Not that I wish … to imply that you have been sleeping on … the job. No one is more deserving of a rest, and all the effort in the world would have gone to waste until … well … let’s just say your hour has come again. The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference … in the world. So, wake up, @pov. Wake up and … smell the ashes..

We're trying to decide on an engine, and one of the big factors driving this decision for our team right now is whether we can build for the web. A native engine like BabylonJS, Phaser, or something like Unity could be best as we can export as html and embed directly in our entry page. But these engines can be limited, and we were thinking of learning to use Unreal. Unreal however cannot bundle for the web.

So I thought I'd ask the community, do people play games if they're download only?

Hi, I'm looking for screen recording software that can do timelapses. Only criteria is that it's free. I want to do a time lapse of me developing my game for ld54. So, does anyone know any software that fits the bill?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, this is it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLGh18Q0GqA

Looking to learn another one for no particular reason really

Yesterday I believe there was an announcement by Unity that they are restructuring their revenue system.

I watched these videos to help me understand the current evolution of Unity.

https://youtu.be/xCGuznDfTmQ

https://youtu.be/4gzO60GhmW8

https://youtu.be/LlPOn0nAOeo

Veteran team of 23 LDs looking for someone who wants to join us and make sound effects.

Check out our previous entries: https://ldjam.com/users/simon-rahnasto/

Some notable achievements include placing 6th overall in the last two jams and winning the Mood category LD #50.

Our team consists of 2 programmers, 1 artist, 1 composer, a couple of voice actors and hopefully you! 🙂

Is anyone looking for an artist for this Ludum Dare? Here is my portfolio https://www.artgram.co/ruslana

CEST time zone, prefer 3d cute art

Personally, we will be using Bevy. I strongly suggest you don't use Unity and learn something new and open-source like Godot, LibGDX, SFML or Bevy.

go go go mike, we all cheer for you

"Foxcrate" (my expansion of my LD53 entry) will be coming to Steam soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2598050/Foxcrate/

https://youtu.be/UriNWU2Ecxc?si=lU9BK4AP3aHq9IX_

I'm just trying to get Mike's attention to enable account creation for new users!

Am I the only one seeing wrong date? January? 2019? Is this a bug?

And one day it WILL work!

Help! The theme suggestion round has been started! Somehow I was expecting some old pool of suggestions to be used this year. Now I have to think really hard :grin: Good luck everyone!~

My suggestions for LD54:

Hello,

I usually do compos but this time I decided to form or join a team.

I'm a rellatively experimented at game jams. I participated to 8 LD and a few other jams.

My games can be found here, it's mostly jams entries plus some small other projects.

• Engine: Unity
• Time zone: CEST
• Favorite genre: puzzle, but anything will do as long as it is not side view platformer (because there are too much of them).
• Skills: programming, shadergraph, special effects, programmer art.
• Langages: french, ok-ish english

@pov

This time I got feeling due to the date error on the page.

My obligation to post my suggestions has hereby been fulfilled

This will be my 13th Ludum Dare! As ever, I'll be developing in either PICO-8 or TIC-80, depending on whichever engine best suits whatever idea I end up coming up with. I don't have any particular personal goals this time round, I'll hopefully just be vibing. Good luck, all!

I also wrote a blog piece about why I chose my theme suggestions and about Ludum Dare itself (it's been a huge part of my life for a long time).

Here's to an awesome Ludum Dare 54 everyone!!! 🥳

This will be my 31st ludumdare in a row. xD i started at LD24, and am... aaalliveeeee. 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

Good luck fellow Ludumdare Participants and fellow @pixelprophecy followers (unicorns). Balancing LD54 with GenCon means more art this time around. Hopefully i'll utilize it to great effect. Hoping for a good theme this time around... ;-)

OK, This my first participation of Ludum Dare and I'm quiet excited now. I have submitted theme suggestions like this:

BTW I'm wondering if I can finish the entry during the jam...

2023 Sep. 20 Update: I have changed one of my theme submissions from 'Gravity' to 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'.

Hi. It's me. You may know me from hit games such as [NOTE TO EDITOR THROW A RANDOM GAME IN HERE DONT SEND THIS OUT UNEDITED]

I'm in. I'm hyped. I want to make a game. Let's go.

Theme suggestions this time include (but are not limited to (actually they are)):

good stuff.

