That sounds like the most boring thing I've ever heard in my life, but I know some people are very crafty and interpret the theme in interesting ways. If that did get picked, what kind of game do you think you would make?
Same as with the first round whatever sounds ambiguous and novel without going too wide gets +1. I don’t do ‘0’ otherwise we’ll end up with a compromise no one likes.
Ancient Technology I'd vote for if it wasn't already done. Feel like most people would go back to that and take too much inspiration from it.
Gameplay described by the title of a song - it could be very interesting :)
Time for my 11th LD! Done every single one since 33, and all but one have been in compo. My previous best is overall 11th in compo for LD42, so for my 11th LD, let's see if I can beat that! Using GMS2 for everything except sound.
I'm not optimistic about finishing this time round either, because I will be trying out a new engine and I suck at programming so this should be fun! I'll be doing Jam, using Defold engine with the lua language, REAPER for music/sound and Aseprite for terrible pixel art! Good luck to everyone and let's see what you lot come up with!
It's been a while since I've successfully completed a jam of any kind but I've decided to drop Unity like a sack of shit and go back to haxe for my gamedev stuff. So I'll either be using that or making something for my Arduboy because I love that little thing.
I saw a lot of very negative(where I at first also leaned towards) and now also one very positive sided voting. However I think its obvious that, if we vote too onesided it'll result in having less impact with our votes and therefore increases the chance that we get a theme which more people are unhappy with.
Because if for example the only three themes we vote positive on, aren't voted by many others, all the negative votes wont have any impact anymore(or the other way around). If I am misunderstanding this please correct me :D.
I dont want to say that we should vote on themes we aren't happy with or be super critical but I would just say we should think about each theme a bit longer.
This may not be as important in the first three rounds(especially if they are evaluated all together) but I think it definitely would be for the last round.
First time participating in a game jam. Only a teenager just now, but hoping to get a career in the games industry one day. Really excited to participate, even though my artist backed out... You'll just have to put up with some crafty programmer art!
I'm an assistant professor of computer science at Hendrix College, a small liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas. In Spring 2015, I taught my first course in game development. I decided to use Ludum Dare as the focus of our final project. This amazing community takes seriously the efforts of amateur developers as they are making progress toward personal goals, and offered exactly the feedback and encouragement I wanted to provide for my students. My first attempt didn't go exactly as planned, but I used what I learned to make the second time around much better, and I hope that my experience is useful for others interested in attempting a similar course structure.
Throughout my 2015 course, I taught my students with a standard curriculum, giving lectures and assigning labs related to using the Unity physics engine, animations, and 3D models, and programming steering behaviors and AI. However, when the final project arrived, they felt utterly unprepared. We had focused on developing skills in an academic setting, but the students lacked the necessary mental and logistical frameworks to get a game up and working in a short amount of time. Each team submitted a barely-working prototype and was somewhat discouraged by their efforts.
Ludum Dare 32 Entries
Our first experience led me to make a large overhaul with drastic improvements for the Spring 2017 version of CSCI 370 : Interactive Game Development by adding in multiple mini-james, a more integrated asset tool section, and Twitch streaming feedback assignments.
The biggest revision I made was to introduce bi-weekly lab assignments explicitly focused on making small games, for a total of 5 games developed before the final Ludum Dare project. From the moment they were introduced to Unity, we talked about building viable working prototypes. This need for their submissions to be playable and fun was emphasized by setting aside time following each lab deadline for me to play their games and provide live feedback with often hilarious bugs being discovered. Students rotated through different teams for each game, so they could build connections across the class and share new skills. The theme for each game was decided randomly using an online noun generator, providing freedom to innovate within somewhat arbitrary constraints. As new coding skills were added, the requirements and expectations for the next game expanded. Where the first game only needed to incorporate physics, collisions, and mouse input, by the end it was routine for my students to incorporate custom GUI elements and NPC AI characters, and they had multiple solid experiences starting a game from scratch.
Second, in the initial course iteration, students gave small presentations on helpful asset tools, such as sprite creators, terrain editors, and music generators, in the two weeks before Ludum Dare. This turned out to be too late to be useful, and most tools were ignored in their final project work. In the Spring 2017 iteration, I scheduled these demos to be staggered earlier in the course, so that as our Unity skills grew, so too did their outside tools. This turned out to provide the right level of integration, and I found them refining their assets and improving their game quality at a much faster rate.
