Finished my first Ludum Dare! Although I bit off more than I could chew, what I managed to do was a nice piece of work just for one weekend. ...It's all behind-the-scenes stuff, but I think it's impressive nonetheless

You can check out my game, ENDGAME, here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/endgame

How come "Combine two incompatible genres" got chosen over "You really shouldn't mix those"? Seems like we got the more restrictive theme out of the two...

Condensed the nine possible ideas I had into three possible games... which ones do you guys think has the most promise?

1) Medieval Rhythm Racing

2) FPS platform bullet-hell racing

3) Horror-themed bootleg roguelike edutainment typing tutor tower defense & Knuckles

Well, that was fun! Didn't end up going with the horror-themed edutainment. Instead, I made something I was actually interested in: a rhythm-racing game. It still has a ways to go before prime time, but at least I have a pretty good understanding of movement and rhythm snapping in Unity now!

You can play my game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/rockin-horse

So, the results are in, and I must say, I'm pretty happy with them! I'm so happy to finally do well in Overall and Theme - those have always been two of my trouble categories. Next time, I hope to finally improve on Graphics

But just seeing the results from one jam is boring. I want to see how much I've improved! And comparing my placements from my last 3 jams, the results are clear: I'm getting better at this! And I seem to have a knack for Music - I guess all those guitar lessons have started to pay off!

(The higher the bar, the higher the placement that jam. It's a linear graph - each placement was subtracted from 700 to get the bar height. I've also omitted LD43 since I had to leave the group fairly early for that one)

And for completeness' sake, I compared my raw scores from each jam as well. It's interesting to see how scores and placements differ. For example, I placed much higher in Overall and Fun this jam over the last one, even though I got roughly the same score. And one year I placed lower in Innovation despite getting a higher score! Crazy, isn't it?

Thank you to everyone who played and rated my game! I hope to see you all again in October!

Not my theme choices, just a reminder to properly dispose of your plastics.

Since this seems to be a popular subject now, I thought I'd whip up this meticulously rendered schematic for my idea on how to improve the slaughter round. Instead of showing themes one at a time, show 10 at a time and pick out the few you actually like. What do you guys think?

Look, I made a Terraria ripoff! I fell a bit behind schedule, so I hope I'm able to put everything in that I had planned.

Another Ludum Dare completed! And since I’ve never done one of these before, I figured I’d try my hand at a post-mortem for my game, Dayunisi Builds the World! Buckle up, 'cause you're in for a ride!

“Start with nothing”

…okay? Don’t all video games do that? It’s be kind of weird if you started with all of the equipment unlocked. Personally, I didn’t think this was a particularly strong theme, since we ended up with a lot of “you unlocked the jump button” style games that don’t explore starting with nothing in a meaningful way. But I digress…

This is my fifth Ludum Dare that I’ve completed, and by now I’ve gotten into a bit of a routine for these things. To begin with, I always start with at least three hours of planning to find the perfect theme. And it’s usually split pretty evenly between:

Brainstorming to get any and all ideas out on paper. Some ideas are good. Some are bad. Some can stand on their own. Some can be combined with others. Doesn’t matter; every idea I have gets down on the paper. For the most part, I interpreted the theme as making the act of building up to be the most central component. Things like assembly lines and creation myths and Terraria clones were obvious, but I was more interested in thinking outside the box. What if the ‘nothing’ is the knowledge the player has about the game? Heck, why limit it to just a game’s mechanics – maybe I could make an edutainment game? Or a learning algorithm?

After brainstorming, I usually have a handful of themes that sound interesting and could make for fun, unique games. I spend the second half of my planning stage exploring and really considering all the ins and outs of each theme. What would be the core gameplay loop? What kind of assets will I need? Will it be a decent challenge to make? Am I sure I can make it all in 48 hours?

This time, I narrowed it down to six ideas. Two were what I call ‘Mechanical Turk’ games, since they had the player build or correct an AI to proceed. Two others were Terraria clones, where the player had to mine for resources and build structures. One was a pure edutainment game involving mathematical functions and plotting graphs. The last one was a social commentary game around how homeless people face so many barriers to entry into society – to eat you need money. To get money you need a job. To get a job you need a suit and tie and home address. To get a suit and tie and home address, you need money. The twist was to market it as a straight rags-to-riches game, complete with fake screenshots showing a mansion you could never actually get in-game.

