Apart from the OVERALL category.

• A poll: Which category would you be the happiest to win?
• A poll: In which category do you think you have the biggest chances?

As you know, these last months there is coronavirus everywhere - in the news, on social network sites (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), even on your group chats. You know, this game jam should be something to

bring you joy, to make you forget about the situation and just have fun, but why are just still posting those

coronavirus articles? 🙄 Why are you suggesting themes, like: 'covid, coronavirus, pandemic' and these shit?

What im gonna do is im gonna report every theme like this and you should too.

Friendly reminder that video games are a form of expression for many of us. I know many games are set in fictional worlds and they help us escape from reality, but many others are also a way to share our feelings and tell stories about our lives and personal experience.

In this context of pandemic crisis, it's totally understandable that we see lots of theme suggestions that talk about viruses and quarantine. And for sure we'll see lots of entries about these topics no matter what the final theme is.

So please stop raging against covid-19 related themes and :pray:PLEASE:pray: do not flag them as if they were offensive. If we flag every theme we dislike, the flag button becomes meaningless.

After all, most games are a mixture of fiction, reality and various abstractions, so nobody's forced to make a literal interpretation of the theme.

That said, it's true that there are many shitty (and duplicated) themes, but it's our task to find the hidden gems between them.

Have a great jam! Cheers! :purple_heart:

Avoid duplicated themes

The duplicated themes are realy annoying. Here is working python code to remove them. It can be converted to php and put into the right file of the ludum dare source code (did not find it yesterday). Maybe add a second page after a theme was suggested, which tells the user which similar themes exists or if there is exactly the same theme already there.

https://pastebin.com/94a0NSau

Usage

Input:

"The world is not enough"

Output:

Representative version of theme: world not enough

Representative themes which have an important word in common: ['loving whole world', 'enough enough', 'world not enough']

Theme is duplicated: True

Explanation

suggested_themes are themes which are already in the database:

suggested_themes = ["Loving the whole world", "The dog is evil", "Enough is enough", "And the world is not enough ..."]

mytheme is a new theme the user want to suggest.

mytheme = "The world is not enough"

cleanTheme creates a more representative string of the theme. It makes it lower case, removes are spaces, "and"s "or"s, etc.

clean_theme = cleanTheme(mytheme)

findSimilarThemes checks if a theme in representative form is kind of in the database already.

matchingthemes = findSimilarThemes(cleantheme,suggestedthemesclean)

checkForDuplicateTheme checks if there is a representative theme which matches the new theme (representative) exactly

isduplicate = checkForDuplicateTheme(cleantheme, suggestedthemesclean)

• 1) GRAPHICS From all of the categories, I would be probably happiest to win GRAPHICS category.
• 2) FUN Fun is undoubtedly the most important part of a game. So yeah.
• 3) OVERALL This category, although it is the most important category for many people, you can always get 1st place in OVERALL by getting a 1st place in useless categories like: AUDIO, THEME, HUMOR and still you will end better than someone who won just: FUN and GRAPHICS.
• 3) MOOD When making anything (game, art, song...), the mood is really important to me. I love the dark mood, expressionistic things, and so...
• 4) INNOVATION
• 5) AUDIO, THEME, HUMOR Yeah. Very useless categories for me.

I know that we are all annoyed with these covid-19 based themes so I was curious. What themes have you all found interesting that you have seen so far.

It was for my discord account but I've noticed that my ludum dare account didn't have one :)

Hi folks!

Hope everyone is well stocked up on their hot pockets and soda for the jam : )

We're a team of 2 programmers and 1 music/sound engineer. We're looking to complete our holy trinity of skills by adding an artist who would have experience in 2D or 3D art.

Although this is our first Ludum Dare, we're certainly not beginners to the game jam scene, with a combined count of over 25 jams. Also, our team is scattered around England and Malta, just to let you know our time zones.

Give me a ping on this website or send me an email to vdrumsta@gmail.com

Here some gifs from our previous jams:

If we end up with a Covid-19 theme I'm going to disregard the theme entirely and make another floating island game.