Third, I increased the amount of Twitch streaming in the course. To introduce my students to the wider gaming community and give us all a common corpus of games as reference throughout the semester, the first assignment in the course requires the students to play at least 10 selected games from diverse genres and broadcast themselves on Twitch for at least one. In their broadcast, they needed to be reflecting on the elements of the game and how it was creating emotions, choices, and strategies for the player. Because they had already learned about streaming, I integrated a peer feedback element into each of their game assignment, where they would record a stream of themselves play each other’s games and commenting in the same way as their first assignment. I also modelled this behavior myself in class, streaming each of my lectures to Twitch to maintain them as class notes for further study, especially the days when I playtested their game assignments.
Ludum Dare 38 EntriesBecause of these changes, my students felt poised to successfully create a game for Ludum Dare, and saw it as more intense, compressed version of our bi-weekly labs instead of a brand new experience. Their resulting games made great use of asset tools and GUI interactions and overall were were much more complete upon entry. Two teams even submitted their games to Ludum Dare Twitch streamers, and were very pleased with the feedback they received and the interactions possible with the wider community.
As for the final project itself, participation in Ludum Dare is only half the project, and students could still recover from an unsuccessful entry. I emphasized to them the importance of reflection on successes and failures in their weekend, which fits very well with the Ludum Dare tradition of making post-mortem blogs after submitting your game. Students then spent at least a week trying to fixing all the bugs and expanded their content to fully realize their game vision. I coordinated an opportunity for outside playtesting by hosting an arcade with our submissions in the student union building on campus, and welcomed others to play and provide feedback for their game. To wrap up their work, students made a video trailer for their game and demonstrated to the class their progress since submitting their game for Ludum Dare.
Overall, my students have greatly benefited from this Ludum Dare course integration. By being responsible to an outside audience through creating Ludum Dare entries and streaming on Twitch, my students showed increased engagement with the material and improved quality of work. I found that for this to be successful, the course structure must scaffold and complement the skills needed to excel in game jams.
Of course, coupling a course with an external competition can present difficulties. And it did! First, the timing of Ludum Dare is out of my control, so I needed to rearrange my syllabus once the dates were announced. Luckily our semester schedule overlapped well with the April dates for both course iterations, leaving at least a week following the competition for playtesting and revision. Second, in 2017, Ludum Dare 38 moved to a new hosting website. There were multiple server load issues and broken pieces, as the website was updated often while the competition was in motion. Game submission was delayed for a least a day, and the voting/feedback mechanisms were even further delayed. It was critical to be flexible in my expectations for the students when these outside issues occurred.
Finally, I have found it enormously helpful to participate in Ludum Dare myself alongside my students in the course. I gained first-hand knowledge of any issues they should encounter, with submissions or posting feedback, so I could better guide them through the process on submission day. Also, as I rated other games after the competition, I saw the benefits of the “karma” system, which helps others find your game faster when you have provided quality feedback elsewhere in the competition, and encouraged my students daily to rate and comment on other games. I have since separately participated in Ludum Dare 42, and hope to help another instructor deploy a similar course structure this spring!
Good luck to everyone this weekend in Ludum Dare 43!
Last Ludum Dare was my first game jam ever. I tried out LibGDX and I found it's a really nice way to get to know a new tool. Does anybody have a good tool or engine I could try out this time around. I saw a lot of people using Godot , is that any good It can also be graphics, audio, whatever helps me make better games.
Go go go 👍👍👍
I am so sad that I am going to have a maximum of 10h to work this time.. The date is just so bad for me. Hope that I am going to get at least something going ;)
Very excited for my 5th consecutive ldjam!
Tool: + Engine/Framework: Love2D 11.2 + Code Editor: vscode forever + Art (I make it, so it should not be called art): Aseprite + Planning and Brainstorming: Trello and my slow 2MB/s brain + Music: LMMS (with AudioThing's miniBit plugin) and a c99l r3tr9 radioshack midi keyboard from earlies '00 + Procrastination: Chrome with twitter and ldjam page logged in + Probably a lot of stackoverflow + Some coffee to upgrade my slow brain into 4MB/s + And spotify to make the development more relaxing (and more importantly is the theme is "Gameplay described by the title of a song")
I am in and ready to do Ludum dare again! We are looking for others to join our team.
We are an ambitious team who worked together in multiple game jams. We will be making a 2D sidescroller using Unity. We are mainly looking for:
Coder - good with implementing art and music assets, optimization, polish, or animations
Art - background, environment, and platforms artist
Design - level design, who knows how to add assets into unity and arrange game objects to make a fun game
Join us and let's make an amazing game and have fun!
https://crowdforge.io/jams/ludumdare/teams/2653
While we're still working on getting our next game ready for show (it's made a ton of progress but we're picky that way), we're taking this weekend off for another Ludum Dare. It'll be our 12th one dating back to Ludum Dare 30.
We'll be streaming our progress live - as usual - on our Twitch channel, twitch.tv/alphasim. We tend to get a bit goofy and sidetracked, but we've always come in on time so far. Good luck to everyone involved!
