• Lots of ways to interpret "Avoid Text", from making a game that doesn't include any text in it, to literal avoidance of books or words
• Having a game that switches between two different genres (not combining them, just alternating), whether it happens once or continuously, could result in a lot of interesting types of games

I am going to automatically downvote any theme that includes “is Key” out of principle, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

Whatever it is, we know it’s key. It’s the theme. Saying it’s key is redundant.

It’s like if you want the theme to include some element of timing, and you suggest the theme, “Timing is key and is very important and should be used”.

Just say “Timing”. Simple, concise, effective.

Please, take the few moments to look over your themes, and if either of them include “is key”, just delete that part.

You’re a programmer; you need to learn how to be concise.

Start here.

Imma try to make a game, no clue what program but aiming for something I can click into eachother- I have no experience in programming language. Suggestions are welcome! If it does not work then there is a next time.

Oh and themes! - Weather - Emergency procedure

Idk tf I can do, trynna gain skill and get inspiration to do smth, searching for a 3d enviroment artist role in game creating

◄Get out of hand ◄Better never than late

Although this might get swallowed up by LD theme suggestion posts, I wanted to let everyone know about a new series I started called "Dice Dev", where I'm learning Godot by rolling for random game elements and building a game based on what I rolled. There's also a link in the video description that takes you to a free download of the completed game.

(https://youtu.be/KpOqRzvo1Ic?si=Pf4vuTfEpEmJbYv-)

Glad to see the site up and kicking again, thought my browser was busted lol.

I came up with these in 2 minutes lol, but they're something

Very hyped to participate again! Sorry I couldn't think of anything relating to floating islands or that life is currency :smile:

Excuse the jpeg artifacts, I Have been sharing this to everyone I know! I present to you: the perfect themes:

~~This is satire~~

I think most people would agree that this would be a bad theme:

"Defeat a witch by burning the book that gives her power - also the book is hidden in a chest in the third room on the right"

Of course this theme would still produce a variety of games - one can easily imagine 2D platformers, 3D shooters, puzzle games, etc... being made from this theme. Maybe the only way to burn the book is by drifting so hard into it that your tires go up in flames in the racing game you made. If we ignore the lengthiness for a moment, we can still agree: No theme should completely give away the objective or content of every game you could make from it.

"Sulfur hexafluoride"

This is also a bad, or at least very weak theme. While it is more concise and less specific than our wizard theme, it still does not allow for any room in what the theme actually means. Maybe you can make a game about stealing sulfur hexaflouride, or a game about manufacturing sulfur hexaflouride, or a game about drifting so hard that your tires go up in flames in order to...

It's all about sulfur hexaflouride, because that word can only mean one thing.

So, I propose that a theme should be concise, nonspecific and have many homographs.

Homograph: One of two or more words that have the same spelling but differ in origin, meaning, and sometimes pronunciation.

An example of a homograph would be the word "tear", describing both "a drop of clear salty liquid secreted from glands in a person's eye", "a split in something caused by it having been pulled apart forcefully" and a few others. With this perfect definition of what a good theme is, I present to you the objectively best themes possible:

1. Run
2. Set
3. Go
4. Take
5. Stand

Ok, maybe this definition is not perfect after all - it seems we went too far with it. Too many interpretations are now possible: apparently the word "Run" has 645 different definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary. The subcategories get so deep the numbering system for them starts with capital roman numerals, then to lowercase roman numerals, on to arabic numerals, latin letters and back to lowercase roman numerals, so you get fun headings such as

II.i.44.f.ii.

This rambling has, in a way, just lead us back to what everyone already knows: a theme should be open to interpretation, yet specific enough so you can't just make anything.

I think that there is something to learn from this though, which is: If you come up with a single-word theme, make sure that it has many homographs. If you can't name five (or let some ~~de~~generative AI come up with 20) it's probably a bad theme. What also seems to work nicely are words that are nouns and verbs at the same time.

"The theme always sucks" some might say and while that is true, I'm mostly writing this because I don't feel like voting on over 2000 themes again. (ok, to be truthful, I'm mostly writing this because I'm bored) I think it's alright to be a little elitist about what makes a good theme; I think it's alright to shame people a little who submit "You don't play as the main character" for the tenth time; I think it's alright to try and quantify the unquantifiable.

