Last time I was somewhat satisfied with the results (this is a complete euphemism by the way). So I'm in for the next… event! (is there still a compo/jam distinction?)

My theme suggestions are:

• Rest, as in "sleep/have a break", or "no motion", "remaining part", "silence in music" (or even using a REST API in a game??)
• Chicken, as in the animal, or the coward. I always suggest this theme. Apparently, it's also slang for "a kilogram of cocaine" in the US. Yes, a kilogram, not a pound. In the US. Go figure.
• Following. I somewhat liked "it follows you" from LD49's final suggestions, but this is my weakest suggestion so far.

Ludum Dare 50 is kind-of a big deal. It's been 20 years since we started, and no joke, our anniversary event begins on Friday April 1st. What a curious date? :wink:

We're still getting setup here, but in the mean time feel free to go make some Theme Suggestions. For this event the Theme Selection will be the same as usual: make suggestions, slaughter, 3 rounds of theme voting plus a final round.

We are making some changes though.

New Decade, New Rules, New Event Format

Behind the scenes I've been making some of the biggest changes. Everything is still open source, but for clarity I've spun-off the code that runs this--the event website--into its own project. In time the project will become less "Ludum Dare" specific, but one step at a time.

Next, the rules are being moved. They're not live yet, but the new rules will soon be available on ludumdare.com/rules. The move will make it easier for anyone to contribute fixes, changes, and translations via the ludumdare.com project on GitHub.

Finally the rules are being heavily reworked, for the first time in nearly 5 years. The core will still be the same--hopefully easier to understand--but we had to make room for the new event format: Ludum Dare Extra.

Ludum Dare Extra

Like the "Compo" and "Jam" formats before it, games can now be submitted in the "Extra" format. Ludum Dare Extra games are like Ludum Dare Jam games, but you have nearly 3 weeks to submit them, until we stop collecting feedback and ratings for the event. There are no final scores given in the Extra format, and thus no winners. What Extra does have is feedback. When you submit a game in the Extra format, you still get to take part in the feedback and rating process. You are encouraged (incentivized) to submit as early as possible, to give ratings and feedback, so you get feedback on your game.

The goal of Ludum Dare Extra is to make taking part in Ludum Dare more flexible. Time is not always on our side, and to have to wait 6 whole months between events because it landed on a bad weekend is extremely unfortunate. The new Extra format effectively gives you 2 more weekends to make a game and still be a part of Ludum Dare 50: April 9th weekend and April 16th weekend, but you are also free to choose your own schedule. We like weekends, but you do you.

Ludum Dare Extra submissions will be open from Friday April 1st to Thursday April 21st.

Results for the Jam and Compo events will go live later in the day on April 21st.

Wrap-up

That's it from me for now. Feel free to tweet at me or e-mail me if something breaks.

Hi my name is Corey, and I am looking for a team to make a game. I am 14 years old, and I have been making games in flash for about 9 months, now and I'd like to meet/work with people my age. My discord is shxdowCorey#5694 and my newgrounds is CoreyMcDonald. Thank you and I foward to working with you.

Apparently someone from LD46 (LD47? I don't remember) just came back. I love encountering wacky themes like that (up until the point they are in the final round, that is. Or they stand before my sleepy eyes of the fateful saturday morning)

Edit: apparently, Jeff is in a fight alongside a rag tag bunch of wizards against aliens. Maybe the player has to collect tax from all those wizards as well?

Thank you, LD Team!!! I've known I was going to be out of town when the jam starts for a few weeks, but I've just been given the great news that I can participate only a few days later (:D)! I think this was a great idea for Ludum Dare, as I'm sure I wasn't the only one who would've missed it! I give the greatest thank you, as last jam was my first and I've been looking forward to participating ever since! :thumbsup:

Our team got bigger since our last post and we're now mainly (but not only) looking for more Godot users to help me dev the game. The team :

• a game dev/designer/writer/pixel artist (me: you can check out my stuff : https://bottled-up-studio.itch.io/)
• a music composer/sfx designer/writer
• a pixel / traditionnal artist / animator
• a music composer

Most of us are bilingual french-english. We plan on making a 2D game with Godot. Any person with any creative skill can join our team ! I want everyone to be able to fully express their creativity. Hit me up on Discord : I'm @ Dark Peace on the jam's server. :D

To kick-off LD's 50th event and 3rd decade, I'm thrilled to announce that Ludum Dare has a new format!

