1. Instead of complaining about duplicate themes, make a pull request or commit an issue on github. LD is open source after all.

2. If you're not figuring out any theme suggestion, do not give any instead of writing "this is my last suggestion" and such...

Looking forward to a great jam, good luck!

So ive been doing the theme slaughter round for about a hour now and ive noticed somethign awfully strange. It's a plethra of themes that have to revolve around Suicide or Deppresion in one way or another and i find it quite concerning that theres a good number of theese themes, ive slaughtered around 100 by now.

On the other hand i have been Flagging all the themes relating to the Corona Virus. And this is also the first jam ive had more flagged themes than kept ones. This is how much i have done so far.

It really annoys me when it's obvious a person is trying to joke around. Are you kidding me?

I get that many people are drawing theme inspiration from their new routines during this pandemic, but games for many people are a way to forget all the bad things that are going on in the world. I've seen far too many themes in the slaughter which are some variation of 'virus' or 'indoors'. Come on people, do you really want to be spending two days of lovingly crafting a fantasy world, being constantly reminded that a virus has you locked indoors??

Who writes all these themes?

I mean seriously, who writes all these themes? At least this one just made me crack up. These ones are better than all the toilet paper/coronavirus themes!

Well, I have now gone through a little less than half of all the themes, and it's not looking good...

My current kept : slaughtered themes is currently 1:88. And after seeing thousands of themes, I now have a set of filters which I check every theme against to see if I should spare it or slaughter it.

Filter 1: Does the theme make sense? / Is it not totally dumb?

This filter basically weeds out all the themes created to troll the slaughterers(does that count as a word?). It eliminates things like "FlOaTiNg IsLaNdS", "nuzloke"(whatever that is), and "Mushrooms and ducks do it again". This one is pretty simple and obvious.

Filter 2: Does the theme add unnecessary constraints?

This filter can be broken up into 3 smaller filters:

A. Does the theme constrain game genres?

One of the intresting things when playing other submissions is seeing how the same theme is interpreted diffrently. I don't want to play 20 platformers or 20 puzzle games. One good rule of thumb I heard is this: "Can you think of a platformer, a puzzle game, an FPS and a text adventure that fit this theme?".

Example of a bad theme: If you jump you die

B. Does the theme constrain the "Style" of a game?

Some "Styles" of games are: Sci-fi, Midieval, etc. A theme like "Weird Sci-fi" limits the possible styles, and reduces overall game diversity.

C. Does the theme constrain the Dimension of a game?

Realistically, there are 2 types of games*; 2D and 3D. Which game you make is mostly a matter of personal preference. Therefore, the theme shouldn't force LD participants to use one or the other.

Filter 3: Is the theme too vague to be a meaningful inspiration?

The official purpose of the theme is to help people overcome the "Blank Page" challenge. Themes that are too vague undermine this purpose, which is why "You start with nothing" fall flat.

After these filters, the themes you keep or kill is a matter of preference and judgement. A good example of this are the many COVID-19 themes. Most people don't like these themes and automatically downvote them.

I hope this guide will help you think of better themes and help you in your slaughtering :D

• There are 1d games like zrox

Cool! Theme slaughter is finally here! I can't wait to... h-H-h-H-O-L-Y COW!

6000+ themes!?!

I don't think the themes are what's getting slaughtered this go round...

Insert Brain Tears

Hello everyone,

I've been reading about this duplicates issue so I tried to add my grain of sand to the problem. I ran some deduping of the full themes list and it seems that out of 6327 theme suggestions, only 927 are exact duplicates, which is below 15%.

The thing is removing duplicates is not an easy task, because you have to find: + a) Exact matches + b) Semi-Exact matches: themes that are the same one but misspelled or with a special symbol like a "." at the end + c) Themes that are extremely similar and can be clustered together

C is not as simple as removing exact matches. I think, since LD is Open Source, we can do something about it.

So, if we are going to add something for future jams, we should probably think about preprocessing the themes list.

IMO Preprocessing should:

• 1) Remove exact and "Semi-exact" matches but keep the number of appearances
• 2) Cluster similar themes under one unique entry +3) In the UI:
  • 3.1) Show themes along with the number of appearances
  • 3.1) Show clusters of themes that are very similar under one unique entry

This way no theme is removed and all similar ideas can be approved or denied all at once.

It's just an opinion, let me know what you think

Cheers!

Edit: If anyone wants the full list as an spreadsheet here it is

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xfigRLvo8Y97TI9oyteUyGiFoRAC7pQ88MLFftme44U/edit?usp=sharing

As always, people are complaining about the themes that have been suggested, and we'll most likely see the tried & true tradition of complaining about the final theme when it's picked in ~10 days.

Oh Ludum Dare, never change buddy :^)

( p.s. we all hate the theme, even if it's your theme, that's the rules, no need to rant about it ;^) )

111

Like for real, why are there so many COVID-19 related themes. Either that or themes that make no sense.

it looks like people are gettin' suicidal this year.

Those who have added themes such as "death is only solution"/"life is meaningless"/"you are alone" should rather take part psychological therapy than in the Ludum Dare.

My finger (and soul) hurts from slaughtering all of those themes.

Duck for attention

I've been seeing so many death related themes! Stuff like "die to win", "decrease in population", "death is the only way", "mass nuclear destruction", and many other dark themes. There are a lot if other possible themes that would be more interesting and fun. What do you guys think?

I was predicting just over 5k and somehow I still undershot it.

Time to put the boots on and wade through the theme landfill once again...

Help when i click publish it doesnt publish and it undoes all my typing and resets so i cant post anything

Would you rather have the theme "COVID-19" or "Floating islands"? :fire: :fire_engine:

:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:

(Definetely NOT my artwork)

I spent an hour just on slaughtering 1000 themes. And by the end of it, I got so burnt out, that I started to don't care.

I just clicked by instinct, instead of thinking about them for a few seconds. Because even if something sounds bad, it could be a really productive theme....

By the end, If it sounded bad, I downvoted, if it didn't, I upvoted. There should be more thought behind voting.

My 3 suggestions:

• Automatic filtering for duplications. If a suggestion is already in, delete it, or don't even let the user suggest it in the first place. (not case sensitive)

  • zero cost

• Manual filtering for duplications. If a suggestion is 80% the same as one another, it should be flagged, and will be needed to be approved by some authority.

  • one hour for an authority member per jam

• People should think before typing. If you think that someone may have already entered this suggestion, then DON'T SUGGEST IT. (I'm pointing at you, "Quarantine", "Virus", "Isolation" and "Covid" guys.)

  • 10 seconds for one user

Until something is changed, I won't participate in the theme slaughter, because my vote most likely won't make a difference.

1 vote in 2000+ doesn't really worth 6 hours of my life.

(The theme would suck anyway, as the old saying goes :smile: )

Cheers!