Right now, all of you are in the heat of Ludum Dare. I know it’s a bit of an LD tradition to be outraged by the theme, but I want to take a moment to see if we can understand why you dislike the theme. Is there a rule, something we or other jams imply that cripple you? Is it inconceivable to just pick your favourite instead? To perhaps just use the theme as a ‘feature creep’ or ‘scope’ limiter, and do whatever you want?
I’m curious. Lets get all psychoanalysis on this. Maybe there’s something obvious we’ve been missing. Share your thoughts, rage, or love for it in the comments.
Most of the time, the theme give a pointer on what to do. Alone deal with loneliness.
“all on one screen” give restriction on game mechanics, not theme. That’s pretty unusual for an LD. That’s surprise me a lot given that it’s the only theme that got a positive score .
I just finished making a single screen game called Platfinity. Every time I think of what to make I just think of Platfinity, heheh It’s a single screen platform game / game construction set. I put it up on Steam Greenlight:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=326903625
You can read all about it here if it sounds interesting to you:
http://platfinity.com/
I also work retail and it’s Christmas time, so I had to work Friday and Saturday. Hopefully I’ll be off more the next time there’s an LD! 😀
That’s not a one screen game… you scroll around. You’ve just made a regular platformer.
I’m perfectly fine with both rule-based themes and setting-based themes, so this one worked out alright for me. This theme did discourage me from using UE4, but I had no trouble coming up with an alternate concept and running with it.
We all come into the last day of voting with an idea stuck in our heads, and when an incompatible theme is selected it will cause some complaining. I like the challenge of dropping everything and figuring something out.
If anything, the only themes I don’t like are very generic things like “Chaos” and “Four Elements”. While there can be some pretty cool things to come from those kind of themes, they just strike me as uninteresting. A little specificity goes a long way for me.
I don’t really see this as a theme, it’s more a restriction.
I would see a theme as something like: winter, light, depressed, christmas, high, gold, happy, horror, etc.
Something that sets the mood for the game. I think it’s fine with some restrictions too, but then I think it would be better to have two parallel votings, one for a theme and one for a restriction
It’s not really a “theme”, it’s more a restriction or a rule if you will. It doesn’t force the creator to think in a creative way to adapt or express something, it just tells them “you can’t do that one thing” (in this case scrolling.) To me, this feels similar to holding a photography contest and telling the contestants they can’t take panoramic photos; there’s still billions of possible pictures to take, so it doesn’t really lead to anything new.
These kinds of restrictions can still lead to interesting results if they are restrictive enough; but considering that virtually all 80s arcade games took place on a single screen, I think it was too lenient this time. Things like “You can only move in one direction” or “One-Button controls only” might lead to more interesting results.
Because it doesn’t define the theme of the game, it is more like a rule that your game must have.
I didn’t like most of the themes of this edition mainly because of that.
Hope to see better themes next time.