Have had my eye on Ludum Dare for probably over a year, and, for the first time, this weekend actually works with my schedule so I'm in! I'm using Godot as my game engine and GIMP for art. Not sure what I'm doing for music yet, and for sound I'll be using a combination of Google and a microphone.

I'm going to be working with my brother (a film student), and we're hoping to make something along the general lines of Her Story, using real videos as part of a game. I have a few ideas, but of course we'll have to wait for the theme to figure out more specifics!

Worked up until the deadline last night, so just now making a post to advertise!

Here is my game, a combination of a text-based adventure and a battle royale! (Though it's only single-player because that was simpler to do in 72 hours.) Still working on publishing screenshots/gifs/videos, but I want to go ahead and get this out there to hopefully start getting some ratings. Downloads are currently available for both Windows and OSX, and if there's a demand, I'll look into porting to Linux as well.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-mad-kings-tournament

The Mad King's Tournament is a combination of battle royale and text adventure! This was my first LD, and I'm excited to have finally finished a game for the first time. Feedback is more than welcome, and I will gladly play your game in return!

Now announcing: the first post-LD update for The Mad King's Tournament!

This patch contains the much-requested fullscreen mode and multi-resolution support, and also fixes a bug where not enough food was spawning! Enjoy!

I plan to release another, much bigger, update later tonight that I've been working on as well! New features will include greatly-improved AI and combat! And now that I'm done with finals and graduation and all that mess, I'll be hopefully releasing some new updates every day until LD ends, including planned features like Skills, Magic, and Crafting!

Also, in recognition of the rapidly-approaching deadline, I am taking this opportunity to announce that EVERY SINGLE PERSON who rates (and comments) on The Mad King's Tournament in the next 48 hours will receive a rating and comment from me as well! We're almost there, let's get other's games past the 20-rating marks!

For those that haven't seen or played it yet, The Mad King's Tournament is a combination of a text-based adventure and a battle royale! You wake up in a mysterious arena and must fight hunger, thirst, and 99 other competitors to make it out alive!

Game page link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-mad-kings-tournament

Besides Floating Islands, of course.

I'd been hoping for weeks to do my second LD this weekend. I did my first last April and loved it. But grad school is getting too tough and I just don't have 48 hours to spare...

I do still plan on playing and rating y'all's games, I just won't be able to make one of my own. I will, however, do an unofficial LD (at least somewhat using the theme) in December after finals and post a bit on here like it's the real thing. So at least I'll have some of the fun eventually!

EDIT: If anyone else is in the same situation, I'd love to organize a semi-official Ludum Delayed Game Jam!

So, like others have mentioned, the obvious way to go with this theme is "blood magic" type things where you pay for upgrades with hit points, whether it's a fantasy setting with necromancy, a cyberpunk dystopia, or just a generic game mechanic with no in-universe explanation. But there's a few thousand of us here, so let's see if we can't come up with some other directions to take this.

With a theme this specific, the biggest question to me isn't "how can we as developers interpret the theme," it's "how will the voters interpret the theme." No one wants to get docked points because someone felt they stretched the theme too far, and I worry that worry will stifle creativity. So, in this post, I'll try to stay as close to the original theme statement as possible and explore alternate meanings of the words in the statement rather than ideas that are simply similar to the theme. Honestly, I may end up stretching the theme quite a bit myself, but close adherence is worth a shot at least.

Let's look at each word individually:

• "Your": Sadly not much to work with here, but we'll try. The naive interpretation is that "you" refers to the player character or characters. But what if "you" isn't the player? What if the statement is something the player says or thinks about another? A hitman, for example, might view someone else's life as representing currency in his/her pocket.

• "Life": This could have a few different meanings. The most obvious is, of course, the state of being alive and not being dead. In the context of our games, this might mean avoiding a game over or even Curse of the Black Pearl-style necromancy where dead means being a zombie/skeleton/etc (which, coincidentally, also involves currency!). But, "life" can also mean things like your job/livelihood/how you spend your time or even what you care about. So maybe it's not your physical health but rather your time or goal.

