That one would fit the game idea I had yesterday perfectly, in fact I could bend quite a few of these themes to it, so fingers crossed! What's your LD username so I can check your game out when it's finished?
Kind of seems like most games have this theme, really. A lot of games are about starting with nothing and then building up to something crazy. Everything from Civilization to Final Fantasy to Katamari Damacy to Tetris does this.
But hey, a constraint is a constraint. I'm sure some really clever games will appear from this.
> I mean, there's lots of places to play around with starting from an even more primordial slate.
I am struggling to see how you can start with a more primordial state than Tetris. If there is no game world, you cannot possibly progress into there being something you can interact with other than perhaps the game world unfolding after some amount of predetermined time.
I could imagine a universal paperclips style game where the initial interface was literally just a solid color. That resolved over time as you moved your mouse or typed, slowly gaining fidelity and using the randomness of your movements to dynamically fill in some color scheme. (So it would eventually resolve to a game space, but one that was uniquely colored by your actions.)
Conway's game of life often starts with nothing. You could pretty easily start with literally just a white screen.
I could imagine some stuff that's probably closer to generative art starting from nothing.
You could have a sea of noise that you sort of collect into a shape, which eventually becomes your avatar. I think about a game like Warning Forever played pretty well with the concept of starting with (almost) nothing.
I mean if you want to get that extreme about it, sure. When I read it I initially interpreted it kind of like "rags to riches" where a person "starts with nothing".
Obviously there's still a person, they're still alive, they had some history and have probably made some money and experiences up to that point, but we still say that they "start from nothing" if they eventually become successful, and you can google "start from nothing" and come up with tons of articles of financial advice about saving and whatnot.
I wouldn't be surprised if several designers interpret the theme like I did. There will probably be very few that actually have the game begin as a blank screen, as that severely limits what types of games you can make, I imagine.
But thanks for pointing out that it can go more extreme than how I imagined it.
They do this one every couple months and it's pretty great; rather large community of people will play and rate different games. And you can do it from anywhere in the world, with any size team or tech.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 57.5 ms ] threadedit: Start with nothing
I don't know if I'm going to submit at all, but you can follow if you'd like. Still racking my head for ideas to fit with this theme.
But hey, a constraint is a constraint. I'm sure some really clever games will appear from this.
I mean, there's lots of places to play around with starting from an even more primordial slate.
> I mean, there's lots of places to play around with starting from an even more primordial slate.
I am struggling to see how you can start with a more primordial state than Tetris. If there is no game world, you cannot possibly progress into there being something you can interact with other than perhaps the game world unfolding after some amount of predetermined time.
Conway's game of life often starts with nothing. You could pretty easily start with literally just a white screen.
I could imagine some stuff that's probably closer to generative art starting from nothing.
You could have a sea of noise that you sort of collect into a shape, which eventually becomes your avatar. I think about a game like Warning Forever played pretty well with the concept of starting with (almost) nothing.
Obviously there's still a person, they're still alive, they had some history and have probably made some money and experiences up to that point, but we still say that they "start from nothing" if they eventually become successful, and you can google "start from nothing" and come up with tons of articles of financial advice about saving and whatnot.
I wouldn't be surprised if several designers interpret the theme like I did. There will probably be very few that actually have the game begin as a blank screen, as that severely limits what types of games you can make, I imagine.
But thanks for pointing out that it can go more extreme than how I imagined it.
Wish I had time to work on it this weekend but I'm already working on a small game project this weekend
› GitHub Game Off (Nov 1) https://gameoff.github.com
› Global Game Jam (Jan 31) https://globalgamejam.org
https://itch.io/jams is a great resource for other fun, niche jams.
Ludum Dare is an unusual combination of talent, efficiency and humbleness. In some sense the direct opposite of a typical IT workplace :)