an extra entry.
• I will never, EVER use AI for any of my projects.

I've made a game on a previous Ludum Dare, It was an entry for the Ludum Dare 59, I tried making the game however I was too late to make it a jam entry, but not too late for Ludum Dare! I unfortunately deleted the game, so you may no longer play this game. I hope not to make this mistake again, and I'll see you tomorrow when I start working on the game! :heart:

If you're looking for a barebones template for using Godot, I have one setup for GDScript here.

Features: - Basic Godot project with Compatibility renderer for Web Export - Export config for Web, Windows, Linux, and Android - Title screen with three buttons: Play, Credits, Exit - Credits crawler, just edit credits.txt! - Basic game scene loader

Godot Jame Template on GitHub just click Use this template

Good luck!

This will be the 2nd game jam, i've joined in over 6 years. I'm really excited to take part in one again and see all the cool games everyone makes. I'm thinking this will be a cool challenge to get back into a creative working headspace.

HELLO beloved jam eaters.

This ludum dare, our sixth and your sixtieth, we are going to SPEEDRUN game developement to extends PROBABLY seen before!!1!

We promise you that this game will be PLAYABLE, no, not just that, BEATABLE this time if not INFINITE!!! (faints) After FIVE whole games, two of which I was personally satisfied with, we will DEFEAT the curse of being bad and GAME the GAME once aGAME to avenge our ANCESTRAL PERSONS!1!! With five cups of spicy hot chocolate behind us, a whole overdose and a half of carbohydrates that led us to a phase of sloppy tiredness, we shall MARCH on (oh, its an october jam) through the power of capsaicin and do SOMETHING!

Ludum caught you by surprise? No issues. Codesman is gon take off for an hour or four? We have seen this before! Missing a third sentence for this climax?

Its a simple strategy really, beloved Ludum deer: We will make SIMPLE GAMEPLAY, MUAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA!

With my incredible knowledge in producing BASIC tilesets at a RELATIVELY GOOD pace, and the masterful abilities of @kartoffel-licht, we stand, just stand. But if we get to experience the presence of @inkyonyx and @kitkat-girlslop, our optionals, Ludum deer, I advise you to take into considerations our raw SAUCE. It will be a WEB, it will be an ITCH, it will even be dare I say.. a DARE!

Ok just, wish you guys good luck. Ludum is such a cool time of year during which a person loses half their bodily energy to create a child which they become increasingly distant towards in the next few months and then solidify into some sort of pride later on its like, virtual childbirth. Please dont be weirded out, draw practise snails, drink fluids. Dont fall off the plattforms. Take care.

Ya know, I wanted this post to be more slang and rad and young cool kids stuff but in an ironic sense and it just ended up being sarcastically dominant fancy language and now were here.

Just know that we have hope in this jam again uhh Im in. We hope to make a great installment in the Spicy Hot chocolate series!

Wishing you all luck for on the jam!

Currently my PC is bugging out on me not allowing me to use the taskbar properly. Hopefully I could get it sorted out by the jam starts or at least use my college laptop to make my Twine game. Fun stuff, not stressed at all...

Hi everyone! This is my first game jam and I'm so excited! Still pretty new to gamedev, so I'm mostly here to learn and have fun. I hope the theme will be good - can't wait to see what everyone comes up with. Good luck to you all!

This is going to be my 10th entry (13th if you count all unfinished ones and MiniLDs) and 1st with Picotron. I'm pretty sure that is going to be a risky move, and I know I'm not ready, but I want it so bad now that I must do it.

It starts in 1hr, but since it's pretty late here, I'll probably just go to sleep after theme is known.

The target is, as always, Compo (I often end up in Jam time though).

