Not much gameplay. Kinda like Creative mode in Minecraft, but on plane and with bigger parts. Tiles are just MagicaVoxel files, so it's easy to create/add new.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$25133

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/$170951

I went with probably the most obvious approach to "Start with Nothing" theme.

When nothingness is felt the most? When it's ion the place of something you are used to have.

So, I should take some familiar game or genre where player starts with something, and remove it.

What's the most familiar game? Obviously, it's Chess.

So, just take Chess and remove one or both sides pieces! Then allow adding placing them gradually. It's just that simple.

Actually, there are several well known Chess variants that allow placing pieces on board mid-game, such as Chessgi. And Shogi (Chinese chess) has it as in the "vanilla".

To make things more hard and fun (and to differentiate from Chessgi and board games as the whole) I added another twist: other than placing pieces, you can't do anything else, because all "normal" moves for Whites and Black are made by AI! On the other hand, unlike Chessgi/Shogi you do not have to choose between moving and placing piece: both are done on the same turn.

Most of my time making it was spenf on finding the right javascript chess engine with AI.

Most starred on github is https://github.com/lhartikk/simple-chess-ai

It has decent API, but is very inefficient.

So, I continued looking and finally settled with https://github.com/douglasbagnall/p4wn

It's quite old, and written in very IE6 manner, but otherwise is pretty good: API is ok and AI is fast.

So, I took it, hacked it a bit and got a pretty fun chess variant, or, rather, four chess variants. One of them even makes you put pieces for Black too.

You can check them out on https://white-starts-with-nothing.netlify.com/ - it's tiny and loads instantly.

1.0 version of post-compo of my game https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/white-starts-with-nothing is ready. If you don't know, it's a game of chess where White starts without pieces, and your role is to gradually place pieces for them, hoping that AI will win the game for you.

Compared to original it is playable on mobile, has saves, undos, passing moves, history and scoring. So, now you can play to get max score instead of just winning, if it seemed too easy for you.

I got pretty high result in "theme" category last two times. Don't have as good idea now of how to approach the theme ins not-beaten-to-death way. So, I have decided to make a puzzle about particles.

Some of levels will indeed be about making particles loop around each others, but probably, it will not be THE main theme of the levels.

Looks like most ideas are about keeping unstable things stable. Is anyone making a game where you are to destabilize a stable system?

Try my game - only 5kb of zipped js+html.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/tiny-car