Hello everyone! This is my first Ludum Dare Game Jam. Although I have participated in a few other game jams I have completed only one game, so in this one my main goal will be to finish. I haven't yet decided whether to do the jam or compo. If I finish within 48 hours I will do the compo, otherwise - the jam. Game Engine & IDE: Game Maker Studio 1.4(I haven't bought GMS2 yet)

Graphics: Aseprite

Music: Bosca Ceoil (or whatever else free tool I find)

Greetings everyone, this is my first jam and I see that a lot of people are posting this type of development update. I like reading them, so I decided to write one myself.

I live in Europe, so for me the jam started in the middle of the night. When I woke up, I saw the theme, and was like "Okayyy, what do I do now?". The theme seemed really hard to me at first, as I didn't have any good ideas. I thought about many ideas for a few hours(quite a bit more than I would've liked), but now I think I have a solid idea.

I don't know if I should share it, as I see some do, some don't. Whatever I will, because I trust that noone's going to steal it(even if they did I wouldn't really care) and it's absolutely nothing special so here we go. The idea is a rougelike platformer(a bit like Spelunky) where you have a small amount of time to get a bunch of people into a volcano(basically the end of the level). You start off controlling the first person and if they die on the way they drop their loot and you start with the next person. You can return to the starting point with loot to buy stuff that will help you get to the end level quicker, but the more loot you go to the end with, the higher you score is.

So this was my first Ludum Dare. I was about half-way through and I got ill, so unfortunately I couldn't finish. Now I would like to at least rate some of the games, but under Rating it says "Sorry! At this time, only participants are able to rate games.", which in my opinion is kinda dumb. It makes sense why only participants would be able to rate games, but if I had known about that I could have just submitted what I had(a half-finished game) and be able to rate games, and so can anyone. I understand that not having that restriction would mean that people could use bots or something to rate their own games highly, but what does it matter since there are no rewards. I would appreciate if someone can explain to me why this rule exists.

Although I have participated three times, I had yet to submit any themes. So this time I decided I'll give it a try. It ended up being a lot easier to come up with a few themes than I thought it would. I'm not sure how good they are, but they were the best I could come up with.

Anyways, I can't wait for the jam to start!