Other than thinking the people who voted this up deserve a slap, I'm at a complete loss here. There's going to be loads of groundhog day ideas or other variations of having to loop until you find the exit condition.
I'm thinking of maybe a horror thing where you're stuck on The Loop (e.g. an underground railway, etc)
First game jam :D hope to follow through
In a strange coincidence, this summer I have designed a game that would be a perfect fit for this theme! I can't resist to share it with you if you're looking for inspiration :
Timeloop is a game where you play futuristic soccer against your past self(s)!
You'll control a blue robot who have to push the green ball into the goal to score points. Move with D-Pad and press button to Dash. Sounds simple? Well there is a catch: the whole game plays inside an endlessly repeating timeloop!
Every 6 seconds, the timeloop will reset the game. Your previous avatar will turn red, and it will move exactly like you did during the previous timeloop. You will play as another robot, always in blue. Up to 8 robots can play at the same time: your current avatar, and 7 of your previous incarnations. So, in this game you'll face the ultimate opponent: yourself!
You can get the game from here: https://drludos.itch.io/timeloop
I hope this may help those looking for inspiration.
Anyway, good luck everyone for this compo!
Got my idea an hour into the jam. That is a personal best. Have not entirely decided if I am going to do the compo or the jam still but will see when I decide to call it a day! Hope everyone has a great jam!
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Yeah I have a LDJAM music playlist!
I have 3 ideas, I don't know if good ones or bad ones yet. Now I'm going to bed, it's 1 a.m. in Spain...
This game is about you're a game developer, you are participating a game jam called "ludum dare" and the theme is "stuck in a loop", then you decide to make a game about a game developer participating a game jam called "ludum dare" and the theme is "stuck in a loop", and that game developer decides to make a game that a game developer is participating a game jam called "ludum dare" and the theme is "stuck in a loop"...
Done:
Next theme please
This Ludum Dare will be the war of hamsters in wheels... or groundhogs in time.
A semi idle rogue like game with ramdom generated mini dungeons where you manually walk through but the combat is automatic. Everytime you finish the game you get a rebirth making your heroes stronger. The further you go the bigger and harder the maps but you always face the same doom.
"Stuck in a loop" was not one of the better themes of the lot. Luckily, it wasn't one of the worst themes I've faced (e.g, the losing theme You can't save them all, or LD38's A Small World), but it's certainly not ideal. Luckily, I do have a plan going forward - presuming I can get some of the fiddly maths worked out in a reasonable timeframe, I'll be making a game more or less about my constant loop of lost homes in NMS that've all been claimed by various generation resets, because woop that's definitely not an overzealous goal for 72 hours. A small galaxy fulla planets and procedural generation, with actual newtonian physics a-la Kerbal. Though no worlds will ever remain your home long enough to really enjoy on account of the random regeneration-wipes, you'll at least get to have some fun swooping about in actual orbits and the likes.
If getting that working does not happen within a reasonable amount of time, then I'll dump the idea and make a runner about being on a literal loop-de-loop or the likes that's slowly falling apart, because that'll be pretty cheap & easy, maybe even on the level of being doable within the remaining Compo time period.
Best of luck to all the rest of you who're gonna try and stick with the jam in spite of the bad theme. Know this: your struggles are valid, and you are not alone. Every jammer has been here before, and will be again - all you can do is push forwards, and failing that, put your jam time to good use working on another project that's meaningful to you. Even if you hate what you end up making, or simply cannot come up with an idea, don't let that stop you from being productive - I'm assuming my main goal won't actually be doable, but getting the maths working for double-precision floating origin support w/ Newtonian physics will be vastly helpful in one of my other projects, so if the final result is just a tech demo with a single motile planetary system of grey spheres, I'll consider that a personal victory even if it goes Unfinished on the LD site.
I hate the theme, but what else is new, sorry to whoever suggested it. I've got an idea that is stupidly simple, but for this LD, I wasn't going to try and make anything mind-blowing, just trying to make something to test how well I've learned Unity (I usually do the design and aesthetics, but not this time, it will be lucky to have sound effects or music even).
Since i have chosen such a generic and basic idea i have way more time of polishing it and tweaking the gameplay
It's been a little while! I really enjoyed doing the compo a couple of years ago - sound design gets a lot more interesting when you can't rely on your libraries. I've had a couple of thoughts for what I might do this time:
1) Groundhog Day
I'm fairly sure this is what sprung to mind for most people when they first saw the theme. You have a limited amount of time in the game before everything resets, at which point all you can bring forward is the knowledge you've gained in previous rounds. Perhaps you're trapped in an abandoned mansion, and on one round, you solve a puzzle that gives you the code to a safe, so that in the next round, you can open it, retrieve the key that's inside, and escape the room you're in. (Ooh, an escape room, there's a thought.)
2) Bungee Cord
Instead of having the entire game state revert, only the player position is reset after the time limit. Imagine a maze in which you only have 30 seconds to get to the exit, which isn't enough because it's a long and winding path. Now, imagine that you can take a secondary route in your first round to push an obstacle out of the way, opening up a shorter route to the goal.
3) Derailed
You're on an out-of-control train. Thankfully, there are no cliff edges anywhere in sight, and the track is in a loop. You need to lean out and press switches in order to change the junctions so that the train takes a different path.
I'm leaning more towards 1 or 2. I really enjoyed the 3D work and horror aesthetic I did last time, so if I can lean into that, I will.
We're in and (almost) ready for the jam! Just keeping brainstorming and stuff. Hope we'll find something inherent with the theme...
still no perfect ideas but the person who is doing music for me said about making drum loops and i thought keyboards and it came together as this idea in my head.!
please say if you like this btw.
oh and the big probblem with this is that not all keyboards are layed out at all the same so it would cut out a lot of the player base for this game so I'm erring ageist this idea.
Decent idea in the works, which has already birthed a nice little sprite and some lovely code that doesn't have very visual output yet. Here's the sprite:
Joining this LD with the intent to go back to my roots creating a game without any game engine associated.
I'll be using: - C# in net core with SFML.Net - Aseprite for the visual art - Bosca Ceoil for music - sfxia for sound effects
I hope you all get stuck 😜