Out of these six, four were unfeasible: the Mechanical Turks would require me to program a way for the player to program the AI, which I couldn’t do in 48 hours. Same with one of the world building games, which would need both a mining mechanic AND a music sequencer mechanic. And the math one just sounded tedious to build, and was probably going to be boring to play.

That left two ideas. Between the two, I cut the social commentary game because I had already done a social commentary game last Ludum Dare and felt my execution was nowhere near as clever nor insightful as I thought it would be. That left…

Dayunisi Builds the World!

One of my ideas for “start with nothing” was all the creation myths of the world. Unfortunately, all the ones I knew would make for either very boring or very complex games, so I had to do some research. Through Wikipedia I found the Cherokee creation myth: that the little Water Beetle was the first to leave the overcrowded sky realm. But, finding only water, he dove down to the ocean’s floor and brought back some mud, which grew into the world we know. For me, that was perfect: I could make a Terraria clone. It would have core mechanics that are known by most people while having a unique twist that ties into both the theme of the jam and the theme of the story!

At first, I didn’t know if I could handle a Terraria clone – I thought my computer was going to explode from too many loose physics objects. This is another reason why I flush out so many ideas: I have more options to fall back on if my first choice fails. Thankfully, my computer was able to handle all the blocks, and I was able to continue. It was around midnight now, so I decided to go to bed and be back at it before 9!

… That was the plan, at least. Remember that routine I mentioned earlier? One of the things I do is buy myself some sweets and munch on them over the weekend. After all, Ludum Dare only comes twice a year, it’s time to celebrate! Well, I guess I overindulged that night, ‘cause I was up until 3 from a combination of a sugar rush and an upset stomach. I ended up waking up closer to 10, and finally started working after 10:30.

My entire Saturday was spent just making the Minimum Viable Product. There’s not too much to tell, really. Just a few technical issues that threw a wrench in the works. Like the one where I wanted to use MS Paint to make the art because it loaded faster and was easy to use, but I had to switch to GIMP because Paint doesn’t use transparency layers. Or how my character kept clipping through the floor if he fell from a great height – turns out he was moving so fast the collision check was completely bypassing one of the ground tiles, so I changed the setting from Interpolate to Continuous and everything worked out in the end.

The biggest issue I had was with raycasting. Every LD I try to make use of a new Unity feature – this time it was raycasting to check for blocks. There ended up being so much trouble because things weren’t properly aligned on the Z axis, or I was using Raycast instead of Raycast2D, or I used GetRayIntersection instead of Raycast, which I should’ve known doesn’t work… except for all the times it does… It was frustrating to say the least. This was especially true with the Buzzard’s coin drop, which would randomly drop a whole bunch of coins on the same spot.

Around the end of the second day, this I realized that the core gameplay mechanic loop wasn’t all that fun. It became too difficult to build a nice enough platform because you’d run out of easily available pieces nearby and start to drown very early on. By that time it was nearly midnight, so I had to just leave what I had and pick it back up in the morning. This time, I did actually start at 9! …Well, actually 9:20… and it was closer to 9:30 by the time my computer finished booting up. But what matters was I started earlier than yesterday!

It was at this point that I decided I needed to cut out some features, or at least majorly scale them back. Some of them were obvious, like a handpainted background and power-ups. Some aren’t really needed to experience my game, like a working health mechanic. One of these was actually supposed to be a major mechanic: you see, the coins that Buzzard dropped were supposed to be plants that you needed to harvest. The main idea was to have different types of blocks with different fertility levels. That was how I would incorporate the story into the game: You were supposed to be split between building upwards towards powerups with strong but infertile blocks like stone, and building a nice plane of land made of fertile soil to collect more seeds, which would then be used as upgrade material. That’s why soil was so abundant but such a poor building material. In the end, I dropped the fertility mechanics and reworked plants into generic coins.

Speaking of which, did you wonder why I used such a strange S for the money symbol? That’s because I found that the Cherokee word for money is spelt like DSW, using that S-like symbol. I thought it was too good of an opportunity to make a silly little pun.