In addition to the Jam and Compo, you can now choose a 3rd option "Extra" when submitting to Ludum Dare.

• The Extra format is a modified Jam format
• There are no winners in the Extra format, but you still give ratings and feedback, and get ratings and feedback
  • NOTE: Extra ratings are unused. In the future they will let you compare against the Jam/Compo
• Extra format games are due on Results Day: April 21st, nearly 3 weeks later! Choose your own schedule!
• Again there are no winners in the Extra format, but you are incentivized to finish to get feedback with everyone else
• IMPORTANT: Please only use Jam, Compo, and Extra for finished games. Otherwise choose Unfinished.

The Extra format has many other uses:

• It can be used to opt-out of the competitive side of Ludum Dare
• If you miss Ludum Dare weekend, you have 2 more weekends to choose from: April 8th-11th and April 15th-18th
• If you're unable to finish by the Jam deadline, or you need an extra day, you can take it and not miss out
• If you want to spend a week on a game and get feedback (by giving feedback), you can do that now
• This isn't supported yet: In the future you will be able to submit multiple games
  • One Jam/Compo game, and any number of Extra games
  • To get ratings and feedback for all your games, you'll have to give 2x-3x more feedback and ratings
  • IMPORTANT: Your Jam/Compo and Extra games should be different games
• If you want to create and rapidly evolve a game over ~3 weeks, trading feedback for feedback on updates, you can
  • NOTE: While this is allowed, it is not well supported
  • The problem: Our prioritization is logarithmic; It takes and more and more feedback to get the same effect
  • We plan to improve prioritization to better enable this (and fix other algorithm problems)
  • IMPORTANT: Today this is only allowed in the Extra format. You give up placing in the Jam/Compo
  • However, we are exploring evolving Jam/Compo games into a hybrid, with separate scores and feedback

Setting aside a weekend to jam isn't always possible. With Extra, I hope more of you can find the time.

The Future

I've left the ratings enabled for Extra games because we have a use for them, but it may take a while before we do it. Calculating stats and metics happens on the same servers as the website, and I've had to put hard limits on calculations to keep the website responsive. Once all of this is offloaded to different servers, we can do some serious number crunching. :fire:

Submitting multiple games, this has come up a few times. Before, when events were only 48 and 72 hours, I would tell people to "pick one"--their best, their favourite--and submit that. Now with a nearly 3 week window to make games, I can't really do that anymore. The feature is closely related to blogging between, team building, as well as managing and deleting content (posts and games). All of those are tentatively scheduled for LD51 as part of a major code cleanup and triage. When that is finished, we can come back to this.

The name "Extra" comes from its original goal: To let you add new games to previous Ludum Dare events. I was waiting to add this after migration was finished (BTW: it's finally happening end of 2022/early 2023). But as inspiration hit, Extra grew to encompass many exciting new ideas, and it became worth trying sooner.

Finally, the thing I'm most excited about is that last bullet point: evolving a game over the ~3 weeks. We're not stopping anyone from doing this today, but you will run into roadblocks. Ludum Dare was never designed for this, but I'm so excited about the potential. For years I've racked my brain for good ways to drive engagement to ratings and feedback process. Introducing Extra games was the start, but the next step is to extend some of what Extra offers to all games.

The tricky part: Submissions to the competitive events--Jam and Compo--need to be unaffected. Once managing multiple games is supported (LD51), we can let you add a "post-event" Extra game as a child of your Jam/Compo game. These will work the same as other Extra games, but we can avoiding showing the same game twice, and send players to your Extra game once you have enough Jam/Compo ratings.

Fundamentally this requires a new game prioritization algorithm, one suited to ongoing feedback. The algorithm we use today is more feedback focused--we nerfed the rating lots of games quickly exploit--but it was still designed to diminish the value of ratings and feedback over time.

To get the most out of Ludum Dare, give feedback to others. In turn, you'll get feedback.

For 20 years, Ludum Dare was about coming together and challenging ourselves to make something. I'm excited to see Ludum Dare grow from game creation into game iteration.

This'll be my 9th time participating in a row!

I'll be using the following:

Art:

• Aseprite
• Clip Studio

Programming:

• Visual Studio Code
• html5 Canvas
• Unity 3D (maybe)

SFX:

• Audacity

Good luck everyone!