• "Is": Bill Clinton jokes aside, there's a lot of room for creativity here. First off, the word "is" is reflexive; that is to say, it goes both directions. So the theme could also be interpreted as "Currency is Your Life." "Is" can also be metaphorical, not just literal.

• "Currency": Not too much can be done with this word by itself; currency in games is usually things like spending money or XP on items and upgrades. But there's no limits whatsoever on what to spend the currency on!

Hope this helps anyone still in the brainstorming stage! This is also how I've been doing my own brainstorming, so I figured I might as well write it up and publish it, you know?

EDIT: I'm not doing any twitch streaming, but I will be live tweeting this weekend at @zata_gamedev!

Play as the God of Commerce and compete against other gods for followers and power to become the high god of the land!

Follow my progress on Twitter throughout the weekend!

Procedurally generated maps are starting to come together!

When the map is different every game, how will your strategy change?

Follow my progress on Twitter all weekend!

Completed the procedural map generation, a lot of under-the-hood stuff, and some of the UI!

All that's left now is to populate the world and add the gods' powers. Which, to be fair, is a lot.

Our game maps (procedurally generated at runtime!) are now populated with Cities and Characters!

How will you manipulate them to grow your Power and become the sovereign god of the land?

Hi, all! With all 3 preliminary rounds of Theme voting live, I wanted to lead a little discussion about what makes an interesting theme for a Game Jam and how to identify a good or bad one. I've personally identified 3 conditions I look for when voting for themes, each building upon the previous:

1. First and foremost, a theme must be accomplishable in a short period. This includes themes that hint at complicated, difficult mechanics like anything with significant RPG elements, enemy AI, etc. But more subtly, many themes almost entirely suggest story elements rather than mechanics, which can create a roadblock for less skilled developers and/or those on smaller/solo teams. Keep in mind that most completed game jam games take the form of simple arcade-like games based more on some single mechanic than on any amount of content, which takes additional time to make. For any developer working in a short period of time, mechanics must always take priority over theme/story, and theme choice should reflect that. "Automation," for example (suggested in this year's voting) is really fun in games (speaking as someone who loves playing Space Engineers, Minecraft, etc) but would be extremely difficult for most people to implement in a single weekend in my opinion.

2. In a Jam like LD, the event doesn't end when we submit our games. We spend a single weekend making our game, but the next two weeks playing games! Thus, it is essential that a theme produce games which are not just fun to make but also enjoyable to play. It is not uncommon to see some themes that emphasize heavy restrictions like "single button input" or "losing control." While it may be fun to program a game with some of these restrictions, they might not actually be fun to play, like if Call of Duty made you spend more time searching for ammo than actually shooting.

3. Regardless of how fun a game made from a given theme may be, Ludum Dare isn't just about making and playing a single game--by the end of the jam, a dedicated community member may play dozens and dozens of other games! This means that not just quality but also variety are important! The question that should be asked when considering a theme should be not "can I make a fun game out of this?" but "can the wider community make a diverse variety of fun games out of this?" A theme like "projectiles with recoil" can make a fun game but in a broader theme will likely mean the same game idea made over and over again. I particularly love themes with a homonym, meaning a single word with multiple possible meanings. Words like "power" for example, can hint at political power, physical strength, electricity, and more! (Though I do think this year's theme suggestion of "you are the power source" is a little restrictive because it describes mechanics). One-word themes are always my favorite because they are by nature vague enough to have lots of possible tie-ins and don't restrict you mechanically.

Some of my favorites are: 1. Sanctuary: Can refer to either a church or a generically safe place (multiple interpretations). The "safe place" idea is something widely applicable in game design but does not restrict mechanically. I can see this one going a lot of different ways.

1. Reflection: Could be a mirror reflecting light or images. Could be physical surfaces reflecting balls, projectiles, or more.

2. Strength in Numbers: "Strength" and "Numbers" can both be interpreted tons of creative ways!

Otherwise, almost any of the one-word themes.

But that all said... we all know good and well that it wouldn't be LD without complaining about a terrible theme and being forced to come up with an idea anyway, so I wish everyone the best no matter what is voted through!

What are y'all's thoughts on the subject?

Check me out on Twitter at https://twitter.com/wingman_gaming to see my long-term project Call of the Stars, a survival game about building civilizations!

