I am excited for Ludum Dare 57, I had no time to prepare though until now. For the previous edition I had made an effort to clean my github repositories, have a clean and uniform readme across the several editions I participated. I try to put all the information I have gathered in order to help the community (disclaimer an LLM helped me clean the english for the rest of that post)

My goal is to have a repository that people are keen to visit to look at my code, share, star, or fork it to elaborate on. I also try to do the same while reviewing other compo game to look at their repo, add a star to my personal collection of game I have played

1. Repository Setup

Start by creating a repository on GitHub. I first name the repository LD57, I'll update the name later on when I am finishing the project. Github keeps the links active. (you can reach my previous entry by both of the links :

https://github.com/dhmmasson/lilyFrogs https://github.com/dhmmasson/LD56

I like to update the name afterward because it makes it easier to identify in list (see : https://github.com/topics/ludumdare56). Add a short but description that explain in very few word what's the game is about (on the top right of the main page in the about section)

56 Lilypads is a turn-based game where frogs leap between lilypads to catch flies and lotuses, but each lilypad disappears once left behind! Compete for the highest score in this strategic battle before movement options run out

Consider using these topics to make your Ludum Dare entry more discoverable: - game - game-development - ludum-dare - ludumdare - ludumdare57 - ludum-dare-57 - ld57

In the repository setting you can also add a cover image, that github will display in list and while sharing the repository on social media.

2. README.md: First Impressions Matter

A well-structured README.md file is crucial. It should include: - A brief introduction to your game - Screenshots or GIFs (if possible) - Installation and running instructions - A link to your Ludum Dare submission page - Credits and acknowledgments

3. Use Badges for cool look

Badges help make your repository visually appealing and informative at a glance.

Using shields.io I have created some shield for ludumdare, one for the edition and two for the compo/jam using the ludum dare color palette.

md ![Ludum Dare](https://img.shields.io/badge/LudumDare-57-f79122?labelColor=ee5533&link=https%3A%2F%2Fldjam.com%2Fevents%2Fludum-dare%2F57) ![Ludum Dare](https://img.shields.io/badge/LudumDare57-Compo-f79122?labelColor=6f7984&link=https%3A%2F%2Fldjam.com%2Fevents%2Fludum-dare%2F57%2Fgames%2Foverall%2Fcompo) ![Ludum Dare](https://img.shields.io/badge/LudumDare57-Jam-ee5533?labelColor=6f7984&link=https%3A%2F%2Fldjam.com%2Fevents%2Fludum-dare%2F57%2Fgames%2Foverall%2Fjam)

You can also use badges for what stack you use, what platform you support, the license used... md ![HTML5](https://img.shields.io/badge/html5-%23E34F26.svg?style=for-the-badge&logo=html5&logoColor=white) [![License: MIT](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-MIT-yellow.svg)](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) Once the event is over, you can use this excellent website https://badges.jaxs.onl/ a rating badge like this: md ![Ratings](https://badges.jaxs.onl/56/fifty-six-frogs/badge.svg)

4. Choose a License

Adding a license is essential if you want others to use or contribute to your code. Popular choices include: - MIT: Permissive, widely used - GPL: Requires derivative works to also be open-source

Use choosealicense.com to help pick the right one.

5. Add a CITATION.cff File

If you are an academic and you’d like others to properly cite your work, include a CITATION.cff file. Example: yaml cff-version: 1.2.0 title: Fifty Six Lilypads! message: >- If you use this software, please cite it using the metadata from this file. type: software authors: - given-names: Dimitri family-names: Masson orcid: 'https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7072-3146' email: ... repository-code: 'https://github.com/dhmmasson/LD56' url: 'https://dhmmasson.github.io/lilyFrogs' license: MIT version: v1.0.0 date-released: '2024-10-06'

6. Engage with the Community

Ludum Dare is not just about making games but also about interacting with fellow developers. Here are some ways to engage: - Star and watch other participants' repositories - Give and request feedback on GitHub Discussions - Fork the games you like to try your spin on it - Use Issues and Pull Requests to track progress

7. Share Your Repository

Once your repo is ready, share it on social media, the Ludum Dare website, and relevant forums. Encourage others to star and fork your project!

Are you using GitHub for Ludum Dare 57? What best practices do you follow? Share your thoughts below!

Ludum Dare

Back in LD53 I made the simple puzzle game PACKAGES. There was something that I really liked about it, and other people seemed to like it too, landing me 108 in compo overall and strong showings in audio and graphics too.

