Don't forget about me!

This year, I'm trying my first Ludum Dare, which will also be my first completed-game to speak of. This is very important to me, so I definitely don't want to miss out.

My calendar in the right sidebar says "Starts Saturday at 1:00 PM NZST". I'm actually quite worried. That seems correct, but in my time zone daylight savings recently expired and the 1:00 PM didn't change. I know there's a thread for this, but unless I do some pretty hardcore calculations (I'm not good with clocks) I won't know.

Game design is my passion, and I've been trying to get a foothold on it basically my entire life. It'll feel good to have a complete, quite sanctioned game out by the time April is over. After that, I can finally start moving again.

I am so, SO glad I don't have to join the compo. If that choice wasn't there, I'd be screwed. The Compo sounds really, really hard.

Anyway, lots of people appear to be spilling the info about what resources they're using to build their games. I won't be doing that here, and not until my game is released (full credits and docs in the game) but it is good to see that The Jam lets people get away with things like Unity and LOVE. I kinda... have to use LOVE. That's not a bad thing, and I can always upgrade, but it really is my best shot, and the one I've researched longest. Everything about my setup will change once my first game is complete.

I like Love-dot-Physics. Coding practice is a delight.

Seven days...

I spent my whole life so far attempting to make and finish a game, and I spent a smaller amount of time trying to enforce that my first game would be carefully constructed and legitimately, unambiguously defined.

Trying to make a game under these rules when you're 12 and don't know how to
program, however, has semantic consequences.

Fast forward to now, and it's actually pretty vague if I really have made a game in my life, or what my first game will technically be. Is it what I post in Ludum Dare 10 days from now? Is it Ferst or FACE of this decade? Was it something I threw together a long time ago in Microsoft Powerpoint? Oh hell, was it Ebnosis from 2008 gamemaker all along, which got compiled but didn't even have traces of original code?

Last month, I thought about things a bit harder.
I decided that if I was going to sanction my first game anywhere near the way I wanted to, Ludum Dare would be a good choice - it would be perfect for being understood and to retcon that garbage Ebnosis game.

Before that, I was still progressing pretty well with projects and even before that I was learning how to code.

In no chronological order whatsoever, this is what I was working on kinda recently before I let myself participate in Ludum Dare.

I'll finish these eventually, but for now, it's time to fry a small and speedy fish.

...and quite frankly, I am scared.

I really am doing it at 1:00 PM NZST, wooofth!

Need some help? I might not program fluently in the language you know, but I know how to make neat sprites and textures, once joined another Ludum Dare solo (LD41, Bunny Horrors, didn't finish it on time and gave up on uploading it), and right now there's an entire solo indie videogame under my belt. Woopie!

I can learn most programming languages pretty quickly, but for now my experience is in Lua code, which I frequently use in the LOVE engine. If you're interested in this, comment me or something and I'll add you on Discord. I don't mind having a small amount of responsibility.

This is what happened.

Over the course of four New Zealand days, I worked on my entry and finished the features and the three levels I wanted, and then found bugs and kept breaking things over and over, determined and adamant that I fix every game-breaking bug. Bunny Horrors is a Chip's Challenge clone that I decided to use to get my first game over and done with, once and for all. I was using LOVE, so there was very little guidance for me as far as sorting out functions calling once after being triggered by a detection in the update step. Now, it's definitely worth stating that I got this under control eventually, because it isn't literally the "worst idea" and can be solved, but for the entirety of the LD41 challenge, I did not figure out how to solve it. It was a really, really dumb fix, which I figured out pretty much immediately once I started work on the next game.

By Day 2, I'd already seen my fair share of unholy bugs in the game I'd made, and Tiled broke the first level map somehow, leading me to have to redesign Level 1 (which I think sucks, because I'm pretty sure the original version was way cooler and more interestingly balanced).

