Excited to dive in this October! Here are some theme suggestions I made

I had an vague idea in the start, but I scrapped it this morning and came up with something WAY better

Here's a teaser: Bow to your new leader, Star Emperor Kasprzak! :p

This game focuses entirely on dialogue mechanics and talking to people, so I made a nice dialogue system so I can focus on the characters primarily!

https://youtu.be/bAwNbTtRCOY

This game focuses entirely on dialogue mechanics and talking to people, so I made a nice dialogue system so I can focus on the characters primarily!

https://youtu.be/bAwNbTtRCOY

IM SO CLOSE AHHHHHHHHHH

I'll probably make a Post-Mortem of the project, but right now here is the timelapse with some of Devin Townsends music <3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQYS5OcfbU

Very excited for this next event! Here are my suggestions that I have suggested:

• How do you use this thing?
• The Secret Ingredient Is ___
• Invasive Marketing Strategy

I hope you're all doing well admist the turmoil. Stay strong, and I hope you have a great day ♥️

Did 200 themes today! Gonna try to do 200 every day, but I might do more depending on if I can or want to :p

So far, here are my favorites from this batch that perked my interest!

• Take A Closer Look
• One Day At A Time
• Beyond Infinity
• Twenty
• It Eats At You
• "Hmm..."
• How do you use this thing?
• _-inator
• By All Means
• You Took The Wrong Job
• Don't Let Them See You
• Gimme fifty!
• Three Two One
• It feels

Another 200 down! Here are some of my favorites from this batch:

• Gotcha!
• Don't Cry
• Support it
• The Killer In Me
• Shift Into High Gear
• You Gotta Let Go
• We Want To Help You
• Terms Of Service
• Not The Bees!
• The first second of...
• Off the charts!
• Shouldn't Mix Those
• Wake Them Up
• To Go Further Beyond
• One Step Too Far
• Out In The Open
• I've Never Done This Before
• In Short Supply
• Having A Break

Also special shoutout to:

200 more today, 600 Themes slaughtered total! I might not get them all done before the voting starts. I might try to do a push later tonight but I've been trying to get things sorted out here before the compo starts.

Anyways, here is another list of cool theme ideas I found!

• Oh, NO. You have got to be kidding me...
• Let's Celebrate
• Can it be saved?
• Beautifully Innefficient
• Onwards and Upwards
• Too Much Water
• The animals will help you
• No Interruptions
• You're Not Ready
• It's One Of Us
• I wish I knew earlier
• Always There
• All The Small Things
• Opened Up
• It's In The Shadows
• Who's The Boss
• This is your brain on _?
• Entwined Together
• There's Always Another Day
• Is it a dog?
• Who put that there?

Here's some info I shared on a forum during the last event about coming up with ideas. I hope it's useful!

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The creative process is one of the hardest parts of the entire compo/jam, because it dictates everything you're going to be doing for the next few days. I usually don't make ANYTHING until I have a full plan laid out of what I'm gonna make, but deciding what you're gonna make can be ultra-paralyzing if the theme is too vague, or focuses too narrowly on some mechanics.

So here is some things I do to handle the planning side of Ludum Dare:

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Situation: Theme was just announced Don't program anything yet. Don't make any art or anything. First you need to brainstorm really hard for a while, until you feel comfortable with an idea. Nothing sucks more than tying yourself to an idea you've changed your mind on halfway through the jam. What usually happens in my experience is that you either don't finish or you don't end up liking what you've made.

What I usually do is open notepad/xed and vomit out anything I can think of. I try to focus on mechanics and gameplay first and foremost, but sometimes you can get good ideas for mechanics from interesting situations and funny shit. Generally try to think of ideas you can make in 12 hours or less. Then you can spend the rest of the time polishing things up or adding more levels/music/etc. And if something goes wrong or you need to change something, you have enough headroom to do some refactoring.