Based on past LDs, it looks like my greatest strength is my music. Which is unfortunate, because I felt I gave a very lacklustre performance this time around. You see, just based on how I’m able to budget my time, I can only make one song. No matter what I end up writing in that 1 hour interval, that’s going to be my music. No redos. For a game like this, music was bound to be a disaster. First of all, a happy game needs happy music, but I have no idea how to write in a major key, and it always comes out sappy instead of happy. Secondly, I usually try to write music that shares at least some of the sonic qualities of the thing I'm themeing my game on, which in this case were First Nations myths. Now, I did take a world music course, so I knew which elements make up First Nations music (things like monophony, drums with honour beats, vocables, etc.) However, all of my examples of First Nations music were either traditional prayers and other ceremonial songs with deep meanings, or modern day bluegrass with strong societal and political messages, neither of which I felt I could emulate without coming across as offensive. In the end I tried to experiment with chromatics and accidentals to make a kooky 12 bar blues song, but I was unhappy with the result. It doesn’t even loop properly!

Finally, the deadline approached. I fixed the last few bugs, made an HTML version, and posted it just before the deadline. To make sure the port worked properly, I needed to test it in my browser. And that’s when it hit me: I had never played my game to completion before! I had always made a little island and messed around with the latest changes before returning back to coding. Thankfully, it was actually possible to finish the game, and by that point, that was good enough for me.

After the jam

Unfortunately, good enough for me wasn’t good enough. Many players complained about not being able to get any money. At first I thought people might not have built high enough, since Buzzard only drops coins on blocks above water. Or maybe they didn’t play long enough, as he only comes every 70-90 seconds. But when one user said they reached the final cloud without getting a single coin, that’s when I knew something was wrong. I’m not even entirely sure what’s happening, as Buzzard appears just fine in all three of my browsers.

Looking back, I think I have a problem with messy source code. So many interconnected pieces and prefabs with no file structure and values assigned in editor that if just one thing is out of place, the whole system fails. I know that’s something I have to work on for future games.

And now today came the moment of truth! A lot sooner than I expected, too… weren’t the results supposed to come out at 8pm? Either way, I’ve got one question on my mind: how well did I do?

…okay, that’s not too bad overall, but it is my lowest-ranking game yet. I was hoping I would get some points for Theme, as I thought I did a pretty good job at incorporating it into the main game mechanic. But the more I think about it, that’s not really the case: the fertile world was scrapped, and most people didn’t even get to see its heavily reduced form either, which I imagine means few people actually built a money-collecting continental shelf like I imagined. Ah well. So this jam wasn’t the best I’ve ever had. That’s okay, because I still put in a decent effort and learned a lot from it.

Thank you all for reading my port-mortem / sorry for taking up your time! I hope to see you all again next Ludum Dare!

(Sorry for the wall of text. I've bolded the important bits if you just want to skim it)

So the pre-Ludum Dare season is upon us once again, and you know what that means! Another slaughter round full of repeated theme ideas, followed by four rounds of elimination and a theme that no one ever seems to like. But how can we make the theme better? Well, I’ve said in the past that we should revamp the whole voting process, but seeing as it’s a little late for that now, I suppose we’ll have to work around the system we have in place by educating people on what makes a theme good or bad. So, just in time for the slaughter round, here is my manifesto on what makes a good Ludum Dare theme!

First, let’s consider why we have a theme in the first place. From the official rule page:

“Ludum Dare is about encouraging you to make something. The theme is something we do to help everyone with the “blank sheet of paper” problem that artists and creators deal with. It’s easier to make something with some direction than none.

[…] while we don’t enforce that your game meets some minimum “themeyness”, the community does see significance in the Theme. So while we wont do anything about it, the community as a whole prefers games that do use the Theme. So as a general suggestion, if you want to score well in Ludum Dare, make sure you do use the theme in some way.

So the whole purpose of the theme is to give everyone a common set of ideas to build off of. It’s to fill your head with all the potential of making a game over the course of a weekend. At the same time, it’s meant to create a set of games with a common underlying theme, each uniquely shaped by our own interpretation based on our skillsets, preferences, and life experiences. So now the question becomes, how do we make a theme that promotes this kind of thinking?

Well, I believe the theme should be vague. When a theme is overly constrained, it leads to fewer interpretations of the theme, which leads to fewer interesting games. This is especially true when the theme implies a certain type of play, or forces participants to adhere to a certain skill set. Take “The power of music”, for example. Naturally, it’s going to imply a rhythm game, right? Or focuses on an amazing soundtrack? Or at least one with a heavy emphasis on musicianship or musical allusions? Well, not everyone is able or willing to make a rhythm game. Not everyone is musically talented to write their own songs. Heck, some people don’t even like listening to music! And there are tons of themes that force jammers to use a certain skillset: “Combine 2D and 3D assets” -not everyone can use a 3D game engine; “Jump is also attack” – not everyone wants to make a platforming game; “Amazing story” – not everyone wants to write a story. My personal litmus test for this stage is, “can I think of a platforming game, a visual novel, a puzzle game, and a first-person shooter using this theme? Can it work with both a multi-person team project and a solo dev with only 12 hours to work?” If yes, we can move onto the next stage.

