Solo compo, using Unity as my engine. My goal for the first jam is to make something playable.

Here's a little sneak peek (no powerups, no goal - just pure spacebar-mashing madness):

The Minimum Viable Product for High-Rise is complete - two powerups, infinite levels and non-stop spacebar-pressing action. Graphics and sound is up next!

Made a lot of progress today - the game is nearly complete. Tomorrow, I will be adding graphics and a soundtrack. Here's a little sneak peek:

https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/DF9MwjBW0AEW3-S.mp4

After a few final touches, a last-minute soundtrack and minor patches, my game, High Rise, is fully complete! It took a while, but I'm very happy with the result.

It's been a while since I've made a game. I'm excited to create something again.

After a good night of sleep, I am starting my Ludum Dare compo submission. This one is gonna be fun.

Made my game (mostly) in Unity 2D. Now, I will be porting it into 3D with free assets provided by @quaternius

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/drugrunner

This is my 2nd Ludum Dare entry and 4th game overall. This time around you control a car on its way to Mexico while illicit, mind-bending substances help (or hinder) your driving ability.

This was done in only 2 days (Saturday and Sunday). Most of the gameplay was completed on Saturday entirely in 2D. I then converted it over to 3D using models kindly provided by @Quaternius.

Thank you for playing and rating my game! I still cannot believe that my second Ludum Dare submission managed to get into the top 10 in a category. The other ratings are good too, and I will definitely continue participating in Ludum Dare in the future.

DRUG RUNNER

• Overall: 510th (3.5 average from 22 ratings)
• Fun: 213th (3.7 average from 22 ratings)
• Innovation: 682nd (3.05 average from 22 ratings)
• Theme: 6th (4.45 average from 22 ratings)
• Graphics: 250th (4.05 average from 22 ratings)
• Audio: 289th (3.5 average from 21 ratings)
• Humor: 257th (3.529 average from 19 ratings)
• Mood: 374th (3.528 average from 20 ratings)

I am ready to make a compo game in 48 hours. I have most of the weekend at my disposal but will keep my game super simple. This time around, I will scope even smaller than usual and complete the design in the first day. Throughout the weekend, I will add immense polish to a single mechanic on which I will focus.

I will be playing and rating games on my stream for a few hours. If you want me to play your game, join the stream and send me a link to your game:

https://www.twitch.tv/amastryukov

I have to say that this time around Zuhair and I made a truly great game. This was our first attempt at doing anything narrative-related, and on top of that we managed to combine it with fun pickpocket mechanics.

I spent a lot of time getting our graphics just right, which meant that we had to use 3rd party sources for sound effects & music. Hopefully, others will enjoy playing it as much as we did making it.

The game runs in the browser and there is also a standalone executable for PC: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/black-hat

This Ludum Dare, my teammate and I decided to try and use Unreal Engine 4 to create our game. For our previous jams we've been using Unity. We were thinking of creating something unsettling and spooky.

I decided to make a short trailer for our Ludum Dare game, STASIS. I think it turned out pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJV9mzg5qg

This time around my friend and I decided to focus on creating a narrative-rich, fun interactive experience instead of creating our own assets. As such, we opted out of the respective categories. I think we did a great job and definitely achieved what we had attempted to achieve with this project.

Last time one of my suggestions got to the 3rd final round. Let's see if any of these will.

This is the first time I've managed to get through all of the themes. I'm pretty sure I've slaughtered my own in the process, oh well.

If you've never done a Ludum Dare compo, or if you want to remember the feeling, check out our team's submission: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/ludum-factorum

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.

Hey everyone, if you are a non-programmer looking for a team for the upcoming Ludum Dare, our team would be delighted to have you join us.

We have plenty of programmers and we are looking for other talent, regardless of whether you are a musician, 2D/3D artist, game designer or someone else entirely.

Send me a message on Twitter (found on my LDJam profile) and we can talk!