Then once you have an idea, you need to make a list of all the things you want in your game, and what you will need for it to function. If you get some new ideas later you can always add on to it, or change it. But don't get carried away with feature-creep because

Situation: Theme is good, exciting even! Sometimes the theme gives you an idea right away, or the theme is fun enough that you don't really stress a whole lot on what you want to do. Sometimes you don't need to spin anything, and can make a very fun and engaging game without any wild alterations or interpretations on the theme. This obviously doesn't happen all the time, but basically try not to overthink too much. Keep things simple unless you can't.

Situation: Theme is vague or uninteresting. These are the WOOOORST. But it happens. So what I usually do is start thinking Why does this theme suck? What would make it more fun? Can I reword it without changing it too much?

Feel free to mess around with the theme as much as you'd like, while trying to stay faithful to it. Something dumb like tWo BuTtOnS can be deconstructed or made a small part of your game; like instead of it being a controls restriction, it could mean "these two buttons are the most important of these eight buttons" or "helping grandma find her two buttons she lost" or "you are against another guy in the game to see who can spam your button the hardest".

Situation: Theme is too specific and narrow. These can be harder to deal with sometimes. Tips from more vague themes work here too, but the goal is the broaden the theme out a bit to find some new angles to work with. A theme like "You Are The Monster" could be broken down by changing the context of what 'Monster' means, or maybe change what it means in the context of your game.

Situation: You're REALLY struggling with the theme. Ignore the theme.

Seriously, you can do this! The theme - technically - is completely optional; Theme is tied to a single rating that defines how close your game fits in it. You don't have to do the theme, but it helps to have it to give you a direction. If that direction is directly into a brick wall, then you can ignore it completely and figure something else out.

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I hope these ramblings help give you an idea on some problem solving techniques you can use. This is easily one of the hardest parts of the competition because of choice paralysis and mechanics design, so don't feel too bad if you're struggling; Everyone is!

Reused a logo from my last game and it looks really nice. I hope you all enjoy!

4K Link: https://i.ibb.co/Pwdfbnq/ld50-phobos-2160p.png 8K Link: https://ibb.co/09WK9ys

https://youtu.be/7jifTcDZE4M

Finally have some gameplay setup, but it was after a lot of soul searching and foundational coding. Time to make some L E V E L S

https://youtu.be/Xa8Y8M1E3FA

Feels good to have a solid direction finally! Loving what I can do so far with what I have 💕 Right now making some tutorial levels to teach the basic mechanics before pulling the gloves off.

To make my game a bit more engaging I decided to make a mechanic where multiple conditions must be met to activate different objects. This can really make things more interesting and I plan on using it a lot!

https://youtu.be/IDgyS5fBGYM

Things lined up for me to participate this event! I'm gonna try to use my WIP software renderer Aftershock to make a game, and try to help it mature by building something playable with it. Here's my theme suggestions:) Good luck everyone!

I'm gonna force myself out of my comfort zone and learn something new! This time I will be using the PICO-8 to make my game. I've already started warming up the basics of it by making a clone of my old game ROCKETS FUCKING EVERYWHERE. It's actually really nice to have no objects or nodes to manage, it's just you and the c o d e and nobody can stop you.

ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/you-are-beach-cop-sign

Finished my first ever PICO-8 game! You play as a sign with rules written on it, and you enforce those rules on the beach. Remove the rule breakers to keep the beach under the max. occupancy limit!

After restarting two times, I managed to complete a game for the Jam! It would have been a compo entry but I decided to modify some public domain music from Kevin Macleod a little bit, so I could focus on the rest of the game.

The game is about being summoned to work in South City, and you need to take an exam to determine where you will be placed.

So technically the Jam hasn't ended yet, and I have gotten a couple of comments that mentioned the writing speed of the answer explanation text is too slow. Am I allowed to fix this? Or would this be overstepping the rules, and the idea of a gold copy of a game being published?

You can play the game here. Itch.io embed because Godot 4 HTML doesn't work on the main site for some reason. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/south-city-worker-exam

Thank you for your feedback! I really appreciate your time, and I wish you all luck :heart:

After restarting multiple times, I have successfully finished my game for Ludum Dare Jam! I am going to share the development process, and explain my choices for the final game.