In other news, my tool lineup has not changed whatsoever:

• :video_game: Game Maker Studio 2 to code bugs, at least two features and more bugs. I wanted to be proficient in Godot at this point and have not gotten around to that yet, since my friend is abandoning Unity though, I might finally start learning with him. Hopefully next time I can actually use it.
• :musical_keyboard: Ableton Live 11 to make a banger soundtrack. It could include an instrument. Maybe even one drum. Maybe... even more? Who knows? Stay tuned to find out.
• :musical_note: bfxr for the sound effects I can't make in Ableton because I fixated on a 0.2 second reverb falloff for 3 hours and now have 20 minutes left to finish my game
• :paintbrush: Aseprite to create wonderful pixel art. Or the most horrible pixel combinations you have ever seen. For some reason my art always falls into one of those two categories.
• :globewithmeridians: GitHub to host my code. It's their servers. I'm not forcing them. If they don't want to associate with my code they don't have to.

Well, that's all for now. See you in 11 days. Have a fantastic day :D

I've been rewriting my engine from Haxe to Rust. I think this time I'll participate with a Rust game :)

Due to the recent pricing shift from Unity I'm seriously considering switching to Godot for this jam. Godot has looked quite appealing to me for some time and now seems the occasion to actually try it. I'm still hesitating cause I've been using Unity for 5 years and would be much less productive with Godot at first. But that looks like a cool challenge for a game jam. Anyone doing the same here?

My birthday might be a distraction but I think I'll try to get something done. Recently used a loom to weave a bit of fabric and that made me think a minigame about using a loom efficiently could be neat but who knows if the theme will be one where I can fit that into.

Three years ago i created a list of tools and resources for game developers! I think it is a fantastic way to find new tools that you may need to make your games better :grin:

Feel free to add your favourite tools to the list by commenting or by creating a pull request!

https://wujood.github.io/awesome-gamejam/

So excited for this jam! Last year i somehow managed too get in the top 100 in the comedy category so i hope i can manage too get into the top 100 in a different category this year ^_^ Also these are my themes suggestions.

Me and some of my friends are getting together to make a game engine from scratch for Ludum Dare 54! I'm so excited and I hope you will be too. You can read more about it on my blog.

Finally got here early enough to suggest themes!

…I guess

This is my 7th Ludum Dare in a row. Huzah! Hello to everyone, newbies and veterans alike! :tada:

Normally I don't go in to jams with a plan, but this time me and @gardenovena are planning on making a city builder game or a base builder game. We haven't planned more than that, we'll just try to fit the genre to the theme.

Good luck, everyone!

Here's this year's theme suggestions.

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

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 music and you suggest the theme, "Music is key and is very important and should be included".

Just say "Music". Simple, concise, effective.

Please, take the few moments to look over your themes, and if any of them include "is key", just delete that part. You're a programmer; you need to learn how to be concise. Start here.

Been a while, but I'm super excited to jump back in!

Just submited my "Theme Suggestions"

Oh! It's time for my 15th Ludum Dare in a row!

This time, we'll participate in a team of 4: 2D artist, 3D artist, and 2 programmers! It's twice too many programmers, if you ask me, but we'll see how it goes. :)

If nothing unexpected happens, we'll be using the following setup:

• Godot as an engine.
• Aseprite for sprites.
• Blender for 3D models.
• Jummbox for music.
• Neovim as a text editor.
• Excalidraw for brainstorming.
• OBS Studio to record a time-lapse and gameplay videos.

I have no idea what we'll end up with, but I expect it to be a productive and fun weekend. Good luck, everyone!

For LD51, we released a game named Count Down Dracula. We kept working on it after the jam, improved the design and the graphics a lot, and it is turning into a full fledged game, named Midnight Blood Rush !

We just made a Steam Page for the game, if you like roguelites and fast paced action, it would be great to wishlist the game, as it helps us get visibility on Steam ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2502310/MidnightBloodRush/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utb-HNgMM0E

What you think about these ideas?

Getting ready to the 9th Ludum Dare in a row! Very exciting!!!

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

The whole Unity debacle is a big mess, and I know that opinions are divided on whether or not it's a good choice to use going forward and just how badly they've shot themselves in the foot. But I'm not here to continue that discussion. Instead, I'm here to promote another alternative game engine: html52d.

Yeah, I know the name sucks. I should probably come up with a better one at some point. :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:

Here's the short version: html52d is a lightweight, high-performance, mobile-friendly rapid development library for building web-native 2D games, provided under a permissive open-source license.

Lightweight: html52d weighs in at around 100KiB of Javascript source code. Not only is it a small download, it's organized to try to keep the overhead down at runtime to leave more room for your own code to do its work.

High performance: The code underlying the performance-critical portions of html52d is hand-optimized to keep things fast. It tries to avoid doing anything you don't absolutely need it to do.