Preparation summary

• ☑ made time arrangements (kid sent with mom for the weekend, took leave on Monday)
• ☑ project directory created, themes voted on
• ☑ picotron started
• ☑ re-read my previous post-mortems
• ☑ cleaned up my desk (sort of)
• ☑ prepared ~~all~~ some relevant libraries
• ☐ created itch.io page (should be fine)
• ☐ brainstormed possible themes (next time, maybe?)
• ☐ went through my notes on Lua programming and Picotron (somewhat)
• ☐ did a test project

My stack

• ☑ Picotron 0.3.0d
• ☑ VSCode (no AI autocomplete)
• ☑ Aseprite or Pixelmash? maybe?
• ☑ libraries disclosed here though not sure I'll use them
• ☑ coffee machine
• ☑ music to listen to (via Spotify)

No AI. During LD time I'll write code, create art, music, everything myself - no autocomplete, google searches with -ai. It may turn out to be sh!t, but it's mine. If anyone reads this as a statement - 🤷. I use AI a lot for my job and some other projects - here I just want to be on my own. See my post from LD59.

Good luck to everyone! ❤️

https://twitch.tv/alexrosegames

GET OVER HERE

Ludumdare has not yet started and my game is already finished:

https://meshpage.org/487

Hope it can implement the theme too once it arrives..

Good luck everyone.

I´m really hyped ngl

Excited for LD60, game number 14! Our team of at least 5 plans to participate in the Jam 3-day category. Our usual tools include:

• Game engine: Godot v4.7 for a web build hosted on itch.io.
• Audio: Finale, PxTone, Audacity, and bfxr.
• Visual: Adobe, GIMP, and Microsoft Paint.

Also, each Tuesday of October I plan to live-stream demoing our game, then play and review other entries each Tuesday this month. If you want to be alerted when I go live and have your game played on stream, please follow https://www.twitch.tv/vorceshard. I look forward to seeing what everyone makes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAg5KjnAhuU

OK! We're almost there! IT'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN! Since you're probably really excited and can't wait for the big reveal, I present to you this absolutely fantastic video that is literally the funniest thing ever put on the internet to satiate your appetite for the last 20 minutes!

I have some ideas about what I'm doing, but tbh until the theme is revealed, I'm going to just sit and wait.

Have fun, everyone!

4 more "I'm in"'s left, Since my first Ludum Dare back in 2020 times have gotten a lot busier. hopefully I can make the entry, extra points for a high score. 20 minutes left, i should get to clearing my desk.

Good luck everyone! Don't forget to rest

I'm new here. This is my 1st Ludum Dare. Good luck.(sorry my English isn't great lol)

ЛД-60 서울 We're back in Seoul, South Korea 🇰🇷 Good luck everyone!

Oh yes, we are in. This is our first Ludum Dare jam, but despite that, we are ready to show what we've got.

Good luck, guys! May these 72 hours feel longer than they actually are.

Let it be legendary.

Keeping up the tradition here in our community, here's a photo of my setup.

I'm in for my second Ludum Dare!

Feeling a bit under the weather and unprepared, but my schedule is cleared and I'm doing this! I'll be participating in the Jam category and working in either Godot or PICO-8.

Note to self (and whoever else it concerns): Do your best, but don't work yourself to death. Remember to have fun. Failure is always an option.

Don't know if it's mandatory to leave a post to participate. Good luck to all!

Decided to participate with a teammate; it’s our first game jam.

Good luck to anyone participating. I hope to see some good games and concepts

I will be using JavaScript, WebGL2, JavaScript's Audio API, Vite and a custom Music Editor also made with JavaScript and its Audio API. So that means I will have the audio engine already prepared. And I will probably make a 4-shade Game Boy-like monochrome game.

Good luck to all!

I'm in, good luck everyone!

I'm still not sure, but I'll try 😅

As usual, I'll (try to) make a NES game - I've thought about making something for current PCs instead but surely I won't learn Godot in 10 minutes lol

Setup: - coding in Neovim - using llvm-mos-sdk - NEXXT for graphics - Dn-FamiTracker for audio, if any - MesenCE emulator for debugging

No AI involved - I don't even know if they can make NES games currently (please don't make one to prove me it's possible)

Edit: oh. Just saw the theme. Somehow it is appropriate in a meta sense

Does using old tech to build the game count?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO >_<

Bloody heck, the ONE THEME I didn’t want.

We’ve DONE this theme before, in Ludum Dare 36!