On Day 3, and the early morning of Day 4, things got really stressful. We'd already all seen the game in my household, we knew its merits, the weird April-based Christmas my family came up with was already done, but there was seemingly no stopping of the issues I was having.

The biggest one, and this makes me quite mad: gold was duplicating. Sometimes gold would double every time you died. And that was a huge problem because the amount of gold you collected was a core mechanic, and that growth in gold value was accumulative. You can't get the right ending if you get so much gold from walking into a single tile that it triggers the inaccessible joke ending that's supposed to be mathematically impossible.

After the Ludum Dare, after finishing another two games, more recently, I discovered the cause of the issue. And it was really, really dumb. Some things were triggering more than once because I didn't do the if prak == "prok" then prak = "done" thing properly. The way the control loops work, that expression cancelling whatever is inside the if statement has to come FIRST, not last.

But that was after a matter of weeks. Back in the morning of the day I had to submit the game, nothing was working properly, and I was helpless to do something about it. I decided to submit an unfinished copy of Bunny Horrors and clearly label it that way. Then, shock horror, the website slowed to a crawl at the last possible minute. Now, I know now that I probably could have just asked for a bit of leeway on submitting it slightly after the submission deadline, but I was out of my mind with tiredness and rage and decided against it. In the same state of mind, I decided to make Bunny Horrors an unperson to LDjam, disappearing silently and working on BH or something else later.

This is a screenshot from Day 2, but the game is finished now. I spent a few days over the first few weeks of May trying to fix Bunny Horrors, to no avail, then gave up for the meantime and started working on something else. Once that and one other, smaller game were done, I got stuck into Bunny Horrors and fixed the update bug just as I once predicted. It is quite unfortunate that Bunny Horrors didn't make it to LD41, but things could have been much, much worse. And I will be making something better next time a Ludum Dare comes around, purely solo. It helps to have friends like I do.

Ludum Dare 41 was bad for me. My string of blatant mistakes that I weeks later figured out how to fix immediately were something that got to me during the challenge, and ultimately resulted in me shunning the upload stage. The game is complete and working now, but during April I totally fexxed it. Ludum Dare 42 was something I take a bit of pride in, but that was me working with a team, and none of my own code.

This time, not only will I be working by myself for maximum shares in glory, but whatever game I make, fixed or broken, is going to get uploaded. Though I anticipate that all catastrophic bugs will be gone by the end anyway. The only thing that can stop the next Hindbodes LD game from coming out is some kind of complete failure to act in the contest, like my house burning down or something.

My biggest hope is that we get a good theme. I'm employing rules as to how I vote this time, making for maximum Use-This-Specific-Mechanic-I-Came-Up-With genocide. I control the game I make, not the garbage.

This time, I want to avoid the "overly specific or limiting idea" type of bad theme more than anything else. Even the silly ones are a lesser evil.

To advance my goal, I've given myself a bunch of rules. These are rules that prioritize destruction of a certain kind of evil, letting most lesser evils through to give the former a smaller fighting chance. Scrolling down now, you'd probably see the themes I've approved in that screenshot with some scrutiny, but read these rules first:

1. All themes that are asking for an overly specific engine, gimmick, or style of gameplay must be slaughtered.
2. Themes that limit the scope of the game must be slaughtered.
3. If there is uncertainty about whether a theme poses one of those problems (#1 & #2), it too shall be slaughtered.
4. Any theme that is impassibly terrible or needs to be flagged must be slaughtered.
5. Memes shall be slaughtered if they don't happen to possess some quality that - through coincidence - might actually be of use.
6. Silly-looking themes must be slaughtered if they are pretty much uninterpretable nonsense or don't have a very good opportunity for angles being taken on them.
7. Silly-looking themes, if bad in no other way, must be allowed through to lower the chance of anything else - if viewed as problematic by this list - getting through to the finals.
8. All other themes must be let through.

The rules have a hierarchy with highest priorities at the top, like Asimov's Laws or a BEDMAS equation. Already you can see there's still a surprisingly high number of rejected themes here.

