So I got up already to stream to day to find out my Ethernet isn't working. After spending about an hour and a half trying to get it to work and failing I made the executive decision to not put myself in a bad mood getting frustrated with it and just use my WiFi today. No idea how my WiFi will hold up under stream conditions but hopefully it won't cause to much trouble for me. Let this minor setback serve as a reminded to all my fellow Jammers. When plans go awry (which they always do) always remember that sometimes its better to just move on to plan b than waste time and energy trying to get plan A to work.

Twitch.tv/TheseusInABottle

Gonna be playing Final Fantasy one on the NES to kill time until the theme is announced. This will be my first time every streaming so hopefully I don't have to many kinks to work out.

I HAVE FINISHED!!!

In Scrap Attack you play Scrappy the robot who's creators have turned him on without giving him a battery. I guess you can say he "starts with nothing". Fortunately scrappy can dump the scrap he collects into depositors and get himself a bit of extra charge.

All in all I think this is a pretty good arcade type game. If you wanna check out the gameplay you can see it here

https://youtu.be/v3N_KPhCgkM

Hopefully this year one of mine makes it to be the actual theme for the jam so I can understand what it must be like to be the only person who doesn't think the theme is bad. I also hope everybody who suggest themes is ready to join me in the trenches of rating every theme so that we can crush the floating islands dream together once and for all.

It was 81 degrees in my third floor apartment in Missouri when I finished rating this years selection of themes. Needless to say I was not forgiving in the slightest in my slaughter. I just want to say the only good joke theme was "Honey what did you do with the floating island" all the other ones that I thought where jokes were rather bland (looking at you "flOAtiNG IslANd" guy). Props to people that wanted to have a corona theme but actually rubbed there brain cells together to come up with things like virus or infection which are actually good themes and don't deserve the hate. Fun fact I went and looked back at my previous years to see how many themes I liked. In spite of having oh-most double the number of themes to slaughter this year I actually continued my trend of liking about half as many as I did last year.

also most of my yes votes are due to duplicates for gravity and of course my favorite theme to see every year :snowman:

After the slaughter and all this voting I am beginning to feel like the Heron in Aesop's Fables. Then again when participating in an event where the tag line may as well be "The theme is eternally bad." why not be picky. Whats the worst that can happen I end up with a theme I don't like.

I must say though this years lot of themes I think was the poorest of any Ludum Dare I have participated in so far (which is only three). I would bellyache more about how bad the theme will probably be but at this point that horse has been beating not only to death but back to life then to death again. Fortunately I plan on giving what is in my opinion the single best GDC talk (Ralph Koster Practical Creativity) another listen through so I am ready and able to make the best of what I am sure will turn out to be a bad theme. :smile:

The final voting round is finally upon us. I must say I am actually very happy with these final themes. Hopefully one of the ones I voted for will be the final theme selected. To bad mythology didn't make it to this final round I really hoped that one would be the winner, but all's well that ends well. I guess I am gonna go and start thinking about what I want to make so I can be ready to conqueror this LD. See you guys Friday.

Also I am the pretty sure I'm the first person to post there votes so I must follow the universal internet rule and say: "FIRST"

I decided yesterday that I wanted to do something jrpgish for this Ludum Dare. Once the theme was announced I had to stop and think about how to properly integrate it but I think I have managed something that works somewhat. I decided to spend these first four hours before bed working out the combat so I have all day tomorrow to fill in the rest of my ideas. Right now it my UI design can be summed up with the phrase "Wow thats clearly just the pokemon battle layout". I planning on doing a Darius style map for selecting what battle you go to next with your goal being to keep your totally not a pokemon alive until you can beat the enemy at the end. So far I'm pretty happy with what I got. I will be back tomorrow with more better updates.

I am really happy with how far I have gotten with my JRPGish game. In fact I'm so happy here is a quick list of everything I have done so far: - 95% of graphics - SFX - Music - Gameplay (still needs a bit of balance) - Options Menu (a first for me and now that I know how easy it is a definitely needed thing) - Ingame Instructions (No more instructions in the description for me)

I gotta say this is turning out to be my best Ludum Dare by far (here's hoping I get ratings that relflect that).

Of course here is the maditory snapshot of some vauge gameplay.

Saw the tweet from the LD twitter about theme suggestion being open and decided that it was time for me to come do my civic duty of suggesting bad themes.