I HATED that theme. My team was utterly incapable of coming up with anything that worked with it. The game we eventually submitted had nothing to do with the theme.

Ugh, not a good start to the jam. I'm going to go make dinner to calm myself back down. I didn't expect this to be so upsetting.

dont all do steampunk shit please for the love of god

and please dont go with the obvious color palette, when depths was the theme every game was gray or brown im having war flashbacks

Out-of-class challenge - using old PCs is too trivial! Can you do it without them?

I'm really excited about the theme and I hope to actually complete something this time.

I will be using Godot for my engine. I don't know about the rest yet.

I'm seeing people concerned it's going to be all old computers or steampunk, so here's some other interpretations. One: any old machine is technically old tech, even the printing press, abacas or weaving loom. Two: if your game is in the future, our current tech could be old tech.

Good luck! (And I personally am not against anyone doing old computers or steampunk. I think both would be games I'd enjoy playing, but can see how they might get boring if they were every other game.)

Good luck and have fun everyone. :smile:

Since the theme is “Old Tech,” I’ll be programming on my abacus, using a clay tablet running Vim. Compilation and linking may take a while, since I have to wait for the clay to dry. I’ll be wireframing my 3D models with sticks and string.

Best part is that the clay tablet running Vim might actually be easier to exit than regular Vim.

That theme was "Ancient technology"

No elephant and now this? I was truly expecting better of us all...

Why not brainstorm on main?

First thing that comes to mind is abandoned alien tech ruins. Okay, but what's the game there?

Well, maybe I should just come up with a game and then force feed it into old tech instead. So what game to make? My friend told me to make a game celebrating my top surgery, so I could always make my fruit ninja clone idea I had. I suppose a samurai cutting off breasts is kind of old tech compared to a skilled surgeon. But I really would like to make something spooky for spooptober.

I also keep thinking about the unofficial elephant bonus theme because all I can think about is making a skeleton elephant (or Skelephant if you will)...

Just asked my non-game dev dad what he thought of the theme and he thought of wagons, horse-drawn water pumps and bronze swords. The water pump sounds a bit complicated for me to understand well enough to gamify, but I could work with elephant-drawn wagon carrying water or something...

So, Skelephant is a firefighter but because they're dead they no longer have elephant trunk abilities. They still have a job to do (putting out fires in the graveyard village) so they have to manually carry buckets of water to put out the fires. I can try to make it physics-y so there's an actual game to it... maybe skip the wagon and just make the old tech be firefighters -> elephant in general -> spooky elephant with bucket on its back to simplify things. Then player controls only have to be wasd and jump. Water can be balls so that jumping causes them to physics and you would need to have some degree of skill to put out the fire. It's maybe not the most fun game, but it IS an idea, and that's all I need to work with, maybe it'll be more fun than it sounds...

I guess up next is working on sprites for the Skelephant!

Old Tech is what got us here. Let's all have a great Jam. Remember to be optimistic and encourage each other. Ludum Dare is a privilege, not a right. It took a lot to put this one together, and there are only a few of them left, so let's have fun and do our best. We all benefit from seeing each other's work in progress and our finished games. Special thanks to Mike Kasprzak for doing this for all of us. Good luck everyone!

Old tech FX to hunt for old tech...

• #no-ai, #no-engine, #typescript, #html-canvas, #vector-fx, #pew-pew, #gameplay-heavy ?

just mspaint sketch before go sleep...

Embrace tradition

Let's change that!

This image contains our subject which will be a integral part of the whole ordeal :grin:

Alright, good luck everyone!

Whoops . In my head I was thinking the theme would be announced 2am or something..

I am currently playing with Old Tech of a different kind modding Unreal Tournament.

I'll revert to some newer tech ( Construct 2 from ~2012 ) instead of Unreal Engine 1 ( ~1999 )

I have no idea what this thing supposedly does... :zap:

But I like it!

And apparently I still haven't gotten over last LD's Signal-theme... :radio:

This afternoon, I was still on Nora Beach in Sardinia. I got back just as Ludum Dare started. After spending a few hours in two different airports, it’s time to create something inspired by the theme. Best of luck to you all ++

The good news is, I have an idea: you're defragging the hard drive of an old computer, and this takes the form of a match-3 game where you have to group files of the same type together in order to free up disk space. The more files you group at once, the more space you free up and the more points you earn.