This does, as you may have guessed, count on the fact that there will still be a whole lot of people who don't vote in the same way. Normally, in a democracy or Romhack contest, counting on how other people will vote is a terrible idea and results in self-fulfilling prophecies and outcomes you don't want. Well, I see this as my best chance. We've had a lot of outcomes that many people didn't want, so I figure I might as well try something new.

And if you're still wondering, Why are you being so lax with some of the filtering? - it's just because I really, really don't want any themes telling us to combine two incompatible genres or control the environment instead of the character, and would rather make a Ludum Dare title about literally walking on eggs.

Wow, this is a great idea.

"Hey, remember your first game?"

"No, I'm making my first game for this game jam."

"Oh. Hey, do you like meta?"

I typed it out yesterday and thought it was fine, then I find what appears to be it but with several letters missing today, while participating in Theme Slaughter.

Now I tell you, I TRIED to type the whole thing, but for some reason I guess I didn't. I'm extremely disappointed and downright embarrassed by it. The text is meant to be "Emergent Chaos", not "Emergent C"... 🤢

I'll work on the other exact half tomorrow.

I'm curious to see what got through the first filter.
Honestly, I'm kind of excited. Yeah, obviously there were the usual terrible themes in the bunch, and this time there were a lot of them, but when I was going through every last suggestion in the Slaughter Round, there were some really good ones, too. As I've said, I made reservations for "lesser evil" themes just because I see gameplay-style-enforcers as that bad, but I took special care and enjoyment in approving the really nice "Classic" feeling LD Themes. The ones that were very open to interpretation and felt like a cozy, mysterious letter title written to a software dev dungeon keeper, and the rest of the letter was in Voynich characters. And then Notch makes a game out of it.

Now, going on Wikipedia today, I find that my perceived olden dayes of Ludum Dare themes being cooler was an illusion that my brain came up with because it likes myths. There's a complete list of themes used before here, and I only perceive 7 of them as being the aforementioned ones.

• "Light and Darkness"
• "Caverns"
• "Islands"
• "You only get one"
• "Beneath the surface"
• "Running out of Power"
• "The more you have, the worse it is"

Not barring other good ones, these are the themes in the list that made me think "Classic LD!" and then go on to unwittingly fabricate memories about how common they were.
But what I'm getting at is, there were other themes that I thought the same way about during my extensive stay in Theme Slaughter. I'm sure I found at least two themes that were much better than "The more you have, the worse it is".

Unfortunately, there are plenty of bad themes that were accepted into the main part of the contest historically, and the very specific "Build the level you play" was actually one of them. Who knows, maybe Classic Cozy themes will majorly come into fashion some day, not long after we bite the bullet and have to make a four-colour black and white 2D platformer with unintuitive controls where you can't stop moving. Over here, I'm looking forward to the possibility of voting in a theme that gets the imagination going places, but doesn't tell you exactly what to do.

...uh, everybody. But Hindbodes is in as well, with his Hindbodes hole. Not a dark, slimy hole full of worms. It was a Hindbodes hole, and that means comfort. And cute DOS-era graphics.

I'm going to make sure I prepare a good base to work on top of, so I can add plenty of levels without running out of time. A lot of people do an "endless level" or procedurally generated, but I almost always go with fixed, human-created lengths of level-by-level format. 'Tis how I roll. My biggest struggle is platformer collision.

I was on the phone about 18 minutes ago, discussing the start of December, and it brought me to a realization: what if my flight is before the 4th of December NZST deadline of the Jam?

Due to my far east time zone, Ludum Dare - and many other events dot dot dot - are centered around a different time of day than they are in their native land. In this case, Ludum Dare 43 starts and ends on 1PM of the respective days. That makes sense.

This also means that Ludum Dare's Jam spans the territory of four days when you live here, without actually changing its length. Interestingly, that means a start time of 1 PM on December 1st, and a hard finish date of December 4th. That also makes sense, it's no stranger to me.