In contrast to the previous paragraph, I also think the theme shouldn’t be too vague. As the rules outlined, the community enjoys seeing everyone’s interpretation of the same theme. This means the theme should be strong enough that it can penetrate through the entire design of a project. Thus themes like “based on song lyrics” and “anarchy / no theme” are terrible themes since, by definition, there will be absolutely no obvious underlying connecting thread to all the games (and, in the latter's case, doesn't help overcome the 'blank page' problem)

I also believe the theme should add to the design of games in a meaningful way. Superfluous additions or constraints like “2-colour palette” or “female protagonist” could be applied to practically any game, and doesn’t promote idea generation in the prototyping phase. And, combined with what I said before, it should be up to the participant to decide in which format they want to interpret it. Do they want to interpret “Sacrifices need to be made” as a gameplay mechanic, a narrative element, or just a basic platformer with demonic cult graphics? I personally consider the last one to be a cop-out, but I still believe that this cop-out should always exist for the beginners who are unable or unwilling to make anything besides basic platformers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay, so we’ve determined what makes a good theme, but what makes a bad theme? Beyond not adhering to the above axioms, a bad theme can be identified with one or more of the following:

-Repeating a theme from a previous Ludum Dare. Many of us are veterans of multiple Ludum Dares, and want to see innovation in the theme selection. Plus, what would be the purpose of choosing a theme in the first place if we’re just going to recycle one from last time?

-The scope is too large. Do you really expect people to create an MMORPG from scratch in 48 hours? Or write their own rendering code to “mix 2D and 3D”? Especially egregious are the ones that specifically ask to include too much stuff – “Feature creep”, for one. Or “The 4th dimension”, where half the jam could be spend just learning what a hypercube is.

-Inappropriate topics. This event is for everyone. We don’t want to alienate any portion of our friends by choosing a topic that is violent, sexual, illegal, controversial, or otherwise inappropriate for this jam. I will add in religion and politics to this list as well, as talking about those topics on the internet is sure to end badly. (Note that I’m not against these themes in your game, I just don’t believe they should be the focus of every game)

-Themes that are too common and are, frankly, pathetic. Some themes are just too weak to generate many truly innovative designs. “You are the weapon”, “Only 2 button controls”, “good thing is now bad”; these themes show up multiple times at each LD, and they never get chosen for a reason. I’ll also add themes that, once you think about it, are just basic video game logic. “Start with nothing” – as opposed to all the games that give all the weapons all at once? Or simple subversions of video game logic. They're cheesy and overdone, guys. “You are the villain”, “You are the princess”, “Player cannot move” – why even specify a ‘player’ when there are puzzle games that don’t, strictly speaking, have one?

-Niche references to other media. Not everyone watches JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, most people won’t know what you’re talking about when you talk about making a game based on enemy Stands. Even if you quickly explain it to them, they’re only going to have a basic idea of what that is, how are they going to generate an amazing cohesive idea from limited knowledge? This is especially true with memes, as they also carry the risk of being outdated by the time the jam actually occurs. In short, if people have to Google your theme, it’s not a good theme.

-The title is too darn long. Generally, the longer the title is, the more it’s going to overdefine the game design and produce similar entries. Looking through the past posts, “Take a feature from a dimension, and remake it in another one” sticks out to me. The fact it mentions dimensions indicates using 2D and 3D, but also that the game should be more technical in nature, when many people just want to make simple platformers. I’ve also seen things like “Limitations (can’t go beyond a certain level)” being submitted, where the unbracketed text is too vague to really generate cool ideas but the bracketed text is overdefining the theme (in this case, “level” suggests arcade stages or RPG leveling). Combined, the theme is unwieldly to say and look at, not to mention making the unbracketed text redundant.

-The title is too darn short. From the opposite perspective, making the theme just a single word is sure to make it too vague to really inspire outside-the-box thinking. How many games require you to “destroy” or “survive” something? And what exactly do you expect me to make an “unlimited” amount of? and for what purpose? And how do other games exclude concepts like “light” or “shadows” such that specifically making a game with them is supposed to make me put on my thinking cap?

