Tomorrow starts Ludum Dare 52, one of the biggest and oldest events where you create a game ffrom scratch in a weekend based on a community-voted theme. Today concludes the final voting round, and you can see my wishes below:

Theme Voting Final Round

I’ll be teaming with up an old friend QuantumBits; we previously did Ludum Dare 40 together, which was “The more you have, the worse it is” (github.com/irlbayare… Guard Captain):

Guard Captain

We also attempted, but did not finish, Ludum Dare 43

This time, we’ll be using Rust, and we’ve decided ahead of time to create a CLI-based ASCII game. I’ve been collecting inspiration for a few weeks now (though I suspect our game is going to be much simpler than any of the ones you see in that collection).

Judgement criteria, to remind myself:

  1. Innovation: A unique combination of things, the “unexpected”.
  2. Fun: Is the game fun?
  3. Theme: How well did an entry suit the game? Was it particulary creative?
  4. Graphics: How good/effective the visual style is
  5. Audio: How good the game sounds/how effective sound design is
  6. Humor: How amusing the game is
  7. Mood: Storytelling, emotion, the vibes
  8. Overall: Overall opinion
  9. Coolness: The more games you try, the more people will try your game

Some tips to myself from previous experiences:

  • Take care of myself (food, water, exercise, sleep)
  • Avoid feature creep. Aim to have the game done in roughly 50% of the weekend.
  • Make sure the game is easy to play by non-developers of the game

I’ll make a follow-up post (really, a postmortem) after this weekend :)