Well took this one a little more by impulse... so here we go ;)
I had to find something that rhymes with 3 ok? Anyway, last round is most certainly upon us. Optimistic Nutty is in for the scoop. Here we go!
*You are what you eat (-1): *Too specific. Eating is a very definitive verb, "eat", of course you can also interpret it as "consume" and while that does give you some more possible ideas to work with the more I think about the 'you are' part the more I realise that all this is is a "consume entity and get some parts of this entity" game mechanic.
*Sacrifices must be made (+1): * I love games where there is a certain struggle. FTL, XCOM etc. and this theme is basically that. Yes, it could be seen as vague but unlike some other vague themes this one is actually measurable, instead of '60 seconds' which is basically a tick box, with this theme you can actually determine how much of the theme you want to incorporate into your game.
*Everything Grows (-1): *More specific and garbage version of a previous LD theme.
*Inputs are expensive (-1): *There had to be an input based one somewhere among the pile. Here it is! I find this theme quiet dull and can already see pages upon pages of games where basic movement is punished.
*1 v 100 (-1): *Too Restrictive. Moving on.
*Evolve (+1): *I just like this theme. Yes it's vague I know, I know, but I just love games based around 'something' growing to 'something' throughout the game. So this one is just completely out of personal favorites.
*Work with your enemy (-1): *Nice paradox. If you're working with your enemies then they aren't your enemies. I mean, unless you're thinking of the time old "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" but re-read that quote and note the part where it says "my friend". Maybe I'm interpreting this incorrectly but in that case this theme is too confusing for me to care.
*Transform your surroundings (+1): *I will be honest. Originally I called this off because I was thinking of terrain or building games. But then I re-wrote the theme in my head using some synonyms and I came to, "Change your world" and then I realised this is actually a really good theme. Maybe a game about changing the views of the local people. Maybe a game about making anyone who passes you in-game a hot sexy boi. Loads of possible interpretations.
*Symbiosis (-1): *Don't exactly wish to do research for a theme, and I'm sure those who are less versed in English would want to either.
*Two connected places (-1): *Down this theme, go back to round 2 and up "Making Connections". Thanks.
*Mistakes are permanent (-1): *Again, pages upon pages of games that will be based around "haha, couldn't kill that one guy? Well enjoy having him screw you over for your whole play session". Uninspired, basically.
*Only one shot (+1): *Actually not a bad theme. Reminds me of "Running out of Power" since if you look at the theme literally, it would look garbage, but then when you start twisting the theme some other ideas may arise. I, personally was thinking of real life situations where you may only have 'one shot' such as job interviews, or life-changing opportunities. Me likey!
*Non-Traditional Magic (-1): *I really hope magic based themes don't just start becoming a trend. Anyway, this is basically "Inconvenient Superpowers" but wrapped under a different name... so... yeah!
*Self-Replicating (-1): *Not my taste. An, ok theme but doesn't strike me as very interesting, that's just my thought process though.
*Nothing is permanent (-1): *Just another dumb theme. Yeah. 99% of things in video games aren't permanent. That's not a theme, that's just a fact of games. This theme is so vague that someone could just make any old game and there would be a pretty high chance that it would accidentally work with this 'theme'.
*Symmetry (-1): *Meh. Too mathsy for me. All I can think of is building, architecture and maths and I'm not really interested in any of those things.
Surprised we didn't get Buttons or Colour anywhere in these rounds. Not complaining. Not complaining. At least some actually GOOD themes replaced them. Anyway, we're nearly here! Not long to go now.
Just cleared the weekend and got some vacation days for before and after. Pumped for another iteration!
Planning to do something music-heavy. Let's see whether those piano lessons paid off.
I love the music title theme. Fingers crossed!
The last day is all I'll have to make the game, which is good. I tend to make something complicated if I feel like I have the time.
Getting everything set-up. Updating every software and driver, getting the pizza number ready, cleaning my room. I'll probably be completely out of reach for that day so I'm trying to let everybody know: this is my day. Ludum Dare feels like a vacation time to me.
I celebrate the countdown almost as the new year's. From the moment the theme is announced my mind is racing. Then, the site gets too crowded. Update the page and I see desperate souls like me not knowing what to do. This time I'll have a long time to think before making anything though.
Never looked at the event as a competition but more like a celebration. I don't know any of you but we all come together and create lots and lots of cool games. I can't wait to see what you guys will come up with this time.
To finish this wall of text, here are my tools:
Good luck, everyone!
To help drive pygame 2 development, we are making a game with pygame 2.
The whole pygame community is invited to take part in this one game.
More info. https://renesd.blogspot.com/2018/11/first-pygame-2-community-game-starting.html