Hello jammers, I've been participating in Ludum Dare for a few years now and after going through many voting rounds and culling thousands of themes I think I have some useful tips to help reduce the amount of poor theme suggestions that will inevitably get culled.

Now, there is no guarantee that your suggestions will get to the final round, or that they will not get culled, but these tips might help you avoid making low-effort themes that make up a large chunk of theme suggestions and waste everyone's time.

Tips that may help you get past the first cull: 1. Spell your suggestions correctly. Misspelled suggestions will get culled. Suggestions with emojis will get culled. 2. Avoid making meme suggestions. "OwO wats dis" and "Amogus" will get culled. 3. Avoid making obscure references or overly complex/nonsense suggestions. "Terpsichorean myrmidon" will get culled, anything with brackets explaining what your suggestion means will get culled. 4. Avoid suggesting previous themes. Nobody wants to redo the same theme again. 5. Avoid suggesting "gimmick" themes. These include suggestions that limit gameplay, such as "3 button controls", "Two colors only", "Non-euclidean space", etc. 6. Avoid suggesting themes that require specific knowledge/skills. Some people/teams can make a multiplayer FPS, while others can only make a visual novel. "3D Platformer" will get culled, "2D FPS" will get culled.

I've also noticed that successful themes typically follow "Capitalize first word only" format (the first word is capitalized but the remaining words are all lowercase). It could be that themes of this format are generally better, or it could be that people prefer this format. This could be a coincidence but I've been noticing it a lot. Unless your theme relies on a specific capitalization, it might be worthwhile to format it this way. "All Capitals" also works for some themes but it's been a while since a theme matched this format.

Bear in mind - these tips are not a result of some thorough data-driven analysis of every theme suggestion ever made and is based purely on my personal experience culling and voting on themes for a few years in a row. This may not apply to older LDJams. Take these suggestions with a grain of salt but do consider at least the most obvious ones - like spelling correctly (I will always cull misspelled suggestions, for example).

If you have your own tips or thoughts on these ones, share them with me and others.