Here's hoping that this Octobers Ludum Dare ends up being a good one. Also lets all pray that there is slightly better themes this year in the voting... Seriously if you put in any jokes about floating islands as the theme I will personally email you the Navy Seal copy pasta.

It took a while but I finished the slaughter. Now to wait for voting. Feel free to correct my Latin in a comment to this post. Also if you put in Magical Unicorn Potato Adventure as the theme I wan't you to know that I voted yes to your theme and it joins the pantheon of automatic yeses right next to :snowman: and :snowman2:

Jam packed day. Went from having only grid movement last night to having all my gameplay complete and about as much graphics as my skills allow me to produce. Plans for tomorrow are as follows - Music - Sound Effects - Options Menu (this is probably just gonna be sliders to control volume and maybe a resolution switcher in the desktop build) - Implement the actual rebindable controls system (this is mostly done already) - Create the information panel in game (so players don't have to look at something else to figure out how to play) - Other stuff that I am to tired to think about right now.

Here is the obligatory pre sleep screenshot of the days work. Also the player has animations for walking and jumping down the hole to go to a deeper level.

Fortunately I did manage to submit for the compo so no problems there. If you like short puzzle games with full voice acting be sure to Click this text here. and play my game Down the Dwarven Hole

And for those of you who are bad at puzzle games like me don't worry there is a button in the options menu to skip to the next puzzle.

Avalible both through HTML5 and on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Also playable on Apple Silicon because apparently unity supports that these days.

Ever have a theme you suggested make it to the final round of the Ludum Dare. No. Just me. Cool. Don't really know what to do with the realization that my theme is so bad that people have actually voted for it. Well onward to the regularly scheduled "I'm In" post.

My tools for this Ludum Dare are the same as every year - Unity for my game engine - Blender for 3D assets - Paint dot Net (also regular paint) for 2D Graphics - Audacity for Audio (specifically my vocal cords) - FontStruct for fonts

Also because I see so many people sharing resources I figure I will share my favorite resource for those who always draw a blank when the theme is announced.

Ralph Koster's 2014 GDC Talk "Practical Creativity" https://youtu.be/zyVTxGpEO30 I rewatch this GDC Talk probably one a year and the techniques in it have never failed me so watch it and who knows maybe you can take home the 1st place for Innovation in this years Ludum Dare.

Also for those of you who like me want to know who is to blame for voting for such terrible themes here is my final round votes.

Once I saw the theme I had a pretty good idea of what my idea was going to be. Still spent an hour trying to come up with anything better just in case. Closest I got was with an idea of a Reigns ripoff where you where the AI of a generation ship flying through deep space trying to keep everyone alive until you arrived at your destination. Decided I would rather go with my original idea instead. I've been reading some about WWA (World Wide Adventure) games which is a genre that I guess basicly only exist in Japan. This inspired me to go with a single screen dungeon puzzler sort of thing. Here is my mock-up for what the playscreen will look like.

I've got a pretty good idea of how everything should work so now I just need to program it all. Also credit where credit is due the actual 9x9 part of this game idea came from a post I saw a few days ago by @lintfordpickle here on this very site

I am now off to take my eight hours of rest and come back tomorrow with a vengeance. Very excited about my idea. I have made one major decision I knew I wanted something sort of fantasy and deeper and deeper I'm sure reminds people of dwarves. So I decided to do with a smug elf to hopefully break away from the crowd a little bit. As for what I actually got done today it was mostly figuring out grid based movement and wall detection. The plan for tomorrow is to get to a playable stage then to pump out some graphics so that it actually looks like a game and not varying shades of gray blocks.

Here is my smug elf and the other things I need to digitize and model tomorrow. And remember Elves rule dwarves drool.

I had to actually work for once on the days of the jam so this is more like a 36 hour jam for me. hopefully I can go get some sleep and use my time tomorrow to finish the main gameplay (I swear my checklist has like 2 item on it) then I can finally get to polish and making my game look like less of a Mondrian painting than it does.

Nothing like a nice 8 hours of sleep to drain the self loathing from your brain. Remember friends if you feel like everything your making is bad and your a bad person for making such garbage. It could be true, OR you could have just forgot to eat and have been awake for 20 hours.

As per usual I will be using Unity, Paint dot Net and Blender. Also as per tradition here are my themes I suggested.

I tried to go for themes that where very open to interpretation.

I absolutely hate what I have made so far so we're gonna try something diffrent. If it works it works if it doesn't then oh well.