This year, I have a very important, quite expensive flight I must take to go live in another country for a bunch of weeks, and it's right after the Ludum Dare. That's... wow, look at how well it fits.

Then during the phone call I go and check what date my flight is, just in case.
It's December 4th. And I have to leave for the flight very early in the morning. Uh oh.

So, if I were to go with my original plan and join the Jam like a safe-player, I would lose more than 13 hours of game development time, sleep requirements for flight included. That's approximately 20% of the total period given to make a game in, should I choose the Jam. Rather than pick the easy version just to get props for something easier that I wasn't even able to put my full power into, I have decided to put all my efforts into the maximum-props, maximum-credit, most prestigious achievement I can seek: The Compo, Ludum Dare 43.

I know the Compo is really hard and that my 48 hour time limit might fail, but it just doesn't sit well with me to spend 58 hours on a game just to get it judged as though it were 72 hours of work. If it really comes to it, I'll submit my late Compo game to the Jam, but I will try very hard to make sure it never comes to that. The Compo is something harder than the Jam, officially taking more work in a smaller period of time. I imagine that produces some serious respect. It sounds like it would be amazing if I made a pretty good game in a shorter amount of time than usual and kept my head straight. Harder, but with greater bragging rights.
For me, I think it would be much better to try the hard mode and spend just 48 hours on a game that is viewed for exactly what it is: somebody who's never succeeded in a Ludum Dare solo before making a game with relatively low amounts of experience completely following the rules of the Compo... here goes.

I have a bit of insight into "Darkness is your friend" that might make it seem a bit less frustrating than it does currently. I'm not gonna try to change the way anybody thinks or say that it's a "Great" theme, and I certainly understand why people don't look fondly at it, but just so we're covering all bases and know everything we should...
The theme doesn't necessarily force a specific game mechanic. If it said "stay in darkness to survive" or "you can only move when inside darkness" then yes, instant minus 1 from me. Thankfully, however, there's a subtle underside to it. If darkness is your "friend", so to speak, what does that limit your gameplay to? At face value, probably a lot, but since we're talking about what your friends are and not what your style of movement or abilities are, there is a lot of room for making connections that weren't originally there. Example:
"Darkness (uncountable noun, easy to take non-literally) is your (for the player, the character, or all characters?) friend (reinterpretable noun, part of many different proverbs, can mean a reverse-hindrance to gameplay but very easily to a literal friend with NPC or story-based significance)"
A sentient refraction of missing light is your companion and ally
Jump from platform to platform and use the shroud of darkness as solid bridges and weapon/defense methods

This is why the theme may be just a bit misunderstood. It sounds like something about a weird puzzle mechanic where you gotta avoid light, but logically there are a lot of possible scenarios where it's not. It could be anything ranging from a survival game about being a pillbug that thrives in damp, dim areas of soil under a plant, to a branching-decisions story game about how you're being assisted by the forces of darkness and literally Satan himself. Darkness itself is such a poetically broad word, as well, that you could quite feasibly end up with a game about depression, or a perfect excuse to make a really grimdark story.

So yeah, I'm not gonna tell you how to vote, but I think everyone should know that DIYF isn't narrow, it's actually quite open.

... You know, if nothing else... the real reason I wonder why this theme got so far is basically that it's using its words wrong. The game doesn't have a player in it, it has bots, objects, characters, and barriers. The player is the guy sitting at his desk pressing buttons to make the game do things. You are the player, the thing you typically control is not called that. I'd still be shocked if this theme was called "control the environment, not the protagonist"/"avatar", but it could have at least said what it wanted to say properly. It's unsettling how difficult it would be to work with such a confusingly-phrased theme for people who understand this.

Mine are Prelude of the Chambered (nostalgic to a certain year and emotionally significant) and Angry Tracks (spooky game, cheeky).

I'm anxious about Compo's challenge myself, so I wish high fortune to you. Do at others as.