Ludum Dare is a twice-yearly game jam where people around the world make games over a weekend. The 50th jam happened earlier this month, with the theme of, “Delay the inevitable”.
I’ll talk about my game in a bit. But first, a moment on why I enjoy game jams. My personal projects typically start in a few forms: either attempting to build some well crafted, well designed system that I’ll never finish, a simple setup to learn about a library or technique, or a prototype to explore a game concepts.
However, game jams offer a oppourtunity to put a bunch of different skills together. Moreover, it’s an oppourtunity to wear many hats as the process requires art, design, audio production, sometimes writing, marketing, and everything else required to build a game from scratch. I love these oppourtunites to push myself and build something “complete” that I’m proud of.
Personally, the “Delay the inevitable” theme was not my top choice of theme. I think it’s fairly narrow theme that will (and did) lead to many negative games, many focused on running out of time. My good friend Ryan and I spent quite a while brainstorming many ideas, trying to balance exciting ideas and feasibility of the ideas.
Ultimately, with the recent Academy Awards on our minds, we decided on a game where you’ve won an award and are trying to bask in your moment of glory for as long as possible. A game about rambling on in your speech until the MC inevitably kicks you off – “I Would Like to Thank the Academy”
We realized my Markov-Chain based Recipe generator could be used for this project. When I originally built it, I had no idea I would reuse it. But it actually worked well! We were able to find a few different source texts for the player’s rambles to be based off of. Obviously we had to use a dataset of historical Oscar award winner speeches, but we also allowed the player to ramble in Shakespeare, on the history of philosophy, and to give their own TED Talk.
Here’s a few of my favorite generated quotes
Oscar Speeches
Village. That was when Dylan’d say I have an Oscar. I forgot my speech. Okay. I am the worst English-speaking guy
Shakespeare
Peace to your highness! As are our wretches fetter’d in our prisons
Philosophy
So suppose we leave these inquiries, and try to refute each other’s appearances and judgements, when each person’s are correct this is surely an extremely tiresome piece of nonsense
TED Talk
That skin serves double duty, again, for economics. One, it is the lateral stability for the entire building; it’s a structural element.
I’m continually impressed by this markov text generator. I plan to polish it up and make it more extendible and reusable. I’m sure I’ll find another use case in the future.
If you feel inclined to try it out (Windows/Mac), please visit itch.io and give it a shot! And if you really want to, vote and/or give me feedback at the Ludum Dare submission page. Feel free to share any funny or insightful quotes that the game generates.
As with all my posts, thank you for reading.