Let me know if you want different resolutions or colors

I like this theme because it's a fun and safe way to get people to visit you during these times of social distancing :house: :smiley_cat:

1) Too many duplicates. 2) Not so much interesting themes. All about viruses this year, too many topics about viruses, corono viruses, epidemics. As if this is not on every screen now. 3) Still many great and funny themes. I would like to see in the winners theme with something pacifying, or fun.

Scrolled down the front page, saw some mild discourse in posts/comments about flagging vs not flagging covid-19 themes as inappropriate.

My 2 cents: Down-vote it all you want, but flagging it is useless and wasting the time of whoever has to look at those flags. It might be socially inappropriate in that people are looking to escape the topic - though clearly many people want to deal with the topic this jam, hence suggesting it! - but it's not thematically inappropriate by any means worth flagging.

Consider it like YouTube. Someone makes a pornographic video of covid-19 topic? Flag it. Someone just makes a video venting about it or expressing information? Upvote, downvote, ignore it completely, unsubscribe, do whatever you wish. It's not an inappropriate topic.

Save your flagging for things like "The internet is for cats and porn, but don't let the two mix" and "Anime tiddies", etc. Funny themes, but I've seen parent-child teams in ldjam before. Covid-19 isn't an inappropriate topic for children, and being able to safely explore themes related to it might be helpful for those families - meanwhile, anime tiddies and implied cat porn are definitely inappropriate topics.

Also, some of the covid-adjacent themes are fun. I've been downvoting all the "stay at home" clones, but I saw one that was "home detention", which I thought was a more inspiring way to phrase it. Likewise, abstracting covid into post-apocalyptic/pandemic/epidemic/virus themes instead of specifically covid-19 allow more room to play. I've been ignoring "stop the spread", but I thought "flatten the curve" could be fun on its own - terraforming mountains into fields, for example, or a work exploring gender identity (anime tiddies vs smooth chest, etc). I've also been upvoting "kill the virus" clones because if we're gonna end up with a covid-19 theme, it sure would be fun to beat the hell out of the virus in like a fighting game or superhero sense or whatever. Fun ways of coping with troubling times.

Point is: covid-19 is a topic that could be covered by sesame street to help kids cope with the ongoing crisis, and therefore, it is not inappropriate as a game jam theme. Save your flags for literally porn and tiddies.

PLS don't vote, it's not theme for ludum dare. It will be no funny, and there are a LOT of more interest themes. Now i am voting for themes, and 50% themes is about virus. Seriously, it is not fun when i vote for 4k themes and every 3-rd theme is shit about virus. Now for me more interesting theme is

1) Sex, wine and some love

2) Mushrooms and ducks

3) Make a card game (like UNO)

Ok. I just wanted to write here my request for Ludum Dare participants, because rly is not funny. GL to all

Hey everyone, my purpose with this post is not to defend or criticize, but to ask a question. Somehow the issue of cornavirus has become extremely polarized. I can understand why people would want to persuade others to downvote themes they dislike, but seeing so many virulent posts is a first for me. However, I've been around for only a few years, and I suspect that this kind of extreme polarization has occurred before. Controversy has many guises — it is always with us — and I'd be surprised if what we see here nowadays hasn't happened before over a different issue. Has polarization on this scale (over a theme or anything else) in Ludum Dare occurred before, and if so, how was it resolved (if indeed it was resolved)?

This is a question for Ludum Dare veterans as well as anyone who has some familiarity with Ludum Dare history. Perhaps there are some debates in the legacy Ludum Dare site (http://ludumdare.com/compo/) that mirror what we are seeing nowadays.

As always there is this drama regarding the theme voting. And as always there are tons of "too specific" themes, "movie references" or "too shallow themes".

This year, however, we face this new trend of coronavirus overuse. Here are my thoughts on that: I personally don't want to do a game about this theme, because I simply am not interested in it. On the other hand flagging this theme is rather aggressive behavior, because if you think about it, those 1000 people suggesting this theme did not expect another 1000 people do the same. So just because you are angry for seeing the same theme over and over again doesn't mean you should punish individuals.

The most important thing is to have fun, so let's have fun no matter what theme we have.

(PS: but seriously guys, do we really want to have such restrictive theme such as "one specific illness"? Do we really want to play the same kind of game 100 times in the voting phase? Just something to think about)