By: Thematically Thrown Together | Games That Exist

Thematically Thrown Together | Games That Exist — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:15:17 +0000

[...] I’ve been sifting through Ludum Dare 23′s haystack of games. Indulging at random, I haven’t made much of a dent in the 1,400-plus catalog, but I’ve been having some fun thinking about theme and how it works itself into game design. Ludum Dare games are a blast: so many half-baked ideas, feverishly realized, trudging onward through sleep deprivation and frustration to a relative state of completion. It’s even fun digging into the broken entries and trying to decipher what the developer must have been getting at. It really is a window into this chaotic, collective game design soul. It’s like getting to listen to an album before it’s properly mixed and mastered, or maybe even before most of the songs are finished. There’s not much polish, but the idea is still there. The wide range of quality in these games must hinge on a number of different factors: coding ability, artwork availability, motivation, outside constraints, etc. But regardless of quality, all of these games are united by a single theme, which must be both frustrating and limiting from a design perspective. I love reading the postmortems, as well. Here’s one from a guy who works with robots at his day job. [...]

Comments on: Angstrom Post Mortem – Making of

By: Thematically Thrown Together | Games That Exist