So what did I - in my oh-so-great-wisdom - come up with for themes this time around? 1. Cycle 2. Pass

I know they are maybe too generic and boring for most - and they certainly aren't perfect - but I appreciate boring themes. It's us who are supposed to give it life and make it interesting. So I advocate for less "Find a way to die", "Alien contact" and "Pyrotechnics" and more "Power", "Nest", "Order", "Break" or even "Cycle" or "Pass"

Hope everyone has a great Ludlum Dare again! Here's my theme suggestions, I'm actually proud of them and hope you like them too:

When it comes to suggesting themes, I hope you guys consider these nuggets of, err, not necessarily wisdom, but... Something.

Bad theme considerations:

• A game mechanic is not a good theme (e.g. "jumping")

• A genre is not a good theme (e.g. "first person shooter")

• A graphics style is not a good theme (e.g. "pixel art")

• A super broad thing is not a good theme (e.g. "universe")

• A limitation may be a good theme, but not always

Good theme considerations:

• Good theme is open to interpretation (e.g. "up or down?")

• Good theme does not limit game genres ("racing" is more limiting than "speed")

• Good theme does not limit cultural genres ("anime" or "cyberpunk" would do so)

• Good theme applies to all kinds of graphics styles, or even other media like tabletops

• Good theme may reveal itself after the jam is done as we see how people interpreted it :)

Not very original :sweat_smile:

Twitter is banned in Brazil, so I can't get the invite code to invite my friends. :(

This will be my 33rd ludumdare in a row. xD i started at LD24, hi. I’ll be using these this time:

IDE: Eclipse - Eclipse Foundation

Engine: LibGdx - Open Source, originally written by Mario Zechner

Graphics: aseprite/paint.net -david capello/Rick Brewster; Tiled - Thorbjørn Lindeijer; TexturePacker - main guy: Metaphore, also: tommyettinger, devjn, terafog, thefacecore, hangman and voidburn.

Fonts: FontForge - George Williams and the FontForge Project contributors

Sound: Audacity - Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg

Music: Cakewalk by BandLab

Timelapse: Chronolapse - keeyai

Another great event with gen con at the same time. That means my game will be more art than code! haha. Going to try to go simple! (which is hard if you know me)

After skipping LD55, I'll be back for LD56. I've been slacking off when it comes to game dev and I'm hoping this will be the impetus I need to get back into the swing of things.

As ever, I'll be working in either PICO-8 or TIC-80. I might use Picotron instead - depends whether the Lexaloffle site will actually let me download the latest version, because it seems to think I don't own Picotron when I do :stuckouttonguewinkingeye: Anywho, it'll be some flavour of 8-bit goodness, as usual.

Look forward to it!

Big news, all! A full and expanded version of my LD54 entry is coming to Steam as QuantumPulse 2A. If you didn't get a chance to play it during the jam (or did, and want more content!), add it to your wishlist now!

Also, I'm in for the next jam!

(Unfortunately after my testing, we still can't embed the game to LD webpage by godot4.3 even with the single threaded export)

Im so happy to anounce that my notepad game is on itch.io it has 2 more levels link is below: https://creeper666999.itch.io/notepad-adventure

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2485090/CharlestheBee/

It's my second Ludum Dare -> Steam launch! There will also be a third early next year! Thanks for checking it out and thanks for participating in this wonderful community, cheers!

pls help me choosing should i do jam or should i do compo im going to be making on my own in jam or compo

I've been in quite the predicament these last few years working in AAA game development, where I'm unable to publicly participate in Game Jam or and games related work or media. Over the last few months I've been building a little engine around a small game I've been building in my spare time. I think the tooling is at a point where it could be used for other projects too and it's temping to join LD, and then use it on a project in a short amount of time and feel out the flaws and sore points.

This all hedges on my work status though. :upside_down: apparently I haven't participated in LD since 49

:)

greetings o/ I'm happy to announce my return for the 3rd time in a row for LD gamejams, this time even threw my theme suggestions into the hat, plotting to try and make another game to tell another tale, aiming to keep my upwards trend for making gamejam games, after 2 rounds of dabbling with LD I'm confident this time about exactly what I can and should do for the event! Excited to try a lot of entries and see what everyone makes also! (favorite part of the whole event, where we come together to play each other's little games)

Crossing my fingers and count on your support!

It's in the name, and everyone else is doing it i guess-

I feel like these could be fun ideas to work with, for me my favorite would be "The World is Alive" as I think people can be quite creative with that!

Hey Good people of LDJAM !

