In my opinion “you are the villain” is a difficult theme, for the three act story formula doesn’t work. If it’s a “introduction, everything falls apart in the middle, protagonist prevails in the end” kind of thing, then you are not really the villain anymore, but an “evil” hero instead. However, a narrative where everything goes well from beginning to the middle and then falls apart in the end strikes me as rather frustrating. Hmmm, what to do,what to do?

Perhaps it’s better to focus on what kind of game I want to create and what’s possible in the alloted time span.

The first thing that springs to mind is Grand Theft Auto, but something like that is too complicated to realize.

That dungeon game where you had to defeat heroes would be a possibility. Kind of like a reverse tower defense, but apart from the flavour you could easily interchange hero and villain.

Perhaps I could keep the disappointing reverse narrative to stay true to the “you are the villain” theme after all and then make this an 80s style game where it’s about obtaining a high score rather than winning, since the villain has to be overcome by the hero in the end.

Considering how many hours I’ve wasted with analysis-paralysis I might not finish at all…

I woke up at 9 a.m. CET and Ludum Dare 30 had been running for several hours already. As part of my waking up routine, I checked twitter and found out that the theme is “connected worlds.”

Not my favourite, but I immediately thought of a 4 way split screen (actually, it could be a different number of split screens), where the player movement is connected. For example, on screen one, you see that your hero can walk in a straight line to get to the exit of the level, but on screen 2 there is a pit ahead, so your character would fall into the pit and die when just walking in a straight line.

So this idea is essentially a puzzle game – get to the exit in all of the connected worlds without dieing, in the fewest amount of moves. There could be different elements like spinners and conveyor belts (blatently stolen from Richard Garfield’s RoboRally, of course) to help with making the puzzles more complicated.

As with all ideas, I’m sure many other people had the same idea, but I’ll go with this, as it was the first thing that sprang to mind.

Looking through the front page, I see that there are already many beautiful images from works in progress – better get started now…

Dear all,

I just went through all the themes (rapidly, but this time I noticed that it's possible to go back and change the result, if the "n" press was incorrect) and narrowed them down to 24.

Here are some personal highlights: semi real time, fairy tale, and vending machine :)

Hopefully I won't be too embarrassed to submit something this time around.

All the best,

Kai

Emergencies notwithstanding, I actually have time to participate this weekend. However, I am super rusty, and the last time I tried to participate I was too embarrassed to upload anything. Hopefully this time is going to be different, so I'll tentatively say "I'm in." I'm going to work in Unity3D, which reminds me that I should probably update to the latest version before Saturday.

Hey all,

I think it's great that the last 6 themes are shown to give an idea of what has been done. Nevertheless, I tried to go into a different direction, so my three theme suggestions are as follows:

Research

Friendship

Union

For each of those I can think of several different games, genres, interpretations, and approaches, which is why I believe those are solid candidates. On the flipside, the terms themselves are a bit nebulous, so I was half tempted to scratch all that and suggest "fog" instead.

As for the previous themes, four of those ("one room", "running out of space", "running out of power", "a small world") can be summed up with "limited resources." Another one, "The more you have, the worse it is" consitutes the opposite, where an abundance of resources becomes a problem.

Out of the six suggestions, the only theme that is not resource focused is "combine 2 incompatible genres" which takes the reliable method of combining and remixing to foster creativity, but adds the twist of combining seemingly incompatible genres. It is reminiscent of the strange attractors concept that Brandon Sanderson talks about on the writing excuses podcast. This non-resource based theme fascinated me the most. I can't quite live up to that, but hopefully my own theme suggestions are of use to some people.

