Currently generating beats with random tempo and time signature. Working on making it progressively more difficult, then gonna add some procedural scales/melodies.

Why did I make a typing/rhythm game when I can't touch type and I have no rhythm?

The visual hallucinations are starting, which means it's time for bed! The music is coming along; I'm super surprised how much easier it is to remember a beat when you have a melody to associate with it. At least I got a high score for my troubles. Can't wait for everyone to give it a try!

I didn't expect my first Ludum Dare to be so fun and fulfilling! Thanks to the kind people who played my game and left feedback. I can't believe y'all chose to spend your time that way.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/stereotype

Books keep getting added to the shelf -- combine them before you run out of space! And how do you combine them? By combining their titles, of course!

Like any good bibliophile, your bookshelf seems to fill up on its own. Mash titles together to create strange new books, books with titles so bad that you can finally bear to get rid of them.

play Bookbinding (Windows, OSX, Linux)

My second Ludum Dare compo, and my first "complete" project in Unity. It was a harrowing 48 hours, but in the end I'm much more confident in my abilities. And I have a very strange game on my hands. It popped into my head during hour three, while I was working out the details of a very dry puzzle game, and I immediately dropped the other thing and got to work. I have to say that it's not quite as fun as I thought it might be! Though anagrams can be entertaining -- thought provoking, even! -- it's hard to come up with good ones under time pressure. Not when a shoddier one will do. There's a lot I would change about this prototype... as you will learn if you play Bookbinding, time is cruel.

Tranquil Man on Hash

I've settled on something that I'm almost happy with, so if you're out there struggling to think of anything, here are my unused concepts:

• You're a stock broker with insane medical bills, and you're just trying to keep up. Do you forgo a time-sensitive surgery and invest that money is a lucrative stock? Selling organs?
• Managing multiple characters that you can buy and sell. A tycoon game with a turbocapitalist mentality. Play into the criticisms of capitalism, that it puts a number value on a human life.
• "Your life" meaning "your social life"
• Navigating a society of vampires that will trade stuff for your blood
• You're a monster that must eat money to survive
• Throwing chunks of your bodies at enemies (?)

Good luck, y'all.

I wrote a post on my blog detailing all the ways I screwed up my game, plus some bonus griping about the theme and theme selection in general! Read it here. There's no comment section, so feel free to leave 'em below.

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What a great compo! I'm very pleased with the result:

Try to keep this little cutie alive and fed in a procedurally generated hellscape. Play now!

Just finished a postmortem blog post for last weekend's compo game. Lots of good lessons learned this time around!

My game Circleline got 6th overall in the compo! Thanks to everyone who played it and rated. I've found writing postmortems to be useful in the past — I guess they exist for a reason! — so I figured I'd do another. Check it out here.

I was hoping that we could continue this discussion as LD51 approaches. I worry that unless either @pov makes a ruling or the community somehow comes to a consensus, there are going to be a lot of arguments and bad feelings come R+R time. Some people seem to think that they obviously should be allowed to use these new AI art tools, and some think that they obviously should be banned. I can see both sides; here are some arguments from the last thread and from me.

For * the Compo rules state that "content generators are allowed" * current models have niche uses; require editing, prompt engineering, trial and error to get good results (not likely to be true for long, though) * better art means better games, raising the bar for everyone * as AI becomes more integrated with game dev over time, it may eventually seem silly to prohibit its use * it's a tool; don't tell me what tools I am and am not allowed to use

Against * the "content generators" mentioned in the rules are nowhere near as advanced as these new ones * the process of text-prompt-only generation can be compared to "commissioning" art, which is not allowed in the Compo * right now, access to strong models is inequitable, requiring either money (Midjourney, DALL-E) or powerful hardware (Stable Diffusion) * the Compo is supposed to be "hard mode" Ludum Dare, and in some ways this goes against the spirit of that idea * the rules state that "you must work alone" — at what point along the AI continuum are you no longer working alone?

Multiple commenters suggested that competitors be allowed to use AI art if they opt out of the Graphics category. I don't love that idea: you're supposed to do that when using existing assets in the Jam. While people sometimes do opt out of categories in the Compo, I think you should really adhere to all of its rules or do the Jam instead.

The community isn't going to reach a consensus all at once, and certainly not in the comments section of this post, but the more we talk about it before the fact, the better.

Here's a poll, whatever that's worth.

After 6 compos, I finally decided to record a time lapse for the 7th. Turned out nice, besides the flickering between light-mode Visual Studio and dark-mode Unity. I'll have to do something about that next time. If you watch closely, you can see me start the project from scratch not once, not twice, but THRICE! Yikes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGYwZtIOcE

This game just got recommended on the feed, but it deserves more attention. It is not what it seems: among the 300 games I've played across 7 Ludum Dares, it's my favorite. Have a look:

Fallumns