I'm sitting in my chair, breathing heavily. I press F5 for the millionth time, just in case the theme was announced a bit early, or the clock was a bit off. Three minutes to go.

I'm so excited, I have to go to the bathroom. But I rush it, and when I get back, there's two minutes remaining.

One minute.

Seconds.

It's time.

I slam F5 and the refresh button as hard as I possibly can and wait. And wait. And receive a timeout. 'Server crashed again!' I thought. Quickly I rush to Twitter. No news on Mike's page. No news on Ludum Dare's page. Refresh again. Then, finally, there's the theme.

And I hate it. For a moment. And a brilliant ideas blossoms in my head.

First impressions of the theme were not that great. I tried a lot of different methods to get inspiration, my most complicated of which was to find a random number generator, and generate two random dates. The genres of the first game I could find released on each date would be combined into my game.

Which probably would have been kind of cool. I ended up with Golden Eye and some JRPG released in 2002. But I couldn't come up with an idea fast enough, so I scrapped it.

I though back to my favorite genre: Metroidvania. I'd never made one before, which should have been the first red flag. But I decided to mix that with the most unlike genre I could think of: Diner Dash.

The idea was going to be that you were the caretaker of the West Chesterfield Archives, a massive natural cave system full of old books. Your job was to keep the visitors of the archive happy by bringing them the books they requested. There would have been an indexing system, upgrades, and all manner of comical cartoon bookworms.

The key word up there is 'would.'

10 minutes before I decided to knock off for the night, I realized: I can't make this. It's too big! I played around with other ideas, merging other themes into Metroidvania, like stealth, horror, and art house. But the idea I finally settled on was completely different.

I doodled around on a piece of paper for inspiration (I like to base games around characters that I draw). I came up with this chubby boatman:

He quickly became Elias Muttonhedge, the last of the Conservationists, and before I knew it, I had a plan.

To Be Continued...

You can play the final product here: The Fat Man and The Sea