Upon hearing the theme, I was reminded of a quote I once heard from some famous car racing person: "The perfect race car is one that finishes first and then immediately falls apart."

With that inspiration, I'm making a spaceship racing game in which all the ships are highly unstable and falling apart, so you have to repair yourself along the way to ensure you'll make it to the finish line at all, much less in first place! But if only it were that simple... along the way, you'll also be tempted by the ability to upgrade your ship with better thrusters, weapons, and more. A bold, aggressive move could launch you to the top... or plummet you to the bottom if you're unwise.

Each Ship consists of 5 Parts: the Hull (which cannot be upgraded), the Engine, the Weapons, the Defenses, and the Thrusters, which you can see here in this first screenshot of the project.

Follow my progress both this weekend and on my long term project (a survival game about building Civilizations) on my Twitter at https://twitter.com/wingman_gaming !

The track and UI are coming together for my racing game!

Full game description: Fly in a spaceship race where your ship (and those of your opponents) are slowly falling apart! In order to ensure you make it to the finish line at all, much less in first place, you'll have to pick up parts along the way to not only repair and refuel yourself but also make upgrades! A more aggressive choice might propel you to the top... or sink you to a DNF. What will your strategy be?

Making a second post because my screenshot on the last one was bad and the Edit functionality seems to be super bugged. Enjoy the better screenshot!

Made a fun little animation of your ship disintegrating if you lose from becoming too unstable! I'm not usually a great artist, so I'm really excited about how this turned out:

https://twitter.com/wingman_gaming/status/1444768866056425473?s=20

Ended up having too much going on IRL to finish all the key mechanics by this evening, but this is still undeniably one of the better game jam projects I've done, even though I've "finished" (by game jam standards) a few before! I think it's a design that could end up being pretty fun and maybe even worthy of a full game.

Thankfully, LD has come through with adding the Extra format! So I can keep going, finish it later this week, and end up with what should be my best ever video game whether from a jam or not. I don't have a name for it yet, but hopefully that will come with time as well.

Follow me at https://twitter.com/wingman_gaming to keep track of this promising project!

I'm making an autobattler where "every 10 seconds" the fighting pauses and you and your opponent can each buy and place a single unit or structure card from a common pool. But instead of just trying to kill the other units, the goal is to control territory and kill the opponent's home castle like a classic RTS. So like tower defense, but moving forward... tower offense?

In addition to autobattlers like Teamfight Tournament, my design is heavily influenced by the board game Splendor, in which each player builds up and spends their resources in attempts to claim a common pool of powerful victory cards. Would absolutely recommend it if you're a board game person and want something simple to introduce to family or friends that still has a surprising amount of depth.

With this weekend's jam fully underway, I'd like to share some of the long-term progress I've made on my project from last Ludum Dare: Battle Lines!

Battle Lines is a "tower offense" autobattler similar to a hybrid of TFT and Advance Wars. Each player buys unit cards from a common pool using harvested resources (so it would go with this jam's theme as well haha), then places them on the map where they periodically attack and cast abilities like tower defense towers. However, instead of playing defensive like traditional tower defense, the goal is to build forward and destroy the opponent's Keep while defending your own, much like an RTS!

https://streamable.com/lfq4rm

Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/wingman_gaming to keep track of progress and get the fastest updates on development progress and release news!

Currently aiming for a public Beta release on itch.io in late January and a full Steam release in March!

This is my continued progress from my LD51 game Battle Lines, aiming for a full Steam release later this year!

Battle Lines is a “tower offense” autobattler similar to a hybrid of TFT and Advance Wars. Each player buys unit cards from a common pool using harvested resources, then places them permanently on the map where they periodically attack and cast abilities like tower defense towers. However, instead of playing defensive like traditional tower defense, the goal is to build forward and destroy the opponent’s Keep while defending your own, much like an RTS! This creates chesslike strategic situations in which you have to cleverly plan ahead and position your units to control territory, push through choke points, and win the game!

Follow my progress and be the first to jump on the open Beta later this month by following me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/wingman_gaming !

And if nothing else, you can take this as hope that sometimes it is indeed possible to take that LD weekend project and turn it into a long-term work!