-Anything with misspellings or bad grammar. This is kind of petty for me, but when you’re trying to sort through 3000 themes, anything that could help make the selection process easier will be helpful. Correct spelling, proper capitalization, using words instead of numbers for numbers below 20, anything that could be held against a theme should be. Plus, if everyone voted like this, there’d be more cohesion on whether “Only Two Buttons”, “only two buttons”, “only 2 buttons”, “Only 2 buttons”, and “only 2 butons” gets to go past the slaughter.

-You don’t enjoy the theme. Just because something is technically good doesn’t mean you have to like it. If you don’t want to work with a specific theme, simply don’t vote for it. You don’t need to explain yourself. Even if it’s just a gut feeling, it’s okay to throw that theme away. We’ve got 3000, we can manage without it.

So, yeah. That's my personal guide to choosing a good theme. Do you agree with me? Based on some of the other posts I've seen posted in the past couple of days, I certainly know a few of you disagree with me on parts. I'd like to hear your opinions in the comments. Maybe we can finally make the theme selection process tolerable for once!

(...or we can just give up and turn Ludum Dare into "Floating Islands: The Game Jam")

So I was initially somewhat bummed by my results when I first saw them.

While I certainly could have placed lower, I wouldn't necessarily call my final placements mindblowing. I was more than a few places lower than my last entry, which was itself a few steps down from my entry before that. In fact, my placements were around the same as my first Ludum Dare's results. So am I getting worse at this? I thought I did a pretty good job this time around...

That's what I thought before I compared my raw scores instead of my relative placements:

So, statistically, this has been one of my best Ludum Dares thus far! But if my scores are so high, why was my placement so low? Well, one look at the LD historical data and we see:

This was the most popular Ludum Dare by a significant margin! So I'm not getting worse, there were just so many more fantastic games this time around!

Congratulations to everyone on their fabulous entries, and I can't wait to do this all again in October!

Hey all, Niterich here. You might remember me from the last Ludum Dare, where I made a post about what I thought made a good or a bad theme for Ludum Dare. You can read it here, but as a quick recap:

The theme SHOULD:

• serve as a starting point for ideas to help people to overcome the "blank sheet of paper" problem

• be flexible enough to be made into to a video game in any genre, scope, and developer experience level; and with a number of possible interpretations so we don't get the same game 5000 times

• be specific enough that each game can be identified as coming from this specific jam. Many people here enjoy seeing other people's different takes on the same theme

• impact the game in a meaningful way, and not just as an artificial limitation or visual gimmick

The theme SHOULD NOT:

• repeat a theme from a previous Ludum Dare

• specifically be too large in scope - we can't all make a MMORPG in a weekend!

• be explicitly violent, sexual, illegal, controversial, or otherwise inappropriate for a public, worldwide jam for people of all ages, races, religions, and sexual preferences. You can make your game whatever you want, but don't force others to work with a topic they don't agree with

• be a commonly ignored theme from past Ludum Dares. From experience, these seem to mostly be simple inversions of video game logic ("two button controls", "you are the villain/weapon/princess", "start with nothing", etc.)

• be a joke theme that never get chosen, but always clog up the theme slaughter round (looking at you, "floating islands"... which in itself isn't an awful theme but it gets suggested and joked so often it's annoying)

• be a niche reference or a relatively unknown concept, including memes. If most people have to Google your theme, it's not a good one!

So what do you guys think? Do you think I'm being too tough? Too lenient? Is there any criteria you would add or remove?

See, this is why I always brainstorm a bunch of game ideas - in case one of them just flat out doesn't work.

Two years ago I made a Ludum Dare game called Concentrate, which was about going around a circle without retracing your steps. Well, this jam I thought I'd apply that concept to a high-speed flying game. That's easier said than done, unfortunately. I just could not balance the visuals to have both a clear and reasonable lead time as well as a fast pace, and I'd rather spend this weekend working on something new over trying to make this work.

Also, shameless plug for anyone who wants to try out Concentrate: https://nickhenley.itch.io/concentrate

You know, I would probably have has more time to work on my code if I didn't spend so long on my title screen... 🤔

See also: "You are the weapon", "2 button controls", and "Start with Nothing"

I forget who originally posted this compilation, but it perfectly encapsulates the problem with these kinds of themes.

...except for golf.

There's a larger version available at my itch.io page if you need it: https://nickhenley.itch.io/ludum-dare-48-wallpaper