I had made the game in Unity at the time but when the whole Unity debacle of 2023 happened I thought it was the right time to move to Godot. My thought was I would create an endless version of PACKAGES with procedural puzzles as a quick project to learn Godot. I'd realease it in a couple of months.

Boxbound

The game quicky grew in scope as games tend to do, and we are now over a year and a half later. The game now features endless levels, a weekly leaderboard and a story spanning hundreds of levels. The gameplay has been broken up with unexpected events that you have to deal with as to not make it too repetitive.

Conclution

Ludum Dare is such a great place to try out new game ideas, seeing what works and finding new projects to work on. Hopefully I can participate this weekend and maybe fins another project to work on.

The game itself is available now on AppStore and Google Play Store. You can read more about the game and find links on www.curlewstudios.com/boxbound .

Good luck this weekend!

Plant the seed: +1

Open to a few interpretations, but will most likely result in 90% gardening games, which is too much like harvest IMHO. But the non-gardening games could all be pretty interesting, and I've already got an idea I like just in case.

Can be read as gardening, sexual, propaganda, espionage, maybe parasites. I could maybe shoehorn my card game into it via the sexual path, but I think there's a funny sexual joke game to be made...

Decay: -1

A few interpretations, but not sure they're very compelling.

There's decay of matter like corpses and trash, decay of things that need maintenance like cars or relationships, or I guess the decay of sound forms or other waves over time type of thing. That last one could make 'waves' fans happy. I'm not really into any of those concepts mechanically or narratively, so it would be a struggle for me and likely for a lot of other people as well.

Recharge: -1

I could only really see 3 interpretations for this.

Batteries, self-care, and maybe some memey interpretations like re:charge or re-charge in the sense of charging into something again rather than charging something back up to full. Arguably, 'Charge' on its own would have made for a better theme than 'recharge' does. It's just too limiting.

Depths: -1

Underground, underwater, cave spelunking, deep diving into information. Feels a bit limiting again and I've heard a lot of complaints that it's been done so much via otherly-worded themes. Pass.

Salvage: -1

I like Lethal Company, but not sure I wanna play a few hundred clones of Lethal Company when there's already a few hundred clones out there on Steam... other than lethal company clones all I can think is metaphorical salvage like salvaging a relationship; or a 'make something new out of disparate parts' approach. Again, doesn't really feel like a super open theme to me. You could I guess take a memey approach where you identify the ages of different salves; the Salve-Age if you will.

Doors: +0

It's a funny theme to imagine winning, but realistically, it's too constricting. There's no obvious paths and no subversive paths. It's just doors. What, you want me to recreate Monster's Inc or something? A game about installing doors? Then again, it's constricting but not in an obvious "every game will be the same" way, just that they'll all somehow be about doors. This might actually be just restrictive enough o force people to be more creative... Fine, have my +0.

Send signals: -1

A little bit broad, a little bit constricted. Will mostly fall into the camp of digital/analog signals or face-to-face communication signals, so games might end up feeling very same-y. But I could use the face-to-face path to shoehorn in my card game and give it some more mechanical direction or a different mechanical direction. Not enough to get a positive vote from me though.

Keep it together: +1

Gotta vote it for nepotism, that's my theme! But I also think it's got that good-ol'-fashioned "keep it alive", "sacrifices must be made" theme style that LD has bee missing for a while. It's a common phrase which allows for easy interpretation and easy subversion, without anything entirely specific; and because it's a vague command, it's a good prompt for narrative design. Keep it together? Why should I? Or wha am I keeping together? Will it fall apart if I don't? Are we in a group: "keep it, together"? Why does it take multiple people to keep it together, is it a pet? A baby? It's open to a lot of questions that can lead to a lot of interesting games.

Out of order: -1

So you want me to fix toilets and machines or organize your house for you. At worst, punish someone in the royal court for speaking out of turn. Got it. Next.

Wild magic: -1

I mean it sounds neat, but where do you really want me to go from there? Druid simulator #5000? D&D clone #1200? What kind of games would it even lend itself towards? Gardening again but this time it's overgrown forest and you can move vines around with your mind? Maybe a couple games about shapeshifting? Ehhhh.

Side effects: -1

I fail to see how this is one people even like. Like it would just be annoying to play and annoying to code depending on how you took it. Especially if you wanted to keep the element of surprise, meaning players wouldn't be able to make informed decisions and might be more annoyed than anything else. And thematically, 90% of the games are just gonna be about drugs/mad science experiments or ingesting mysterious materials. Very samey.

