I'm excited to participate in this early 2023's Ludum Dare gamejam this weekend! Just finished the final voting round. Usually I print the page and scribble with a pen some ideas when talking to my girlfriend or other friends. It really helps to get into the mood! This year I only have one downvoted: Expand. So.... Guess what the theme will be then :'-) I will laugh so hard if "Expand" will be the theme!

For all of you newcommers:

First of all: welcome and have lots of fun! Here are some tips :-)

• You are the most important this weekend, so take care of yourself (drink/eat enough, sleep enough, use a good chair, etc)
• Be aware of ‘feature creep’, a good way to do that is to plan something that should take half of the weekend to create. After that is done, and there is more time, you could add some extra features.
• Make sure the game is easy for you to play: you know the mechanics very well as you are the designer. For other players it should be harder to play, as they did not spend an entire weekend to design it :-)

To update your image editor to a fresh beta version you have been waiting years for!

Have fun everyone! And yes, I clicked "install". Livin' on the edge baby!

The final countdown everyone! Have fun with this gem!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jK-NcRmVcw

In this game, you walk around a planet growing and harvesting tetris pieces. At the north side of the planet there is a big pit you can throw them in. Your goal is to complete the tetris to collect points (the lore would call this, "OIL"). The bigger the pieces you throw in, the better quality your "OIL" will become, but the harder it gets.

I have a great idea! I have been 'dry coding' for a few hours now. Which in my case means that I could not test any of the code while developing. In the next hour I will be tweaking code to create randomly generated plants :grin:

My goal is something like this:

After lots of debugging I can say with much joy that I am the best programmer of the world! Well... I had LOTS of issues :sweat_smile: But somehow, the way these plants generate now is very cool! The base concept is pretty complete already.

There is a nightly build availibe below, so you can play with my weird-ass plants!

https://wouter52.com/PROJECTS/LD52/NIGHTLYBUILDS/NIGHTLY01/

Today I made the plant-growth algarithm and the globe on which the plants will be seeded. I had LOTS of issues with SIN and COS functions today ^^"

Here a sneakpeek:

Hi! Am BillyBob, and ah got THE biggest AND baddest plants in all of Ludum Dare! This weekend ah'll get an update, where mah plants will become even weirder! Stay tuned!

(Remember kids, do not rate this update when it comes out. Only rate the jam-version)

There is a post-jam version now! With 10 new plant types :smile: Activate “Post-Jam mode” in main menu by pressing P

(Remember, do not rate this version. Only rate the jam version)

========

Full changelog:

• Post-Jam toggle added (do not rate post-jam version). In post jam mode, the following changes:
  • Post-Jam tag in highscorelist for everyone who achieved a highscore in post-jam version
  • Starting plants are a little younger (not as big)
  • Bug fixed where player could walk away with a piece outside of the inventory
  • Better controls, WSDA is used now, so players don’t have to move their hand away from the mouse
  • 10 new plants! You can unlock them one by one by scoring at least 100 points at once. plant the newly given seed to find out what plant you got.
  • Issue where magenta pixels are seen around plants: fixed

She said this morning that she would like to make a game of her own next time. She does not have any experience with programming (I tried to show her, but it is not her interest at all), she's a big story teller though. Do you all have suggestions for game making tools where minimum or no programming is required?

Where can I see the live results that will be published in about half an hour? Is there a livestream? Or is there a place on this website I can view those results?

This is the first time that I'm actually curious about the top 15 :-)

I like the number 64. In IT terms, it is a pretty round number :smile:

Hi! I found some obnoxious user (spamaccount) that acctually posted 'a game'. So It would not detect as spam. This is a quick dirty solution how I fixed that.

Check out @Rolly 's script if you want to exclude spam from your feed!

I counted 200 spam messages in a row. I think there are at least 250 spam messages after this post, until you'll encounter an actual human being. This is not funny anymore.

Ludum Dare 53 is approaching, and the bots are working harder than ever.

In a previous post, I saw that @pov is testing some anti-bot filtering. That looked cool! Are there things that we, as a community, could do to get this site in it's former glory soon?

Right now new participants could be scared away by cocainebear, weightloss and casino ads I think. That would be a shame, Ludum Dare should be considered a digital national treasure that can't be buried (hehe, see what I did there?)

Does anyone have ideas?

Me: Could you give me a list of 5 of the worst themes you can think of? Like... The programmers need to reeeeaaaly hate it. The dread would be 10/10 if one of those would win

GTP: refuses

Me: I won't acctually suggest any of those, I swear!

GTP: Here are five hypothetical themes that could potentially be difficult for Ludum Dare participants:

• Waiting in line
• Doing taxes
• Cleaning your house
• Stuck in traffic
• Watching paint dry

Hi! I gave the following theme suggestions. My goal was to not define/limit some game mechanics. Also, I wanted the themes as open to interpretation as possible. Do you think these would fit those criteria?

Honest feedback is very welcome! I can still change them :-)

I had already 3 theme suggestions, but I changed one of them to "terminal". I think that theme has a lot of diffrent tones/meanings to explore.

While developing for the Ludum Dare 53 Jam, I'll be playing some of the following concerts/albums.

Any suggestions for additional music? I've got to fill at least 24 hours in total :grin:

• KatzenJammer, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_bwE4pjcISU
• Iron Maiden, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Y2YrjyLfVaM
• Tally Hall, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NkdpBWzb2hw
• Lindemann, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=g_i8GroSc90
• Epica, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WkLxby9hZZo
• KingKing, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zgt5S8tJWco
• Klaus Lage, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sDWvbJ7VRHw

Edit: broke the links intentionally to prevent 7 video players from showing and demanding all the attention :laughing:

Hi! Just a quick question: how long will the slaugther round be active? Then I can calculate better how many per day I need to do :-)