In light of the theme, I won't be participating this time. However, in the spirit of ludum dare, I will still be jamming over the weekend on my ongoing project, and I encourage anyone else who is discouraged by the theme to do the same. Don't give up, skeleton! Either ignore the theme (it is optional, after all) or spend your game jam hype energy on something else you'd rather do.

Slaughter ALL the themes!

I know I always complain about the themes, but they really are unusually bad this time. Normally I vote for about 1/3 of them in the slaughter, this time it was less than 1/5. Obviously there are the tasteless coronavirus memes, but it seemed like fully 20% of the themes were variations on "losing = winning", another 15% were "the more/less you have, the more/less _", another 15% either "play as the level" or "play as the villain", and a final 10% some version of "the end is the beginning". I'm actually amazed y'all managed to find literally thousands of different ways of rephrasing the same handful of ideas.

I've added up final round theme votes from 56 screenshots posted on the ldjam.com site, the #LDJAM twitter hashtag, and the unofficial Ludum Dare discord. Here are the results: Dreams - 5 Power source -11 Non-violent - 8 Abandoned -10 1 minute -13 Decay - 8 Side effects - 2 Fragile -14 Outdated tech -17 Ruins -17 Momentum -20 Automation - 5 Keep it alive 5 Garden - 2 Connections 1 Please be advised, I don't claim that this has any real predictive power whatsoever. The small sample size and likely sampling bias are huge methodological flaws. Consider this list as just a curiosity.

I use macos, which as you can probably image, makes rating LD games a bit trickier since very few people provide builds for mac. You'd think the recent zealotry about web exports would have improved this situation, but in fact it's exactly the opposite. An increasing number of people seem to think that a web build is a substitute for cross-platform builds, and many people now only provide a web build, even though they are using an engine which supports cross-platform export. The net result, although I don't have hard stats to back this up, is that native mac and linux builds feel significantly less common now than they did a few years ago. Which is unfortunate, because the situation with HTML5 exports from major engines right now is really, really bad.

I can't claim to know why the situation with web exports is so bad (although I have a few guesses), but my experience has been that web games are extremely unreliable, to the point where I've started going straight for windows builds and trying them with wine first, because I actually have a better success rate with that than with running web exports. Seriously. At least 20% of the time they don't even load, if they do load it usually takes an unacceptably long time (much longer than just downloading and running the game), and if/when they finally get going there is quite often one or more game-breaking bugs with input, audio, rendering, or performance. I would much rather download a game and be plainly unable to run it, rather than waiting a full minute to find out whether it will load or not, playing for another couple minutes, and then suddenly being unable to continue because the mouse capture starts bugging out.

Y'all, please make downloadable versions of your games if possible! I am so tired of dealing with broken web games.