Ludum Dare 23 Theme Voting Begins!
Posted by news (twitter: @ludumdare)
April 15th, 2012 12:49 pm
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So far the best ones from Round 1 and Round 2 add up to “Nanobots Bring Dead Back to Life”
That sounds pretty good
People, please stop upvoting the rubbish.
Thanks.
Don’t worry, the better themes come with round 3 and 4… hopefully the good ones are picked…
I had high hopes for previous theme too, there were some nice themes…
And then we got ALONE.
One persons rubbish is another persons inspiration.
You actually liked the top-voted themes?..
Seriously, how “Randomly generated” is a good theme?
Alchemy and Artificial life are totally cool, though.
Anything can be a good theme if you have the imagination and the inclination to implement it. Whether it’s good/bad/rubbish is entirely subjective.
Just because it can be good theme doesn’t mean that it is. I personally think that a good theme should encourage great content and innovation in any quality of a game (art, mechanics, story), and/or people should really like the concept.
In the example of “Randomly generated”, I think it gets it’s most votes from people who likes the concept rather than people who think it has potential. I don’t think it really encourages anything new and exciting, randomly generated content is really easy to make and often doesn’t bring a lot variation from other games.
In LD 20 and 21, I ended up basically making the same game twice, because the themes where so vague and uninspiring, and it takes so little effort to fit a game for a generic theme.
A theme like Alchemy, Limited Resources, Artificial Life, and Tiny World are much better themes than Randomly Generated, because they encourage you to include specific elements in the game, without being too specific. The last theme Alone was actually alright too, because it encourages to focus on story, mood and the overall feel of the game, instead of exciting random infinity mechanics. It was just hard and not very liked apparently.
Wait… you produce vague and uninspired work and blame the theme for this? Sorry, but that’s pretty loltastic there. Other people took that theme and made some pretty good games out of it. Just because you don’t like a theme or can’t see how to apply it doesn’t make it a bad theme.
That was not my point. It is true that I blame my dislike for “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!” for the quality of my game that time, but my point was that you only need to include danger and the event of receiving something to actually fit the theme. I also failed to mention that even though I didn’t like the Alone theme, I think it turned out good in my case, better than the previous, because I had an obvious specific element to build the game around. In Escape too, which was my first Ludum Dare, I made something actually decent, if anything I blame my bad planning skills for any failures there.
And I’m not saying people aren’t making good games, in fact because the rapidly rising number of participants and my unwillingness to play all the games, I will not say anything about the ratio of bad and good games.
It’s not _entirely_ subjective if a theme is good or bad. There are pros and cons for all themes, I believe.
Just about any game can be tweaked to fit “Randomly Generated”. Therefore terrible.
A good theme should have some constraints to it.
Also. I hope the theme isn’t depressing this time. But that’s a matter of personal taste.
re: “Just about any game can be tweaked to fit “Randomly Generated”. Therefore terrible.”
That describes just about every theme on the list. All it takes is a vivid imagination and maybe a bit of shoehorning. If this is truly what defines terrible, than I have yet to see a ‘good’ LD theme.
“Randomly generated” is pretty terrible, and “tiny world” is dull too. Otherwise I’m fairly happy with the top voted themes so far.
Randomly generated is okay, but I really hope that tiny world isn’t the theme
I can’t seem to go and vote, it keeps saying I need to log in before I can see the page. >:( What do I do when I’m already logged in?
Oboy that drove me NUTS! Solution: Log in. Then go to the page where it tells you you have to login. Then press Ctrl+F5 and wait.
try logint out and logint again??? Also, some ppl said a solution on page 1 (control + F5 or something alike)
As others have said, it’s mostly opinion which decides what’s a good theme. For example, I quite liked “Alone.”
That being said, I really like the idea of Death is a New Beginning. So many cool possibilities there.
Please no. That was essentially the Global Game Jam theme.
“Alone” made me sad after last year’s Global Game Jam theme was “extinction”.
In fact just please not make the theme about death or sorrow at all.
In case anyone needs extra inspiration, check out some of these “old school” games lol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_TgM0pCDvI
Pretty happy with the Round 3 results!
Round 4 … meh
Discovery was LD19′s theme. Just FYI in case anyone forgot.
Growth and Minimalism were also previous themes, though before I was Dare-ing.
Please, fresh theme!
I happen to have just made a post concerning this. Would you mind adding ‘growth’ and ‘minimalism’ to the list there?
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/04/19/check-recent-lds-before-voting-for-themes/
“Recursion” has appeared in rounds 1 and 4, this seems like a bug to me. Perhaps the theme voting site should be made to ensure themes are unique across rounds (apart from round 5 of course), and that themes from previous LDs are excluded?
Also Discovery was LD 19 theme
They left the old themes in on purpose.
At least round 4 has some interesting themes that don’t try to force everyone to make a specific type of game…i was a bit depressed by rounds 1-3. Lots of themes this time around much like lasttime though that sounds like a lot of people voted it in because they want to make a minecraft-like game in LD :/
^– THIS
Agree with this A LOT. The final round should be interesting to see how people will vote now that the winners from each round are put together.
Um, how do i know which theme will be chosen, and how does this theme round thingy works? I need help please
The bold links in the theme voting topics are rounds that are still open for voting, so go vote whatever you think is appropriate. The non-bold links are rounds that have finished, and you can view the results of that round through the link. The top results from rounds 1 through 4 will compose the list for round 5. The top voted theme from round 5 will be announced when the timer ticks down to zero, and the competition will begin. This process is detailed somewhere on the site, but I forget where. It doesn’t seem to be in the rules :/
Thanks
Really hope ‘one room’ wins, the combination of the one very specific design element running through every entry, and the fact that each ‘room’ is essentially a blank canvas with endless possibilities for variation, makes this the best theme in my opinion. Unlike other themes, the entries would not be dictated by specific idea such as emotion, pacing or story, yet it is a very specific instruction to give a game designer, so you wouldn’t be able to force any idea you may have had previously to fit the theme, forcing much originality and inspiration hopefully.
I would love to trawl through all the entries, seeing what each person/team came up with for their room
Totally agree.
“One room” It is also my favorite theme so far. On one hand, you have great potential but at the same time you are very limited.
The guy famous for his elephant games, now head developer of Armour Games, (JM098 or something like that) has made 3 “This Is The Only Room” games. Check em out on Kongregate–they’re pretty funny.
I like the top-voted themes for the most part. “Artificial life” (round 1) is a bugger, though. “Limited resources” could be interesting.
I’m going through the top 5 for each round and looking at how I can make each into a shooter/shmup. Kind of as a creative challenge.
That being said, I’m really hoping that “randomly generated” doesn’t win; I’ve got a couple of ideas for it, but it’s a design element, not a theme.
I think “Tiny World” is awesome.
“Limited resources” are also quite interesting.
No keynotes this time?
Awesome choices in the final round…
I like the sound of “Build It, Then Use It” and “Indirect Control”
Uhm… Sounds like indirect minecraft… What if it’ll have dwarves? WAIT! OH…