Garden: -1

This one's like 'plant the seed', but worse. Now it's 100% gardening games. Even if you subvert it into growing people in the soil or something strange you wouldn't normally find in a garden, you're still restricted to gardens as a concept. I don't need harvest 2.0 thank you, if you want to make a gardening game then give a +1 to 'plant the seed' so the rest of us can make something different than your game.

Trade: -1

Merchants. Occupations. Bartering. Trading card game. None of these sub-categories interest me very much, but at least there'd be about a 25% split across them since they're all easy interpretations to think of. I'll work with it if I have to, but I'd rather not.

Waves: -1

Ocean. Greetings. Cheering in a sports stadium simulator. 'Making waves' in society. They are all pretty different, it's really lacking a lot of narrative interpretation possibilities, but at least they're not too same-y. Still pretty ehh though.

Bottomless: -1

This is the same thing as 'depths', but now a few people can make games about people with no butts or people with 'bottomless' stomachs, which is slightly better than 'depths' since it adds a couple new categories. To be honest, I'm probably the main one that wants to make a game about people missing their butts. But like, not badly enough for a +0. But I could live with it if it won, that's all I'm saying...

Companion: -1

Cube?

In all seriousness, I could see a couple dating sims, escort mission simulators, co-op games and some pet sims. It's a decent enough theme. I could technically shoehorn in my card game but not very well. Not compelling enough for a +0 though.

Layers: -1

Now we've got 'depths' but the extra categories are about lasagna, onions, paintings, and clothes. Which is an improvement over butt-less people and gluttons. Well, with the lasagna and onions you might still get quite a bit of gluttons. Also, you're going to get a lot of Shrek games. Are we ready as a community to play that many Shrek games?

Anchor: -1

It's funny to me that this is at the bottom of the round, like it's the 'heaviest' theme, like some kind of... anchor.

We've got stopping a boat from moving, Mr. Krab's house, being the worst player on your team, finding something to ground you mentally or spiritually. I could imagine some interesting ways to take anchor, but again, do I haaaaave tooooo?

In summary: 3+ word themes, that give you vague instructions or verbs to work with rather than flatly describing something as is the case with 'out of order', continue to remain the optimal theme style hands down. Even though I would have enthusiastically given a +1 to 'chained' if it made it through slaughter. Or some of the other actually good 1-word themes that didn't make it through slaughter compared to this dictionary simulator selection of themes. Alas poor themes, I knew ye well...

I'm finally joining another Ludum Dare! Standard setup: Godot + Aseprite. But this time I'll try to make progress and results videos and post them on YouTube. Scary! :movie_camera:

Gather around folks for I shall commune with the spirits and intercept the votes as they fly into the sky.

The theme is one neither controversial nor talked about a lot. As folks compete to turn our collective opinion towards or away from certain themes, it is the insignificant and the less talked about themes that shall receive blessings by all sides of the spectrum as always, it is the "I suppose it's fine." themes that slip through while poor Folklore suffers.

The spirits say, our theme will be non-other than Doors :crystal_ball:.

If I'm right I'm right, if I'm not, it's a test from the spirits.

After much consideration, and having initially signed up, I've reluctantly decided that I won't be able to take part in Ludum Dare 57. I have too many other things to do over the weekend, and with my health having been swinging between "okay" and "terrible" for a while now, I don't want to push myself and end up burning out. I may be forced to sit out LD58 as well, for similar reasons, but that's still six months away so we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Best of luck to everyone who will be taking part!

Hey everyone!

We're a scrappy little team of three coming together once again to take on the Ludum Dare challenge! No official team name yet — we keep forgetting to come up with one, but hey, naming things is hard, right?

👥 The Crew:

🎨 Bizzybee – Music, SFX, Art

Hello to the wonderful LD community! …Oh no, I'm stuck doing the art again! How could this have happened. 😭 In all seriousness, I'm super excited for this LD. Having 3 days dedicated to working hard on something, and putting it out there within that timeframe, does something wonderful both for minimizing perfectionism and getting this compact feeling of accomplishment. Constraint is such a wonderful tool to work with in our increasingly overwhelming lives. I'm hoping to "brush up" on my art skills and put out something as simple and complete as I can manage within the time limit. I also haven't been composing music a lot lately, so I'm happy to have an excuse to get back into it. Here's hoping the theme is engaging, is capitalized, and has proper grammar. :P

🐞 Frank Gevaerts – Programming, Elite Bug Squasher

I've now had six months to forget most of what I managed to learn about Godot in the previous two LDs. This is fine! This will be my third team participation (my fifteenth overall), and while I don't know what the game will be like, I'm very much looking forward to the experience. Working with people who are actually good at music, art and writing is amazing!

