This theme would inevitably lead to every other game being about an infection. Do we really want a play+rate event that constantly reminds us of today's harsh reality? Ludum Dare (and gaming as a whole) is a form of escapism.
So... here a a few ideas for each of the final themes that I literally thought of while typing them out.
Are they stupid? Probably.
Are they helpful? Unlikely.
Do they immediately eliminate one ridiculous option you probably wouldn't have thought of yourself? Almost certainly!
Decay - Players prevent members of their household from cutting slices of your beautiful chocolate cake until it is completely decayed. Why? Because you're spiteful!
Layers - Commercial hen house simulator. Manage all those egg layers!
ontrol the world, not the player - Bullet hell shooter where you can only press control to reload if your crosshair is on the world sprite, not the player sprite.
Nomad - Play as a seven year old Scottish child trying to convince everyone that they aren't angry but all you can say is "I'm no' mad!"
Connections - 1950s switchboard operator and McCarthyism surveillance simulator. Lowkey good idea actually. Don't steal it.
Stuck in a loop - The letters S, T, U, C, K in a washing machine. Control the rotation and water level to manipulate them into spelling STUCK.
Feeding the monster - Cooking simulator where you dress and cook a horrible creature and serve it for dinner.
Delay the inevitable - Don't do anything for the first 47 hours and 55 minutes of the jam, then make a post saying "Sorry, folks. I didn't manage to make a game this time!"
Contain it - Play in real time as an IT department intern who desperately needs to fart but is only 30 minutes into a 2 hour meeting about risk management.
Day and night - Point and click adventure staring Kath Day and Kel Knight from the hit Australian comedy series, Kath and Kim.
Shipwrecked - Play as a jealous friend and plant incriminating evidence around your friend's apartment in an attempt to wreck their relationship. Bonus points if this is a live action, fly-on-the-wall gameplay experience with Twitch integration.
Clockwork - You want to clock off work on Friday but the boss has something for you that "should only take 5 minutes". Can you avoid them long enough to get to the pub?
You can't save them all - Disaster event bystander simulator. I mean, YOU can't save them all but you can sure as hell watch some one else do it.
Death is not the end - Reverse game of hangman. How does that work? I don't know. I'm just the ideas guy.
Summoning - A quick maths game. Addition only.
The world changes when you are not looking - An illegal piece of malware that deletes all of a users desktop icons and changes their background whenever they open the "game". For the love of all things meaningful, don't do this. Please.
Good luck everyone!
I was in Brackeys Jam 2020.2 and the theme was "Rewind", all the games that came out of the Jam were braid clones and horrid to play, please be a sensible person and stop voting it
For my last two Ludum Dare games, I made educational games for a novel self-challenge. LD45 was about functional programming, and LD46 was about first-order logic.
Since almost a year ago, I've been slowly working on a larger functional programming game that I started using what I learned from my LD45 game. I've tried to use what I've learned from my last two LD games in this project. Since I've been working on an educational game on the side for a while, I might want to use this LD as a break from that. If it feels right I will make it an educational game, but if I don't feel like it I won't force myself.
I'll be using my usual tools: * Godot * Paint.net * Audacity * Bfxr for sound effects * Maybe BeepBox for music?
Looking forward to making something new :)
Seems like the best of the best themes got into the final round this year and I personally would be able to go with any of them. However I do hope that the final chosen theme is one of the broad ones so everyones game is different and fun to play. Still super hyped for the jam and am getting ready to make an epic game!!! Here were my votes:
Guys, this is getting out of control.
TLDR; Please be respectful, go vote and shut up about it!
In most countries (well, at least in democracies), in the days leading to the election, there's a concept of Election silence. That means: shut up about it and go vote.
We would greatly benefit if we used this concept here.
:face_palm: The issues arising in recent LDsPlease, be a respectful member of the LD community and: * 🚫 Try to avoid posting screenshots of your theme slaughter results. The truth is, nobody other than you has any value in knowing that you slaughtered 100% of the themes. It's not an achievement, there's no reward in it and many people do. Simply be proud and do not clutter the news feed. * 🚫 Try to avoid posting screenshots of your votes. This is about election silence. Democratic process should be an anonymous one. You should not try to influence others in their choice of the themes. Let people choose for themselves, however unreasonable their choice might be to you. We are all different. Similar to the slaughter results, your votes, while contributing to the end result, are still completely useless to everyone else. There is simply no point in sharing them. * ⛔Do not call out people for their choices, let alone calling them names! This is not what LD is about. * ✅ Please do post your development experiences, the things you've learned, the struggles you've been through during the jam, the post mortems and everything else that's related to the process of making your game. Such posts are indeed helpful (and interesting) to the community at large. And THAT is what the news feeds should be for. Otherwise, people writing those useful and interesting articles lose all visibility because there's 200 hundred screenshots of Round 1 votes.
This will be my first Ludum Dare! I will be doing it solo. I am both excited, and a little nervous having never done a game jam before. Whatever happens, I plan to have fun and learn from this experience. Good luck to everyone taking part this time! I look forward to seeing what everyone creates.
very exited knowing the theme
Time to get into game jamming mode!
My friend and I found ourself with no game engine 3 days before the jam starts so using this really good tutorial we managed to make a simple raycaster engine using C++ and glut (textures and stuff will come later)
What do you think?
Anyways good luck! :D
Do the sound effects and music have to be original?
Hey folks !
Writing to you from the south of France, amongst the barricades and the hazmat suits.
What a better time to join LD than biological apocalypse right ?
This'll be my second jam, first one was the first edition of Alakajam and that was a blast.
I did end up last time with a broken internet connection, 15 minutes from the deadline, having to knock at my neighbor's door to connect to his network, turned out he was an architect on Amazon's cloud service and allowed me to host my game on one of the devs private servers.
Few ! Hopefully this time will be as adventurous as the last !
Have a good one !
Just voted on the themes. If the theme is something i enjoy i might join, if not its fine too. My team sadly won't join again. So - solo entry this year.
Have fun everyone.
Long time youtube game dev video-lurker, first time game jaming. Looking forward to it!
After having joined various game jams over the past two years, some of my entries would fit well with some of this years themes. For example, the game Slumbering Knight that I created for this years 8 Bits to Infinity Puzzle Jam would perfectly fit the Control the world, not the player theme. I could continue on that game, making new 3D models, new stages, introducing new mechanics etc. Of course I would clarify everything in the game's description. It would eliminate the fun of creating something completely new from scratch though.
So what is your opinion about taking a previous jam entry as a starting point for a new round of Ludum Dare?
It's not that I'm actually planning to do this. I'm just exploring the possibilities.
My First Ever Game Jam
