Hi everyone, and Welcome to Ludum Dare 34! It’s almost time to kick-off the event, but before we do that, we need to pick our theme.
Click the image above to Vote for Ludum Dare 34’s Theme! The highest rated theme will be revealed on Friday December 11th at 9:00 PM EST (6:00 PM PDT, or Saturday 02:00 UTC).
Join us on IRC (#ludumdare on irc.afternet.org) or Twitter (/ludumdare) for the Theme Announcement!
If you haven’t been around these past few weeks, you’ll notice something different when you click above. Some weeks ago, we kicked off part of the new Ludum Dare website, and we’ve been testing it along the way. Blogging and Submissions for Ludum Dare 34 will continue to use the WordPress powered Ludum Dare website (you are here now). However, the entire Theme Selection process was handled by the new website.
There were some hiccups and experiments along the way, but I hope those of you that got to use it liked what you saw. If you run in to any issues with the theme selection site, leave a comment below, or feel free to get in touch.
And before I go, if you’re having troubles activating your account, send me an e-mail with your username and I’ll help you when I can.
Keynote! Hosted by Crowbeak
Here to get you hyped is Lena “Crowbeak” LeRay. She’s one of our favourite people from IndieGames.com, and she recently finished a post-compo (post-jam) version of a game Ultra Hat Dimension with fellow Ludum Dare 29 keynoter Emma “Eniko” Maassen. Here’s her story.
That’s it from me. Let’s get Ludum and Daring!
Tags: keynote
Unicode snowman confirmed?
Whaaaaat? No joke theme?
what about 2 button controls, that’s got to be a joke
Why? I’ve made a game with two buttons.
its a mechanic not a theme
It’s not very specific. There are a number of things that could be done with it. I do see your point, though.
Yes, Growing is a theme. It’s a direction. You could make a game with 2 button controls, one massive enemy, or nonviolent combat. It’s a real theme. How do these theme voters not get what a theme is?
A growing game about those three mechanics that is.
You could have a game that revolves around two buttons on a terminal or a console, perhaps a decision between allowing or denying access to something?
That’s actually one of the few in the finals I’m not having a hard time coming up with ideas for. Gotta be honest, I’m not crazy about the Growing or the Colony. But, c’est la vie.
You mean “death is not the end” isn’t a joke?
No, that’s the most serious theme out there if you think deeply enough about it.
If by “serious” you mean thousands of samey games about the afterlife, then sure. Apparently people fail to realize that games featuring permadeath are a small minority, so the theme is applicable to almost every game.
In most games though, death is still the end of gameplay for now. You then either start again from the beginning or an earlier point. I think that theme would be more to do with finding ways of integrating death as a gameplay mechanic.
Any game with the ability to manually save has exactly that already. There is no new ground to be covered there, and it’s not exactly overflowing with great inspiration (besides, if you wanted “integrating death as a [favorable] gameplay mechanic”, your dream already died when “death is useful” got voted out of the top 20).
Just do yourself a favor and vote for better themes. I don’t think any of us want a repeat of LD31.
That’s the difference between a 1st place Innovation/Theme and everyone else
Isn’t that the same as the theme “growing”? I mean most people would think of farming straight away, while others would go deeper instead of taking the obvious sub-theme and just go with that.
When you update the Theme site with all the stats will we be able to see how well our submitted themes did in the slaughter round. It would be nice to see how drastically my idea of what an interesting theme would be differs from the community ( I already know it differs somewhat based on the themes that made it to the top ten)
I agree. It would be really interesting to see how my suggestions did.
Is there no way to view the results of the four preliminary voting rounds? All I can see is the Final Voting list now.
As an experiment, Mike decided not to include them, so people cannot guess the most popular theme. I think it is better this way.
It was interesting how often the final theme wasn’t the previously most popular one, though. The final vote did still matter. Though I’m not sure it was *ever* in the bottom 10 of the finals.
I think we’re still gonna see the statistics, just after the theme is announced.
I’m really missing those stats round statistics, as a warmup i used to think about ideas for the most popular theme’s 😕
Awesome keynote, Crowbeak! <3
great keynote, spoken from the heart!
WHY NO SNOWMAN?
How is “Journey into the unknown” not a duplicate of “Unexplored” ?
Because nobody noticed before, and then they both scored well.
I’d say that journey into the unknown will have to start somewhere that’s somehow more known and then actually go into the unknown. Unexplored doesn’t ask for anything specific and is in a way a much wider theme. No journey needs to be part of it, and it could be anything, not necessarily something you could ever “reach”.
It kind of seems like Journey into implies more of an adventure, where as Unexplored is vague enough it could refer to game play mechanics, themes or an actual unexplored place
I see what you mean, but on the other hand, “unexplored” doesn’t have to be a place. It could be an idea, or something else. It doesn’t have to be unknown, either.
There’s no Decmebr on my calendar
Decembrrr
The months just went web 2.0. Janur Februr Mar
One the best keynotes so far. Straightforward and honest, like it should be.
I dont know why you redo a boss level that is too hard just tell your players to get good
Well, my initial idea was to grow… the controller. Only have two buttons, start and select, and have to grow the functionality to play. But then I thought “ehhhh, probably not everyone has a 360 controller” so I settled on just a farming game.
My idea is to grow a video game. You start from the early DOS era, make your way through Windows 3.1 and 98 era and end up on the Modern and Indie Renaissance. In your quest you unlock various features, including graphics, healthbar, shooting, enemies and a village. It sounds like an Evoland clone, but it isn’t, because you buy these things for ingame coins, so it’s like Evoland and DLC Quest in one.
One of the features is National Accents, that adds a cow talking in Polish.
“Blooming Buds” is definitely in!
We’ll also try to use both themes. Let’s see how it works 😛
I have a question that I’m not sure where to post, so I’m commenting it here: is it okay to optimize my game after submitting it? I know the rules say we’re allowed to port to other platforms or fix outstanding bugs after the deadline as long as we document our changes and don’t otherwise change the gameplay or content, but does that extend to making performance improvements, i.e. making the game run better/use less memory/making the release file size smaller?
Yes it is OK. If it makes your game more playable (like improving FPS from 5 to 60) it’s even encouraged.
Please continue this great work and I look forward to more of your awesome blog posts. http://itsmydownload.com
For example: If you are registered in the German iTunes Store, the app will be in German. downlodable keygens If you have more feeds to add, please email us at support!