All the best,

Kai

Hi there,

when I say that I'm in, I mean that I have set aside time for Ludum Dare on the weekend. Due to real life obligations, I only have half of the Saturday and I haven't programmed anything in ages (1995... Not counting several failed attempts at previous LDs), so I can't promise that I'll upload anything. It'll be fun and that's what counts. See you all at Ludum Dare 48 :)

All the best,

Kai

Hi there,

I wanted to get something super simple done, essentially a reverse tetris, where the objective wasn't to pile up tetriminos, but to drill into a solid area for a duration of 5 minutes to get a high score (EDIT: Just as I hit send, I saw someone else did exactly that and also made it beautiful - my version will not be that beautiful. Hats off to you, good sir!). Something that I thought was easy enough to complete in 2 days.

Saturday I unexpectedly did not even have the half day I thought I would have and today I started at 11 a.m., watched a couple of tutorials and managed to duplicate a "rock" gameobject via two loops to create the 9 x 9 grid. Sadly, while the game is simple, my programming skills have atrophied to the point that it would take me significantly longer than the remaining time to complete it.

So, instead I am bowing out early (it is 6:24 p.m. right now) and plan to finish the game in the coming days/weeks/months. Ludum Dare 48 has been a success for me in the sense that I finally did sit down and dabble with Unity and C# once more.

As always, I did enjoy watching the progress of everyone else from time to time during these past 1.5 days and hope to be back in October.

All the best,

Kai

Although the suggested themes of previous LDJAMs were phrases, I am fond of one word themes: * Rainbow * What's that? * Storage

Hi there,

I had a game, but alas when I hit build, the canvas resized and the background image could not be seen anymore. It is 11 minutes to the deadline, so I am done with LDJAM49 for now and continue to say "one day I'll finish and upload something on time!"

I did have a good time and that's what counts. I actually spent 12 hours on Ludum Dare this time around. Most of that time was spent trying stuff, going back to tutorials and forum discussions when things did not work, and spending entirely too long to get basic stuff to work (for example, manipulating variables in one script with another script).

My game revolved around a slider to increase and decrease power and a button to cool down the reactor. You had to closely meet the power demand (more points if you are close) without failing to meet the demand (massive point penalty) or running too hot (failstate).

All the best and hopefully see you all in the future,

Kai

Hi there,

last time I actually managed to get something working in Unity, but I was still too shy to upload it. Hopefully this time around I can create something and upload it, so that I can properly participate for once. The weekend is already reserved for LDJAM :)

My theme suggestins are:

1. Vaccine,
2. Treasure,
3. Clouds

All the best and see you on April 1st :)

It took a while, but I just completed the theme slaughter. Interestingly enough there were fewer suggestions this time around. As usual there were several duplicates, so whenever I found a theme I thought was suitable and interesting, I picked all of the duplicates as well (e.g.: LD1: indirect interaction, indirect control, indirect interaction). On a side note, "conspiracy theories" are stupid in real life, but they might make for entertaining games, which is why I also picked that theme.

Ludum Dare 50! Hooray!

So I got up at 7 a.m. CET (there is a 6 hour delay, so the theme was announced at 3 a.m. CET) and checked out the theme. Of course I wasn't too thrilled about it, but immediately said "You are playing the shackled Gulliver and need to blow away Lilliputians before they overpower you."

Then I went on about my day, visited my mother, had breakfast, walked her dog, and eventually set out for my favourite place, the "Unperfekthaus" in Essen (#notsponsored). It's a multi storey building, where you pay a 9€ entry fee and get a table (if one is available), unlimited soft drinks / coffee / tea and wifi. Pretty much a fantastic place to work on creative projects. At the entrance, before you enter the creative area, they also have a small restaurant on the ground floor, so I ordered a sausage with fries and had lunch.

Finally at 12:45 I did set up my laptop and immediately spent the next 30 minutes reading through what everybody else was up to and hitting the heart button a lot. Funny side note: In the meantime, I thought about a game with a boat where holes spring up and you need to use a bucket to remove the water to delay the inevitable. As I was scrolling through the feed I counted that exact topic 4 times :D

So my new idea is to work on a game where you are at a picnic. All around you, ants spring up and want to grab your food and you have to blow them away to delay the inevitable. The game is going to be capped at 5 Minutes. If you manage to hold them off, you get your final score (300 for the duration in seconds + whatever food health points are left over). If the ants complete their mission, your score for the food is 0 and you only get points for the seconds that you lasted and a different end of game text.

