We are about 3 weeks out so the theme suggestion and ultimately slaughter round should be starting soon? Yes?

So glad to get started...

My obligatory suggestion screen capture courtesy Microsoft...

Not sure how to take this...

Ludum Dare 59:

Ludum Dare 58:

Ludum Dare 57:

are just excellent.

I choose themes by reading them and seeing if a game idea pops into my head. This year so many of the themes were extremely easy to do that with.

It is going to be a really good Jam.

Was really bad.

Whatever theme comes from this is going to be interesting. Although I did not vote for it I believe 'No Text in Entire Game' will be LD59 theme.

SIGNAL

Go to bed Dream about signal Wake up with game

Not sure what I am going to do with them. Maybe you are marooned on a desert island and you have to find these flags to send a message to passing ships.

Maybe marooned in space on a moon and you must signal a passing satellite. You have to dig for the flags that are buried on the moon.

So, I thought I would use Godot this time rather than my usual Raylib, or SDL3 framework. I wanted to use Godot because it exports to the web really easily.

But... I... just... can't...

Godot is great, the work flow is great, the IDE is wonderful. But; I don't have it in me to just do a few clicks, set some parameters and off we go. I had the game 3/4 of the way finished in less than an 2 hours and I am not even familiar with Godot. I just can't do that.

I guess I have been a 'C' programmer for too many years.

So, going to use Raylib and you will just have to D/L the game rather than play it on the web. I might try to use emscripten to get a web version.

So, in programming my game I wanted it to be like a Scrabble game but with the letters are the signal flags the navy uses to talk to each other in the open water. There is one flag for every letter.

Anyway when I was talking to my wife about it she said that there is a CCO dictionary of Scrabble words. Wo I looked, and sure enough there was this list of over 172,000 words. That is a big list. How was I going to search it quickly as the player entered letters in real time?

So I went to Claude and asked what is the best method to search a list like that? It said a hash-table. In all my years as a coder I never used a hash-table I always used either a flat search, indexed search, even a binary search but never a hash table.

To make a long story longer I asked Claude to generate 'C' code that generates a hash-table. It did just that. Initially I didn't understand how it worked but I plugged it into my code and when using it the code and methodology became very clear. A hash-table is real time indexing method that uses the data to create an index into an array generating a 'hash' as the index. Do do the look up you generate the hash again and it should point to the array in the array where the data is. If the data is valid you will see it in your list, if not then you get something close. The only stickler is that the data has to be unique.

This was so interesting, and it worked so fast, I was just amazed.

The reason I am relating this story is because the main thrust of Ludum Dare and really all game jams is too finish a game, any game, and hopefully learn something new. Well, using Claude and writing this game I got a clear understanding of what a hash-table. Something for over fifty years I have avoided.

Just thought I would share.