This time, I'll go with:

• The 4th wall
• No matter the cost

The first one is an invitation to do something meta, to explore the relationship between the player and the game characters, to do a lot of self-referential jokes, or any more literal interpretation (wall factory: the game, anyone?)

The second one is about doing something fun with the idea: what if the usual cost of resources in games (stuff like ammo, health, people, money...) didn't matter, for once ? What if the cheat codes were always enabled ?

Good luck with your own themes!

Can't wait to LD56! It will be my first even game jam. Also, I think these suggestions are good enough.

I've (ludum) dare'd to do one of these in Vulkan before I think, and failed miserably, but we're gonna try again!!!

I'll be using - Java (because C++ is what I do at work, and Java is fun and nostalgic). - Vulkan (courtesy of LWJGL3) - LWJGL3 (so vulkan, vma, openal, shaderc, glfw, this lib is awesome) - beepbox, or online sequencer or something - bfxr, sfxr, or online fxr, or whatever it's called these days - err old Photoshop CS6 that I have a genuine license for, for some reason. - Blender maybe, probably not, fairly sure if I go down this road I won't finish - BULLET PHYSICS, tried this in a game jam before, I think it's possible. Will be using j-bullet though, so likely a very old bullet version...

A lot of this stuff is crazy, and I'm attempting the 48-hour compo, so am writing base-code as we speak. Mainly vulkan stuff, because it's a bit of a beast, this will basically handle: - Init - Descriptors - pipelines - shaders - the starrrt of a deferred renderer. - model loading (might use assimp for this one) - (double edit) oh also sound if I get round to it, I figure this one out all over again every compo :/

(EDIT) OOh, I forgot some stuff: Last LD didn't really play/rate, because I hadn't plugged my desktop in in just over a year, and I can't download random LD games onto my work laptop without getting fired. So WILL be playing and rating this time (I am on my desktop now).

(TRIPLE EDIT) Gonna make another TIMELAPSE, probably using chronolapse, if that still exists.

Very very excited for this one!! Good luck everybody!

Ned

Going to fire up Godot again this time, with GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Libresprite, Psycle and Cakewalk in my arsenal as usual. I'd really like to do something else than pixel art this time!

Oh, and I'm still working on my LD55 game, "Ritual of Ribbit" - although the progress is super slow due to other commitments: changed jobs, built two patios, got whooping cough, started DM'ing my DND group... Lots of things going on, but I still try to do even just a few lines of scripting every week. :)

Coming off a losing streak I'm determined to make this one a win! Last two Ludum Dare's I attempted "simple" strategy games and didn't get either of them finished. So this time around I'm gonna return to narrative adventure stuff as that's my comfort zone and I'm much more likely to get the game finished in a weekend.

Tools wise I'm sticking with reliable ol' Unity. I know with all the bad press a lot of indies are moving over to Godot but I still like working in Unity regardless of what the company is up to.

I also should have a friend joining me for this one hopefully, which is a nice change from my typical solo jams.

I know my theme suggestions aren't going anywhere so I had fun with a little G-Gundam reference:

Unfortunately I couldn't take part in the last two jams, but hopefully I can make it this time. So here are my theme suggestions.

Obligatory I am in post. Cannot wait for the 13th LD I have competed in. 11 of the 12 I have done as a Compo. Not sure if my buddy will be joining me on this one. But, I have been quite successful with my completion rate. of the 12 I have completed a game on 10 of them! Cannot wait to make that 11 games!

Good luck to you all!

In for the 8th time. Doing compo as always :)

Looking forward to a fun weekend.

The usual suspects:

-Folklore (one day :cry:)

-Connect

-Sanctuary

-Rock, paper, scissors

-Echoes

-Decay

-Shelter

-Mutation

-Signal

This will be my second LD jam in a row.

I will be doing the jam again. Still using Unity Blender and any adjacent software.

I do have a question regarding the use of AI generated content. I've not seen anything in the rules specifically forbidding it. Is it the case that if, for example I use AI to generate some of the graphics, I'll just have to opt out of the artwork category?

Good luck to everyone! Fingers crossed for a nice theme!

What makes a theme good? There are many factors, I believe one of them is being interpretable for either a background story or mechanics. Like Summoning allows a game where we literally summon fiends to assist in the game, or a game we are a skater trying to reach the court we are summoned.