I broke down the project into several steps and now I am working on getting it done in Unity. Since I haven't programmed or touched Unity ever since the previous Ludum Dare we'll see how it goes.

1. Create a Snack Gameobject
2. Spawn an Ant
3. Add Code to move Ants towards Snack
4. Add a Collider and Logic to determine what happens when the Ant collides with the Snack (Snack Health reduced by 1, Ant Snack Status set to 1)
5. Add Code that Ant with Snack Status 1 moves to the edge of the playing field
6. Add Collider to the edge and implement code that ant with Snack sets Snack Status to 0 (so it is going to return to moving towards the Snack Gameobject)
7. Destroy Snack Gameobject when Snack Health <= 0
8. Scale Snack Size with Health. This is not live like, but should look funny
9. Add Player Object Mouth that can be moved with the mouse. Pressing the button is going to move a nearby Ant away
10. Display Score
11. Game Over Screen, ideally with the option to Quit or Restart
12. Implement Timer
13. Start Screen with Instructions
14. Timer based escalating spawning of Ants

This is the minimum viable product, but if I still have time, here are a few more things I'd like to implement: 15. Draw a blanket & grass Background Image 16. Random Setup 17. implement different kinds of Snacks 18. Small cloud Animation when blowing away ants 19. Ant Animation (probably too hard, but would be cool)

Wish me luck.

Oh, by the way, the blog post is titled "It's 15:24 and this is what I've been up to" but since it is 15:45 I have been apparently blogging for 21 minutes :D

Dear all,

yesterday I only managed to devote 4-5 hours to LDJAM and today it was just 2 hours due to several other prior obligations (and being a bit ill with a headache - not exactly ideal conditions for programming). So, I have decided to fail the Compo. However, unlike the previous times I shall continue to work on my entry for a few hours per week, so that I can at least enter something for the new Extra category.

Good luck to everyone still jamming, I'll be sure to read posts, hit the heart button, and also program a few lines here and there :)

All the best,

Kai

Hi there,

I am actually still working on my LDJAM50 game whenever I have the time (not often) and it is nowhere near playable, but I am already excited about spending 3-5 hours (ideally more, but realistically that's all I have been able to pour in during previous LDJams) on October 1st and 2nd dabbling a bit with Unity. Hopefully I'll manage to finish this time, but even if I don't, I am sure I'll still have a great time and I am very much looking forward to seeing all of your creative entries.

For the Theme Suggestions I decided to go with "medicine" (perhaps still too relevant to the real world, with the ongoing pandemic.) and "newspaper".

All the best and see you in October,

Kai

I am done with the slaughter... Sorry to the people, who kept about a third of the entries - I didn't put every suggestion on the scales to see whether it would meet the minimum requirements of a decent theme. Instead, I asked myself "does this strike a chord with me?" I know, it's very unscientific, completely arbitrary, but this is what remained (for the most part, I wasn't even consistent and did not click duplicates on purpose with the exception of "dice" and "dices" that were in close proximity to each other):

• vacation
• help from AI
• classic PC game
• kittens
• ghosts
• Hold and Release
• Control Level not Player
• Protect the objective
• campsite
• arcade
• game in a game
• road trip
• bastion
• table
• go green, go nuclear
• build and barter
• road
• educational
• revolution
• medicine
• gravity
• barter
• scroll
• judge
• laboratory
• medieval dystopia
• falafel
• Volcano!
• Everest
• Forbidden territory
• newspaper
• anthropomorphic Cyberpunk
• changing gravity
• cycling
• camping
• travel
• lockpicking minigame
• dices
• dice
• treasure map
• tournament
• tidy
• seasons
• heist