First Idea

At first, I wanted to make a first-person game where you play as a wizard that can only summon around four different objects. It was up to the player to use these objects together to defeat enemies, primarily using a kick function. I had three ideas for objects before I switched gears:

• A Dodgeball
• A Banana Peel
• A set of double doors, closed.

So I was thinking that the dodgeball could spawn in front of you and bounce, giving you time to decide on your angle. It can bounce off of multiple enemies before is disappears, but it can also hit you.

The banana peel was to cause enemies to fling into the air momentarily, giving you some breathing room to decide what to do next, or to use their momentum to throw them off ledges or into traps.

The double doors are my favorite; You can spawn them and use them as a makeshift shield, but their durability is very low. You could also optionally use it as a melee weapon, spawning the doors in so you could kick them open and knock anyone behind it down to the ground. Finally, it could be used to force enemies to take a different path, as the doors are locked and you have the keys. You could also use the doors to boost enemies through that had slipped on the banana peel, and the dodgeball could force a kick-function on the door at a distance. I was thinking about having enemies occasionally try to open the door, giving the small illusion that they alive and are not trapped in a video game.

But as I dug more into the game, I realized I was way WAY overscoping what I was capable of, and scrapped the idea.

Second Idea

My next plan was a PICO-8 game where you are a medic summoned to help someone at the top of a perilous mountain. You would platform around deadly hazards and such until you get to the top. When you ask them if they are okay, they say that they are having a rough time and feel down. I would then do a double fake out by having the medic give them a Ludum Dare game, made specifically for them as a gift, cheering them up.

So it turns out making solid platforming controls is very hard. I feel like the limitations of the PICO-8 could have given me some leeway (Pixel push out of walls etc) but I still had trouble. I couldn't roll out a nice Swept AABB algorithm either because that would take far too long. I tried to do everything in Godot instead, but the technical setup of that was also going to be a while. I am realizing now that I don't really have the luxury of making a more traditional game now, considering I'm halfway through the contest. I have to get super minimalist with my ideas to complete on time.

Final Idea

I had decided to make an exam-style game, based around a world I have been building since... Uh hold on [Checks Calandar] 2012.

The world started out as a high-school project for media communications; where we had to make a 45-minute radio broadcast that included music, commercials, and interstitial commentary. Me being super extra decided to make a story-focused radio broadcast that took place in the future. The story is completely different now 12 years later, but some core aspects haven't changed that much. Me and a dear online friend voiced everything, and my final grade was something to the effect of 107/109.

The idea was that you were being summoned to help in a place called South City. Naturally the player has very limited knowledge on these questions, much like the character coming in from what would probably be a small community nestled in somewhere.

The exam does not bar entry when failed. Instead it acts as a guide to the knowledge the player/character currently has, giving them an idea of where they need some education. The others working in South City also vote on your final placement a bit later; a lot of different areas of work need every person they can get, and there's a lot of competition on talent. You will most likely be placed where help is needed the most first, followed by areas that need your skillset. This is why you can't 'fail' the exam, and why you're not given a final result at the end. This is kind of a blue-balling for the player but it makes the most sense story wise, which isn't very good game design :L

I managed to submit my game with ten minutes left on the competition timer, but I submitted for the Jam due to the use of modified music from Kevin Macleod; a slowed down version of River Fire that is supposed to go down in pitch the further in the exam you go.

Final Thoughts

I let the little feature-creep goblins get me! awdauwdhuahs

I need to be more careful about how I scale my ideas. But I am VERY happy with the final result. I've been wanting to make something using this world for a long time, and it feels really nice to get some ideas out there. I'm hoping to make more things and share the full story, but that will take a lot of time.

You can play the final game down below. Thank you for reading my post-mortem! I hope you all enjoyed Ludum Dare and are having fun playing other peoples games! :heart:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/south-city-worker-exam