So i've never done one of these before but I understand how it works, i'm not like a pro game maker or anything but I can make something half decent so i'm gonna try it out. I use GameMaker Studio 2 so thats a thing. Yeah cool thats it.

Hi I'm AmDMaster, a new indie game developer working on a metroidvania game. I was thinking to participate in this game jam since I've heard about it a lot. I have some questions: 1) Can I make the game from home? 2) How does the submission system work? 3) Anything else I need to know...

Literally 90% of the themes from round 3 would cause everyone to make the same game. "You are the final boss", "You are the quest giver", "You control the enemies", "Everything is a weapon", etc. Lots of themes that aren't really "themes" are making it pretty far. What I mean by that is a theme is usually "Rouge-Like", "Space Exploration", "Underground", or something very broad. Saying like "You play as this and the enemies are this" would be too restrictive and in all honesty would make the jam quite boring, as everyone's games would have the same major gameplay expectation. I really hope a good theme wins, but for now, it's not looking too good.

Hi everyone! How is it going? I hope everyone is feeling great things and we will create pretty games in this event. If i find some spare time in this weekend i will be participated in this event for 3rd time. Generally i am making my games in JavaScript but this time i planned to use Godot Engine to create my game. It seems very simple to use but i am completely new in Godot Engine and GDScript so if you have any advice or trick about Godot Engine please write down to the comments. So.. yeah that is all. See you later in this weekend !

As mentioned before, this will be my first Ludum Dare, and my first game jam in general. In the past, I heard some people say about Ludum Dare: The theme always sucks. Now the voting rounds are open and I think these people were right. Although I liked some of the past themes.

WTF Ludum Dare?! Most of the "themes" are just game mechanincs. This has being a problem for a while now and they where a lot of very interesting suggestions from the comunity of how to solve it, but it looks like nobody cares! This is infuriating, we are not exploting the full potential of this event and that really set me down.

So many of these are just old themes slightly changed or rephrased.

See, at this point I would have written 3 lengthy posts for each theme voting round exclaiming my opinion on each one and what I think the potential is behind all of them. Sadly, I think I've already completed this job in advance as a result. Only around 12 of the 48 themes suggested are original and have not already been suggested in the past.

This on its own wouldn't be bad if most of these themes weren't terrible. So, I won't be making a post like that again. Here's a very nice, easy to digest list of screenshots instead. See you in 3 days and happy jamming!

I do not know why people dislike the themes present in the theme voting so far. I voted positive for most of them.

I've recently gave up a job at a medium-sized company where I was acting as a CTO for six years; mostly working with mobile apps and highload backends. This was quite a journey, but at some point I felt bored and decided to get into something that always tempted me: game development (is 30 years too soon for a midlife crisis? :D)

I've only published one game since then - an endless runner for iOS and Android heavily inspired by an old-school classic SkiFree game for windows. The game is called Avalanche Run and I will be really glad if you could provide some feedback :)

You can check it out here.

So I decided to challenge myself and come up with something creative. I will do the compo and I hope I won't mess it up too bad, since I have really next to none experience with game development and I am still fairly new to both C# and Unity :) :v:

I am almost certain that I will make something in 2d, since it's easier for me (yes, as a total Unity noob I am still wrapping my head around Quaternions xD) and 10 years ago I had some experience working with Flash when it was still not dead.

Hope the theme would me awesome.

Btw, why does the jam start at night? Seems a little strange :)

I would probably try to set up a twitch stream, but it seems that there are not much working software for mac to stream the screen that don't try to set the CPU on fire :D

I haven't done a compo since LD26 so, I am really excited. Me and My brother are gonna hash out this game. Going to use Unity and try and use free licensed art to get things done faster. I want to use Pro Motion to create any assets.

And if you have any constructive suggestions on dealing with it, consider leaving a comment on GitHub.

Almost all of the themes are great. It's hard to pick one to vote negative.

First of all - I am not sure I can pull this one off.

I happen to be traveling to Luxembourg at this exact weekend, so I might not have enought time to devote to actual development. Maybe I will put together somethin super-simple, but no promises.

On the other hand I have recently upped my programming skills, and learned a few ways how Unity can be used to develop games other than being Rendering and Phisicsing engine. So putting together something playable should be simpler for me now. Hopefully :sweat_smile:

Theme voting... I don't remember if there was another time where I would only upvote one theme, but here it is now.

But I am not going to get into "Theme suxx" rage. First of all - it wouldn't change anything, except spoil my (and potentially someone else's) mood, and this would be bad. Secondly - any theme would be workable. There is no such thing as good or bad theme.

So... Happy jamming, everyone! Let's have a lot of fun making and playing those games!

Hi, I am excited to participate in LD44, will do my best!

During LD, I have a few other things to take care of so I might be even more time constrained than normal. Will try to get inspired during the busy times. I am planning to use vrum.js, blender, audacity and gimp.

I am joining the solo entry, my goal for this LD is to get top 50 in the humor section.

Can anybody finish this line: Why did the developer cross the road?

Hey!

So, finally taking part in my first LD. I've basically managed to get the whole weekend to myself so I'll have about as much time as one could hope to have in this kind of thing. But I had a question;

What is the stance on using engines in the compo?