The bad news is, I don't actually know how to program a match-3 game. At least, not in TIC-80. The last time I tried, I got stuck trying to program the logic that would recursively search for matches, as I just couldn't get it to work properly. So this will be a bit of a learning experience.

The good news is, that's exactly what these jams are supposed to be: a chance for me to try out new things. So I'm gonna head off to bed now, as it's past midnight, and then tomorrow I'll give it a go. I always try to have a semi-playable prototype finished by Saturday lunchtime, but this time round it might take me a little bit longer. Let's see!

Good luck all!

What about a simple platformer where the game's technology changes every time the player starts a new run?

For example, the first run would use Atari 2600-style graphics, the next would switch to Game Boy, then NES, and finally C64.

Each run could have its own visual style, color palette, and technical limitations based on the system being emulated.

Ludum Dare has always been my favorite event! Unfortunately, I missed the last two, and I was probably going to miss this one as well due to life.

As I get older, with more family and work responsibilities, it becomes increasingly difficult to dedicate the enormous amount of time needed to make even a small game (because we all know it's never really small).

But when I saw today's theme, "Old Tech," I immediately thought about the irony of everything happening with AI lately. And then I realized how fun it would be, at least to me, to make a game using AI to generate pretty much everything except the idea and concept.

So I've decided to do it! I'll obviously opt out of everything required by the rules, but my main goal this weekend is simply to have fun with the little free time I have left between all my responsibilities as a grown man.

(PS: Yes, AI is permitted)

I'm already anticipating some sort of hate from the community, but at least I will have a lot of fun and enjoy the event.

So enjoy the event yourself, folks! :smiley:

Have a great jam.

So behind haven't actually drawn any pre-planned concepts, but one thing I'm fairly sure of it'll be a platform game.

Maybe with robots, cats or maybe something original. Gonna try sleep now and cogitate on what direction to take it. :thinking:

Game where you play as rutabaga-headed lady to stop the world from an evil presence afflicting telephones. Use your old rotary phone and rolodex to pacify creepy stuff. Collect candy corn to order things off the telephone. Shove weird gems and trinkets into the rotary slots to power up your stuff. Other things are also happening.

I have roughly 14 hours to make this. Yay!

working on our game at the moment! I hope we can finish it in time.

eyes emoji

This should be enough to hop into Godot after a bit of a breather...

The idea is a simple platformer played in the hands of an old guy who struggles to grip it properly so he can only use 1 button at a time.

First mock image:

Hey all!

I've composed for a bunch of games, including Game Jams (ranked #3 in Audio at LD56!)

Would love to join a cool team, always happy to get creative with pretty much any music style so don't hesitate to reach out :)

Portfolio here: https://music.benjamin-widawski.com/

giving some love to my favorite game's OST while I'm here

Would it be a problem if I used an effect or plugin to give my game a CRT look?

For example, I found a shader library that adds a CRT monitor effect to the game. I was reading the rules, but I just wanted to double-check here to make sure it's allowed in Ludum Dare.

Would using something like this be okay?

I didn’t create the sprite in this image; I just used it to show the effect.

The theme is OLD TECH, and a flood of visual references hit us right out of the gate: nostalgic dives into obsolete machinery, dial-up internet screeching over landlines, winding cassette tapes with a pencil, Tamagotchis, and retro Dendy consoles—take your pick. But picking an aesthetic isn't enough; you can't build a game on vibes alone.

🔹 First, the gameplay foundation: a single room, tight routine loops—closest reference is ReStory.

🔹 Next, the core mechanic: assembling a newspaper layout by fitting articles and clippings onto a grid like Tetris—reference: Backpack Battles.

🔹 Then, the setting: a nation gripped by conflict, and we're a printing press worker—think Papers, Please.

🔹 And finally, the narrative: night shifts, the previous typesetter was hauled off to parts unknown, and we lay out the final print edition. We decide what makes the front page, while shady figures drop by offering scoops—or threatening our lives to spike a story before morning.