This interpretability allows both bottom-up and top-down game design. I think the reason why most recent Ludum Dare themes are like this, they satisfy both designers with bottom-up and tow-down approach.

im gonna make it in unreal engine first im gonna import the capsule model from unity can anyone design a logo for the game this my concept

Here are my two theme suggestions. I think they are interesting! :smile: 1. Bad or Good Expanding 2. iteration :v:

Greetings!

making another post purely to share stuff really, but I'm slowly realizing that I could just add an extra challenge or spice to my game jam entries by following certain set patterns, basically slowly refining the story and design of a much larger world, grasping ideas from it to form something bigger, so my excitement for the Jam is getting bigger, so much so I been also redesigning my submissions to be more fun and differently interpretable (no I won't share them I want them to remain a surprise if they make it), but yeah excited to be a part of this again and feeling more back to the game dev game

Can't wait!!!

My suggestions this time around are - Mirror - False power

(I think I got pretty philosophical with these haha)

What games do you think could be done with those themes? I'm really curious to know given how abstract they are

I did 13 consecutive Ludum Dare games from LD36 - LD48, but then my streak was broken as I missed LD49 for a few reasons. Still, it's a good thing because it became more of an OCD to must-participate, now I can join when my time and schedule allows instead. I did join LD53 and had fun making a game, and I am on the fence if I can participate this time because I have a game coming out on Steam in October so things are kind of hectic. But, I am hoping to participate :)

My 2 theme suggestions are: * Make It Rain * 6 Degrees of Gravity

I always default to using Unity when I join these game jams. I only use it because I worry about time... it's the most familiar choice. For LD56, I'm coming back from a long break... maybe 4 years or so. I'm rusty even with Unity.

I would like to try something new. Maybe a less "batteries-included" option. Any advice? I do like to lay out levels visually, but otherwise I prefer to code as much as I can...

This is my first time writing a "Blog" before the LD event starts, so let me casually jot down my thoughts at this moment.

It's the first time the three of us are collaborating. I have never worked with more than one teammate in a Ludum Dare event (at most, I was in a duo). I hope our friendship won't be shattered because of this gamejam. (Friendships often end over a task that requires cooperation, don't they?) I hope this is a brand new experience, and this time I won't be responsible for the main programming work. Let's see what we can create!

Here are the tools we prepared for this event: 1. Godot v4.3 stable 2. Aseprite

Looking forward to spending another Ludum Dare weekend with everyone.

And here is my two theme suggestions:

I'm supposedly in, if the theme will inspire me, with game maker studio 2 😁

For a while, I've been sharing the progress of organizing our team, the logistic for an in person jam and our hardware/software woes for LD56 over on Mastodon under the hashtag #RoadToLudumDare (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/tags/RoadToLudumDare) and I was wondering how everyone else's preparations look like? I assume it differs a lot whether you're a solo dev or a part of a team? Online vs in person?

Greetings!

So I have been using beepbox for most of my entries to make my own music, and I still wanna make my own music, but I have been pondering if people here know of any other free open-source music making programs to tinker and try, I love beepbox but I also wanna try some other alternatives, see what I like more!

Thank you everyone for the help beforehand!

WHERE ARE MY IGDERS AT

Hello, is there a team out there using Unreal 5 as an engine and are in need of an 3D Artist?

PLEASE

PLEASE COME

the invite code is below XGonnaGiveMeLD56

Here is my theme suggestions! 1. Good or Bad Expansion 2. iteration

I may not have lot of time for LD#56, as I have things to do the same week-end. However, looking back to the last ones I've done, I guess this will not change anything :joy:

Whatever, this will not prevent me to, at least, suggest themes :
• Exhibition
• Safety

Here's a few tips.

To create a new LD account (if you don't have one yet) you will need an invite code, this is posted on the LD twitter (and other socials) for the upcoming jam. https://x.com/ludumdare/status/1827812733523230866

New accounts will be "untrusted" by default, make an initial post to the feed (such as introducing yourself, listing what tools you'll be using). Your post won't be viewable on main but will be viewable on https://ldjam.com/feed/raw Posting helps your account be manually flagged as trusted at some point. All these steps are to help deal with the large number of spam accounts.

Don't worry about joining the jam or getting your entire team setup on your game page before the jam starts, you can do this at anytime before the end of the jam (but obviously don't wait until the last second).

To add teammates to your game, make sure you follow them and they follow you, then you will see them in the Author(s) dropdown box when editing your Unpublished Game.

The theme slaughter and voting rounds don't have specific start dates and the number of voting rounds has been different in the past. You do not need to go through all themes in the slaughter round, everyone doing some is enough for it to work. Word of warning, don't become too attached to a theme during voting rounds.