Mobile-friendly: html52d works in mobile web browsers and provides touchscreen controls in addition to keyboard and mouse controls.

Rapid development: Unlike Unity, Godot, Unreal, or most other well-known game engines, there's no build process necessary -- you can write code that runs directly in the browser, unmodified. You can use whatever tools you're comfortable with, and all you have to do is reload the page in the browser to instantly try out your changes.

Web-native: html52d is designed for producing web-based games, making it specifically suitable for game jams and interactive experiences for websites. This allows it to be optimized for the in-browser experience instead of shoehorning a desktop experience into a browser window.

Permissive open-source: html52d is provided under the MIT license. It is free for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute without requiring you to open-source your own code if you don't want to.

It's stable enough that I've shipped several jam games using it so far, and one person other than me has used it as well. But it's also still under active development, so I try to fix any bugs that come up and I try to make it more useful over time without violating the above principles. (Currently I'm adding WebGL support in addition to the current Canvas renderer, which should hopefully improve the behavior on mobile devices.)

I'll be joining a certain team under lead of @wouter52, but doing less this time then before as I have another something to do (getting a D&D voice chat campaign ready). Still though, here are my suggestions for the theme!!

I somehow cannot upload the picture, but...: - Picture perfect - Moon - Guard

every LD I make a stupid splash screen while working on the project template, and this one is no exception! I had a couple of weird ideas but I've decided to settle with this one, problem is that I'm not sure where to go from here:

https://youtu.be/YzqdIbae85g

I was thinking I'd have the other godot logos react to the farter by saying things like "come on man" etc.. or the crown doing the "booo" thing or just something completely random :laughing: but I'm not feeling very creative today, any ideas?

here's the splash screen of last LD for reference:

https://youtu.be/NI11whU5zV8

Fall term LudumDare is my favorite LudumDare!

My theme suggestions (sorry in advance):

I'll likely be doing an original old xbox game for this one, or at least starting on one if I get far enough along on the directx stuff to get something running before the jam date. If not I'll use Uni^H^H^Hgodot or something.

If xbox I'll be using some sort of chimera of groglibs off my github, and probably blender for characters and radiant for levels. I'm switching from quake army knife and the switch is not yet done so I might use that. I use 3d coat for texturing if I get that far.

Since I'm not preoccupied with professional projects as of this moment, it's time for me to dive into another LD.

And since Game Jam Plus will also be held a few weeks later, I'll do the gimmick of making the game in one jam and finishing it in another.

Furthermore, I also decided to come up with my own themes.

Wish me luck.

Main page shows some weird dates Schedule page shows one time Countdown timer on main sidebar shows another time while the "Coming up" section shows different date?

Can we get some clear confirmation, and in what timezone are these times?

Slaughtering is the most time intensive process of the voting, and there are still 4 voting stages left, with 9 days until the jam soooo....

Waaaaayy back in October 2020 I made Polyfury (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/polyfury) for Ludum Dare 47 (well I actually made two games that jam...), and for the last three years I've been working hard on turning it into a full release, and it's finally there!

I've had over 10,000 people download the free demo over the last year or so, there are over 1,000 unique entries on the leaderboards, and it all started right here 🤩 the free demo was even part of the ID@Xbox Summer Demo Festival, which was awesome. It took me an extra year to get it working on Xbox lmao, but I've learned a lot in the process.

Honestly though, I'm mostly just looking forward to jamming again 😂 long term projects are not for me, working solo takes its toll mentally and the whole marketing and promoting thing is complete BS. 0/10 do not recommend. It's done though, and you should check out the free demo on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1804980/Polyfury/) 😁

I don't know if a swapping theme was done recently but I think it could be fun. And yes, I like puzzle games.

A bit basic, I know, but I usually don't submit theme suggestions, and I thought I'd give it a shot while I'm waiting for voting and, eventually, the actual jam.

Good luck everyone!

Y'all telling me you wouldn't love to see the entire submission page be full of chicken thumbnails and games about chickens?

This LD splash scene for my entry, because why the heck not? I love LD I can release my inner child and be as free as I can it's truly beautiful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISGIFP1Iff0

So the next theme should be "Digestion", seems like the themes are telling a story.

I think Weather could be cool, but Recycle has alot of different ways to be looked so that's what I want to win. Hope we get a good theme regardless!

I'm excited for the LD, I will probably be using Unity since I haven't had enough time to really iron out my workflow for any other engine I'm messing with.

Anyway for themes I like themes that have multiple interpretations, Some themes I see are often narrow leading to games with very similar ideas and I think that makes some of the rating phases for the past jams feel slow to get through, for me personally.