I apologise if this is clearly answered somewhere and I've missed it but I was just wondering if using an engine excluded you from the compo. I get you're supposed to create everything from scratch but making an engine (and then a game in that engine) in two days seems like a fairly tall order. And if you CAN use engines, where is the line drawn between what you can and can't use? For example, obviously you can't use Unity's first person controller but can you use standard shaders or would you have to write your own?

Regardless of the answer, I'm almost certainly going to stick to the jam for my first game, but I would like to know. Looking forward to taking part!

It's nothing new that themes usually suck. Heck, even Phil Strahl a.k.a. Pixel Prophecy made a movie poster about it.! the-theme-always-sucks-v02.jpg After 43 Ludum Dare we must face the fact that the theme is not the most important thing; good games spring out even with shitty themes, bad ideas or begginer teams. We as a community are who decide the theme for every year and we know that as a fact. It's purely democratical. Sometimes an idea or a theme sounds really good on paper, but it doesn't work that well later; maybe because it was too narrow or too broad, but it's up to us to determine the quality of our games.

In any case, if LD themes are just not doing it for you, there're a lot of jams out there!

This are my votes for this LD44, they may be negative, but I'm sure we'll make something good out of it! Good luck this weekend, jammers!

Yep! I'm joining this one. Pushing myself to the limit is the best way to actually get the ball rolling. (and work more on a certain game about a ball)

So there has been some controversy surrounding the themes sucking. That's fine, I'm joining to have fun, even if I have to work with a theme like "player must eat 4 burgers each square meter they travel on the desert bus". Ok, that was very specific, but you get the idea. Just use imagination or something.

And I hope to give you guys a better game than last time. Like, something actually playable. ~~Maybe james 2~~

See ya!

I joke, I kid. Your not bad (well you might be but I don't know you well enough to judge so I'm just gonna say your not.) Much has been said about how terrible the themes are and I agree with that sentament but ladys and gentlemen I come barring what I consider a solution. Did you know that in 2014 Ralph Koster gave a GDC talk all about practical creativity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyVTxGpEO30

I'm not saying this is the miracle drug you all will need to make a bad theme win first place, but I mean it can't hurt when there is a chance we will get the theme "Non-traditional Boss Battles". Now because I am a big believer that claims need evidence I am gonna use some practical creativity and list off Sixteen diffrent game idea's all in the genre of Twin-Stick Shooter (which I don't plan on making one at any point as they don't interest me at all) using the themes from Round 3 of voting to show that even with bad themes all you need is a little creativity to make it work.

• Ridiculosly Overpowered: Enemys are impervious to direct fire (talk about being overpowered) you instead must bounce your bullets off walls and even other enemy's inorder to deal any damage.
• You're the Final Boss: This would just be a tradiditional twinstick shooter but you spawn with a bunch of ally's trying to kill the hero and each time you kill the hero you advance or alternativly each time you die you become the next more powerfull enemy with diffrent powers and shot patterns.
• Everything is a Weapon: A twinstick shooter where instead of starting is a gun or something like that you enstead grab enemys and use them as auto-firing weapons against there own kind
• You are a Side Character: Rather than play the hero in this twinstick you play as the orbital cannon following around the hero shielding him from fire and casting out small blast at enemys
• Shelter: A twin stick shooter crossed with a tower defense game. Every enemy you kill drops resources that can be used to build towers or upgrade your shelter. Your goal is to defend your shelter until you can build a becon to call for help.
• The more You Die, The more the World Dies: You are the guardian angle of a small island as foes siege the island you are on each time you die you wake up a year later (aka the next level) with the world falling apart slowly in your absence
• You Can't Save them All: You are a rescue ranger tasked with saving people from a burning forest fire use your water spay to put out flames and carry people to the rescue zone unfortunatley the clock is ticking and you won't have time to save every one.
• You are the Quest Giver: Start deep in a dungeon planting the holy grail inside on your way up activate all the monster spawners with your fire and try to escape without dieing. Once outside you stand and wait for the hero to apper so you can send them to retreave the holy grail.
• Contagious: You are a CDC decontamanation expert run around shooting people with your vaccine gun to stop the spread of a deadly contagion.
• You Control the Enemy: You are the enemy guiding the mindless minions into the spray of fire from the hopelessly incompident hero.
• Alchemy: Litterally just a twin stick shooter but instead of shooting bullets you lob potions at enemys (maybe the potions could all have a diffrent effects)
• Break the Cycle: A twin-stick shooter where your goal is to destroy the towers that create enemy waves rather than just defend in an endless cycle.
• Underground: A Twin-stick shooter but the arena's you fight in are underground fight clubs where you battle for the entertainment of the rich elite.
• Non-traditional Boss Battles: Rather than have a big boss where you have to fill him with even more bullets than a normal enemy you enstead have
• Two Characters, One Player: Take the controls of Brothers a Tale of Two Sons and use that as your twinstick movement each character moves in the same direction they are shooting.
• Tiny Town: You are a giant kaiju terrorizing the city use your twin stick action to destroy tanks and even some buildings

So yeah as you can see with some creativty even bad themes can turn into something not terrible. I really do recommend that you watch the video as Mr. Koster does a far better job talking about mixing genres and making entirely new genres that what I could ever hope to convey in my short sixteen theme ideas. Like I said I won't be doing anything with twin-stick shooters probably ever so feel free to rumage through my garage sale of ideas and take what you want, and always remember "The theme is eternally bad. Even when its good its bad, and if you think it can't be any worse just wait."

Also here are my votes for all the diffrent voting rounds so far.