Reading this once or twice will help: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/rules

The rules are probably a little out of date. There are 3 categories, not 2. Compo (solo 48h), Jam (team 72h), Extra (2 weeks). More info about Extra here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/$276398/extra-the-new-casual-ludum-dare-format

AI usage guidelines: https://ludumdare.com/resources/questions/can-i-use-ai/

If anything above is wrong (I'm relying on past info) or have other advice, please reply to this post.

I am an indie developer currently making my first game, Solacuna (at stickodyssey.itch.io). I started learning game development in Unity back in 2020 during the pandemic. I recently realized that the best way for me to improve is through practice. I saw that this jam was coming up and took the opportunity. I'm super excited to take part in this jam! For this jam I will be using fl studio for music design, aseprite and blender for art and models, and unity as my game engine.

我是塞罗奥特曼

Hey, I'm stuck in tutorial hell, and I think the best way to pass that loophole is to jump on a real challenge, I'm not confident on my skill set, but I think is great to have a community like this one to learn from and get feedback. My plan is to go full minimalistic, with Unity + Aseprite and I'm not sure about the music tbh. Looking forward to this event.

Hi all! This is my first time doing Ludum Dare and my third game jam! Looking forward to jamming with y'all!

After a hectic year where I had no time to try starting any game dev projects, Ludum Dare 56 falls on a long weekend here while work is predicted to be quite. So I have the whole weekend with not needing to take leave from work.

While I had hoped to have learned some new tools to use (so as to expand what I have available), I've not had a chance to do more than look at the differences between them and what I usually use. So, to be more likely to complete a game, I'm sticking with the ones I know for this one.

Each jam I've took part in I've given myself a goal to work on, but have not decided on one yet for this time. Past ones have ranged from finishing a project, to having the aim to create an atmosphere in the game.

Looking forward to the manic fun of building a game and trying out as many of the creations we'll see afterwards.

Happy jamming!

Last LD i stressed myself out of mind cause i couldn't get the art style right that i wanted and threw everything out. Also the theme was not my jam. This time? We've both got so much work, and a birthday next we so no idea if we participate :/ Maybe if the theme is something we both like and get a idea for a small game...

Well, it's my first time to design a game, so hope to finish it! Have fun guys!

Well, it's my first time to design a game, just hope to enjoy it! Have fun guys!

Excited to participate in my first compo!

... maybe. Highly depends on my work schedule and my newly sprained wrist. (And by newly sprained I mean this morning. In the dumbest way possible. It's a talent.)

Anyway, these are my suggestions:

There's multiple dates listed on the homepage. Could someone confirm the next Ludum Dare date? Is it this weekend as it had been the past few years?

I don't know if it's just me but I thought there were an unusual number of bizarre themes this year. Here are the themes so weird I had to take a screenshot of them:

I'm excited for this Ludum Dare

I almost believe that "Slaughtered" was the jam theme haha.

this was... certainly something...

if I was to break it down... we had the singular word themes that were a mixed bag, personally not my favorites, then we had the overly specific themes that are just not good, then all the memes, and all the weird themes tossed in there purely because... still found some gems I personally liked but we shall see what makes it into the finals

I've seen a lot of very weird themes. Like "^(escape|transform|connect|grow|light|balance|echo|swap|break)" or "Get the Bunny out of the hat, Before Eating Your Hat." or "Switch 2" or "board game that can't exist physically " weird and bad themes this year.

Creative use but like… what?

As we were going through the slaughter round and hit "Cute Huge Pets" -- my daughter drew this one:

That's all what I can help you. LOL!

So you've slaughtering themes one after the other, showing no mercy and then after a few clicks fog starts to creep into your brain, seeping through the hills and cracks on it, engulfing every neuron and connection. and then you look at a theme, and it just doesn't register with you, so you keep staring for like 5-10 seconds before it registers. kind of like reading a book and at some point you find yourself reading the same line again and again... should I get checked for early amnesia or something?

Every time I do this I strain my mouse finger and have to use my left index finger to pick my nose...

This is my third jam and I’ve gotten better and better at slaughter, first time it was like 500 yes votes next was capped at 100, this time …. It should probably has been like 20 but it all kept blending together and I couldn’t remember what I had voted for lol

Most of these were just words and non-sense lol

Don't do it like me in on setting, brain goes 'nope and quit xD

i am a nerd.

hi.

Total bloodbath! :knife:

I see from other posts I'm not alone in being picky this time.

ghjl.