Maybe try looking at your theme suggestions and broaden them to allow new interpretations! Instead of "One Button Controls" try "Minimal Buttons" getting the idea across without getting 'um akshually' in the comments when you used 1 button and an analog stick which "doesn't really fit the theme". Or maybe how about instead of "Outer Space" try just "Space" which can have games about trying to find a parking space, not just games that have space ships!

Here's some interpretations for my themes, but I think there's definitely plenty of other ideas for!

Artifact - The obvious one that people go to are Ancient or magical Artifacts, but you can also have Artifacts as in a side effect like an artifact in a science experiment Finally maybe a game about Glitchy Video Artifacts?

Support - This could be physical support like holding something up, emotional support, maybe it's you play as the backup for a spy who's undercover supporting them? Maybe you're the healer in an MMO? You have to support the new hire during their job training.

Limits - This one is so broad and that's the benefit, it asks you to put guard rails, but not what rails to put. Maybe you limit the number of inputs, maybe you limit the number of towers in your tower defense, or maybe you limit the distance the player can travel in your game. There's so many things you can do, but the goal is to come up with some hard limit then make a game around that limit!

If you're new here: 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 :-)

Any new LDers here? Please comment below! Then I'll put your name on my 'to play list', I'm curious what you all end up creating :-)

i've been away from LD for a few years now, but i'll be back this time. not sure if going solo or in a team, not sure if i'll be coding or making music or what not. if i'll be coding, i'll be using either ren'py, or godot, or something custom i've yet to build (i'll be sure to publish if i build something before ld starts)

my theme suggestions, you ask? well,

• resonance
• pedestrian
• literally

Ludum Dare is fun already! Thinking about theme suggestions alone is so exciting ... :-)

I want my friend to create an account here. I checked out how to do it and it seems new accounts need an invitation code.

What is this invite code? How can I get one? Can I generete it for him? Or maybe he has to write to admins for it?

I've started learning Godot, but with LD so close at hand, I'm not confident that I'll be comfortable using it after only two weeks working with it. So I will probably end up still using Unity for LD54.

Alternatively, I'm considering looking for another team to assist, preferably ones with some LD experience. My strengths are in music/sfx and game design (I'm only so-so on the implementation side). I was 2nd place in Audio on the LD45 compo, and have been 3rd place in Mood a few times. My highest Fun ranking was 7th (in LD47 compo).

add me pls

Advertises gambling, casinos, I wonder if someone like Mike or whoever could deal with that?

A mixed bag of thingies...

they would probably look something like this...

my three suggested suggestions of eminent suggestationism

It sucks that some people use the theme suggestions for their political statements. "Don't use Unity" or "$20ct per install" (and so on) - do you think these are good themes for a game jam?

Unity is a great engine - with a bad management. But for non-commercial games this doesn't matter. So what's the problem with using Unity? If you don't want to use it - fine. There are other great engines too. But no dev should be blamed for his personal choise!

About halfway through the slaughter, and as usual a good 50-60% of them are themes I will never vote for:

1. the theme is too limiting. These are themes that require a genre, art style, or specific style. For example, roguelike, one color, or narrative. I don't want to play 50 or so roguelikes or monochromatic games or "deep" narratives; don't confine everyone to doing the same #$%&ing thing!!! Note that this doesn't necessarily apply to specific mechanics, for example cards; these are usually open enough that you can cleverly use them in almost any scenario. another good example is "multiplayer." Don't force everyone to make a multiplayer game; plenty don't know how, and even more don't have the means to play them as intended.

2. the theme is too open. On the other end of the spectrum are themes that spark no idea whatsoever. These are usually lazy, one-word themes (not all one-word themes are bad, mind you) like "literally" (calling you out whoever suggested that!). The point of a theme is not just to have something that is included in the game, but also to be cleverly utilized into the game. Basically, the the theme should be inseparable from the game without limiting what the game can be as to point 1.

3. the theme is nonsense. This shouldn't need to be said, but themes like "rrrrrrrrrrrrrr" will always be downvoted (or flagged).

4. the theme is inevitable. Themes that naturally occur over a game's progression will always get downvoted. These are themes like "game gets harder as you go" NO #$%&ING $#!T SHERLOCK!!!!