Where is this going to lead us?

Ok, maybe it's better that my phone didn't want to transmit the photo of my horrible paper scribbles to my computer. It looks like some alien virus infected my notebook. So here's v1 of the title logo thing. The font balance looked better on paper, but now I can see that the "F" and "L" really dominate and look unintentionally "more" uppercase than the rest of the letters. I wasn't intentionally going for a low res font thing, I was just doodling in a graph notebook.

The theme is OLD TECH, and a flood of visual references hit us right out of the gate: nostalgic dives into obsolete machinery, dial-up internet screeching over landlines, winding cassette tapes with a pencil, Tamagotchis, and retro Dendy consoles—take your pick. But picking an aesthetic isn't enough; you can't build a game on vibes alone.

🔹 First, the gameplay foundation: a single room, tight routine loops—closest reference is ReStory.

🔹 Next, the core mechanic: assembling a newspaper layout by fitting articles and clippings onto a grid like Tetris—reference: Backpack Battles.

🔹 Then, the setting: a nation gripped by conflict, and we're a printing press worker—think Papers, Please.

🔹 And finally, the narrative: night shifts, the previous typesetter was hauled off to parts unknown, and we lay out the final print edition. We decide what makes the front page, while shady figures drop by offering scoops—or threatening our lives to spike a story before morning.

Where is this going to lead us?

My girl was so ugly liek why is she SO BRIGHT??? XD XD XD

But I herd its shuting down 4eva this wknd so make sure u get in and take pics and save ur chatlogs before it does :'(

I'm hoping this is still on theme enough to work, but it's a story that's hit me hard and very quickly, so I'm going for it!

I'm going to be making a narrative-focused puzzle game about exploring a social site from your youth with your old virtual pet shortly before it goes offline. Hoping to include some minigames, interesting turns, 00's cringestalgia, and a heartfelt story about moving on.

Candycorns is the currency in this game. The bigger the candycorn, the more Candycorns its worth.

I'm really inspired by the "Antikythera mechanism", an old astronomical calculator thought to have been invented by the Ancient Greeks ~150 BC ~~for navigation purposes.~~ edit: oops apparently it was mainly for predicting the position of the planets and moon, or something idk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

I want to try to make a game about (re)discovering the technology of an ancient civilization, and using what you learn from studying ancient artifacts to navigate the world and travel to lands previously unknown.

We're planning to make a Tower Defense game. For the Old Tech theme, we decided to dig a little deeper - literally. Not just old technology, but reeeally ancient tech, lost and forgotten by time

Who Up Daring They Ludum

If I complete, it will be my 30th submission.

Have fun, everyone!

The Theme is very good this time. I would love to make a "old tech" game

Hey people! I've just started game dev a few weeks ago, and am just learning Godot.

So let's see where I can head over to with this!

All the best everyone! 👾

The first thing that came to mind when I saw the theme "Old Tech" was a guy delivering water with a horse-drawn cart. If I can't come up with anything better, I'll make a water delivery simulator.

So far, I've spent the first three hours just drawing this guy.

What is everyone listening to while working? I'm listening to The College Dropout by Kanye West. It's a good album. Although I'm not a college dropout. I'm in my second to last semester. I guess I could still dropout. Then I wouldn't be a LARPer. Much to think about... #hmm

social media is my canvas and posting is my paintbrush.

Well, that's definitely something. I'm not sure what, exactly, but it's something.

From the Stone Age to mechas, with Morse code along the way, I scrapped several ideas before landing on what I think could be a good game. Maybe it doesn't have much 'tech' in it, but we'll all have a much better time, and that's what matters!

Well, 12 hours have passed; the core gameplay loop is essentially ready, and we’ll share a demonstration later.

As for what’s fully complete as of today: we have the control systems in place, along with one squid model.

duplicate post - deleted

Pretty pleased with how this is coming out so far, tbh!

First ludum dare in a couple years. Spent probably way too much time on concept art and camera movement but it's a start nonetheless. Good night fellas