🐟 Balimaar the Bass Fish – Programming, God of Bug Creation

I'm really excited to work again with Frank and Biz. We created a very nice and atmospheric visual novel with Apprentice Quest 2 LDs ago and in the previous LD we made what was our best game yet in PaperCat Farms — an adorable little farming game that was surprisingly engaging and fun! One key takeaway from last Ludum Dare was the fact that we just dived right into making PaperCat Farms without really deciding what we were going to do other than 'let’s make a farming game!'. We ended up with something coherent and playable, but it would have been even better if we spent a little more time planning at the outset. Looking forward to the grind and playing everyone’s creations afterwards!”

🛠 Tools of the Trade:

Game Engine: Godot

Art & Audio: Whatever Bizzybee pulls out of their magical hat

Communication: Friendly chaos in Discord, probably

💡 A Bit About Us:

Frank is a seasoned LD veteran, entering his 15th jam this time around! 💪

Biz is a college grad with serious creative chops in music and art 🎶🖌️

Balimaar is a part-time aged care worker and full-time Dungeon Master 🐉, soon to bring Pathfinder 2E into the mix!

Wishing everyone the best of luck, inspiration, and time management this weekend!

Let’s make something cool — and play the heck out of each other’s games afterwards!

See you all on the other side! 💜

Yay, it's that time of the year again!

Joining in with Godot and using this template as a starting point: https://github.com/bitbrain/godot-gamejam

Last Ludum Dare was great looking forward for this one! Using Godot and Aseprite again.

This is my first time back to game dev in over a year. I'm ready to get back into it! I'll be sticking with the tools familiar to me (Unity and Inkscape). Best of luck to all!

Like so many others joining LD57, I too have consulted a wise and all knowing oracle for insight into the theme:

Prepare yourselves accordingly!

I'm really hoping for the Salvage theme this time!

Also, hope it's okay to post this, but just wanted to let peeps know I'll be streaming some my jam process (art, creative etc.) and also playing and giving feedback on games post-game as well. I love meeting and chatting with other jammers and playing as many entries as possible!

I'll be on both Twitch and YouTube

Good luck to all, and may the doors be ever in your favour.

Hello. I am Gamemaker3000.and I just wanted to let you know, I AM GOING TO PARTICAPATE IN LUDUM DARE 57! This will be my first Ludum dare ever. here are the tools I am going to use.

Game engine:

GameMakerStudio2

Art:

Libresprite (too broke to afford aesprite and too lazy to compile it)

Music:

Famitracker

SFX:

JSFXR

I am personally hoping for wild magic. I think it could lead to interesting games. see ya when the jam starts!

As usual, my old puzzle game is free for a few days in order to celebrate the next LudumDare session. I wish you the best my dear friends. And don't forget, the theme always sucks :cat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVeq4l7NPsk

https://geckoo1337.itch.io/theorem

First time doing this, but I figured this will be a good crash exercise to get me back in the rhythm of my learning after traveling for holiday.

makin a game in roblox again, I wanted to have my website + either Godot or Unity running again by now but just too distracted with life, and this is the easiest way to have multiplayer support.

After a long absence, we finally want to participate again in this Ludum Dare 57. Our last contribution to LD 49 was more of a pitch (“That Algae-sculated quickly”, theme: “Unstable”), and our last completed contribution "Deep down the asteroid" (theme: Deeper and deeper) was three years ago, LD 48. A lot has happened since then! The baby in the picture has grown up, and there are now two kids jumping around here, but this time we came up with the brilliant idea of organizing a babysitter. Who knows, maybe we'll have a family game jam soon.

Excited for this to be my 10th Ludum Dare event! Taking some time off work and away from the side project of turning my last LD game into a full experience to enter into the jam this weekend!

For the record, my page only shows 8 entries because one of the weekends I participated I couldn't finish because of a bug that destroyed the entire project, but I had worked the entire weekend on it

When I first started Ludum Dare i hadnt even graduated high school, and now im working in the IT sector with a CS degree. Here's to hoping for a good 10th jam, and hoping I don't go too ambitious.

[cracks fortunetelling knuckles]

Oh Wisdom Chickens, what card best represents the theme most likely to win for LD57 tomorrow?

Six of Wands, you say? Hmm, I wonder which theme that could represent...

Could it, would it mayhaps, perchance be...

DOORS, PERHAPS?!?!

Hi everyone! If this is your first game jam or you are new to game development in general, please check out this website I made. It's full of free tools, resources, and examples for you to look at and learn off of. Hope it helps and good luck!

Check it out: https://gamedevresource.com/