5. the theme is impossible. The two best examples I always see in this category are "you are an NPC" and "you are the antagonist." By definition an NPC is NON PLAYABLE!!!! and also by definition, the antagonist is just the character/s that oppose the protagonist (a.k.a. the main playable character). If you meant to say "you are the villain" than just $#@&ing say "you are the villain"

6. the theme is oxymoronic. Finally if the theme is a two-word (generally) theme along the lines of "blank the un-blank-able," it will get downvoted. For example "prehistoric future"

7. Bonus, if the theme is a meme or NSFW, it will get flagged, no exceptions. Sorry snowman symbol and flying islands, enough is enough.

also, please at least try to spell your themes correctly

holy crap I almost made the character limit

Plan to jump aboard another ride of LD with the beautiful duo of Spacey and Brainoid.

We always joke about small scope, but this time we really are going to try. Some IRL stuff means that I can't prioritise the jam all day for 3 days straight like in the past.

Hope people are excited and enjoy the jam

Edit: I just refreshed the page and now it's burried. I have to find it again to say yes :laughing:

I wanted to share my code base for setting up simple 2D games using ahead of the jam. It includes a bunch of cool stuff, from menus, save system to post processing effects! You are free to fork it for you own games or simply grab whatever scripts and scenes you might need. Also code contributions are very welcome!

This uses the 4.1 release (and above), I'll also be adding new stuff before and after the jam :slight_smile:

Enjoy!

Hi guys,

As personal challenge I plan to try Godot during LD54. :) Which is a bit risky, I know. But as a handicap I'll use C# because I've got tons of experience with it and never really liked script languages anyway.

But I've just learnt that Godot 4 with .NET doesn't support web export!

While Godot 3 with Mono (C#) and Godot 4 with GDScript support it.

So my question is: Are web builds crucial to get a good amount of ratings?

When rating games, I always get the feeling that web build games get a ton more ratings on average. And I understand why could this be the case.

Is this real? I don't want to just barely make the 20 ratings requirement. I want more to get a clearer picture on my entry.

However I don't want to try both a new engine and a new language during a game jam! :smile: And I also don't really want to use Godot 3 because there is Godot 4 and soon 3 will be outdated.

Have you managed to get 40-50+ ratings without a web build?

Let me know and thanks for your comments in advance! :slight_smile:

I had such high hopes. There was only 182 left...

I slaughtered the first 100 suggestions so far and I liked most of them but I am definitely not voting on all 2000+. Which made me wonder (again): what if we allowed less suggestions. Probably 2 would be the sweet spot but I wouldn't even mind if everyone got only 1 suggestion.

The benefits would be: 1. Less time spent voting for everyone. In this case we'd have either 1,000 suggested themes or "only" 700. 2. People would think about their suggestions more. You'd really have to pick your best idea(s). 3. Each theme would get more votes, making it more representative of the community.

The downside would be that people wouldn't get to express themselves as much. But honestly, how many people have more than 2 really awesome ideas. What I've seen so far, a lot of the themes are fine but only a very few truly interest me. Good but not great. But of course "good" is subjective.

I know it's too late for this Ludum Dare but what do people think about fewer suggestions next time (and less themes to slaughter). Would you keep it the way it is or would you change it to 2 or 1 suggestion?

(I'm guessing this came up before so if someone has a link handy, please post it. I'd love to read the discussion there.)

First I want to say I feel for all the devs choosing to set aside Unity due to the recent events. If you are still looking for an alternative, I would highly recommend GDevelop. It's similar to Unity in that it allows you to make many types of games, but I always found it much easier to use. We'll you can use JavaScript, its default programming system is a series of "code free" events (basically if-then statements) and they have an asset store with a variety of free assets that are not exclusive to GDevelop (i.e. could still be used if you decided to change engines). If you're not sure how to start, there's a template for just about every game type and an active Discord and YouTube channel with tutorials.

Finally, it allows you to export to web, PC, Mac, Linux and mobile. Pasting a link and good luck to everyone no matter what engine you are using :)

https://gdevelop.io/

Anyway the theme always sucks :laughing:

This time slaughtering went fast ...

Not a complete redaction, but at least it's better:

https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

tl;dr:

• Unity Personal will no longer require splash screen and can be used for up to $200k in revenue (up from $100k previously).
• Revenue share applies only after $1M in revenue over a year's time, and only on projects made with new version of Unity to be released in 2024; older versions will not be charged revenue share as long as it's still using the older version.

I basically just keep pressing "N" while staring at the "Recent Themes" section, and if I see a theme I like, I click on it and change it. I don't even look at the area where the current theme is displayed.

Am I the only one who does it this way?

Can we use Unreal Engine for Fortnite to create a game.
We could provide the island code for players to test and evelauate.

I remember previously signing up for a Ludum Dare and made a game years ago, but how to be added to another team?

There we so many repeats in this list! However, there were several times I had to stop and re-read the last few because I was inspired by one...

Well done to those that submitted my 75 keepers!