I'm still working on Prism Indigo, which I "rebelled" in order to work on during LD49, but there's no way I'm missing the milestone LD50. So you can count me in properly this time, and I'll be aiming to improve on my shocking performance in LD48, but as always, I'm not going to shy away from pushing my limits and trying new things.

I'll most likely be using TIC-80, as it's supplanted PICO-8 as my weapon of choice.

Those of you who played the game Star Crossed (LD47) may remember the short story introducing the game. That story inspired another project, a picture book titled “Sorrow, Hope, Hunger.” In addition to Star Crossed, it’s based on an old Russian folk tale about a princess and her wicked stepmother. Improvements have been made in the 2nd edition. Read it here:

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

                                                                               Sorrow, Hope, Hunger                                                                                

🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷🔷

The first two stories inspired by Star Crossed were Semiautomatic and Edge Detection. “Sorrow, Hope, Hunger” is also the title of an unrelated game made for practice for LD48.

he finished the TODO before the slaughter round ended so now I owe u all 1 Floating Island

included, the weird default order of recent themes that happens when u manage to glitch out the voting or come back to it after finishing lmao

i also see 3 themes got removed since i started, rip to those ones

I am usysrc (aka headchant) and I am planning to participate in LD50 next weekend.

My tools are: - LÖVE https://love2d.org/ - My own codebase/boilerplate: https://github.com/usysrc/love-boilerplate - VSCode / Vim - Aseprite - Hardware Synths / FLStudio / https://sfxr.me / tenacity

To shorten the time until the event starts I am currently updating and reworking my codebase. This isn't the first time I do Ludum Dare but I am as stoked as the first time. I wish you all a great time!

if "combine" is the theme, I'll probably make a game about the combine from half life 2

Come hang out on Twitch !

https://www.twitch.tv/danny_k1994

Doing some ludum dare theme prep. Making some quick prototypes!

Will be rating and playing games after submission ends also!

Got any old Ludum Dare games Ill play them too and give some feedback :v:

This will be my fourth LD and going into it with a partner this time; can't wait to see what the theme is!

Hi, This is a sondage to see if there is interesting to use Game Maker Studio 2 in free version for this Ludum Dare, if you can respond, that's very cool !

https://strawpoll.com/polls/kjn1jrmajgQ

(i can publish the result before the beginning of the JAM for the interested, if the number of vote is significative)

Sky pirates - game about highjacking santa's sleigh mid-flight - thieves who bungie-jump from hot air balloons - using flying drones to physically access servers to steal software

Teleportation - portal-like - game about managing travel, airport-like facility with teleporters - racing game with portals as shortcuts, need to set one portal on first lap, other on second, use them on third

Tunnels - dig dug remake - exploring abandoned subways/sewers - surfing/racing through a sewer?

Space is limited - play as a Tron-style program that has to delete junk files, avoid accidentally deleting important ones - a game where the level gets smaller - managing limited resources on a spaceship

You are the power source - endless runner on a treadmill, hampster wheel, to generate power - game about manipulating politics (political power) - Matrix referece?

Overgrown - a game about killing giants/titans - lawn-mowing simulator - a game where you have to collect a lot of food, and eventually need to roll instead of walk

Crossroads - traffic management game - small metroidvania with central area - frogger style - race game where every light is red and you have to run them, avoid traffic

Repair - robot needs to repair itself to regain abilities - pit-stop simulator - puzzle game about IT worker rapidly fixing coworkers computers, Warioware sytle

Branching out - social/career networking simulator - game about trees?

Momentum - bus with a bomb on it - vehicle with no breaks - ski jump - build speed to launch player into destructible level

A single resource - steampunk survival, water is used for drinking and energy - research game were you have to find answers to trivia using only wikipedia

Strength in numbers - pikmin style, recruit animals to help you - realtime strategy were you depend on cannon fodder

Decay - of course, Zombies - urban decay, crime in the slums

Treasure Map - any action/adventure involving treasure hunt - you need to explore an area and mark points of interest on a map, to sell to tourists

Fill the void - lemmings style, build a bridge of whatever before dumb creatures walk off cliff - constantly having to feed a perpetually hungry person/monster (wendigo?) - dating simulator, fill the void in your life

Combine - combine two genres - mad scientist splicing genes - food-preparing game, pizza maybe?