Here's a thing that happens at every LD. The theme is announced and immediately, a wave of negativity blankets the intertubes: "What a terrible theme. I have no ideas. Guess I'll just give up."

I mention this because the "bad theme" reaction is the symptom, not the disease. The disease is in not having a toolbox of skills and techniques for creative direction, and as a result everything is based on gut reactions.

I don't know if I'll actually finish this weekend, but I think I can demonstrate how to make an appealing concept. The technique I use is called the "coherency game". The goal of the game is to answer all the questions I have about how the game might be made. Some of these questions I don't have to worry about, like my choice of tools and technology(I'm going to be using PICO-8). Others are thorny, like settling on a game concept.

The way the coherency game works is to start with a quick brainstorm and make a list, including the theme or other requirements:

• Running out of space
• Hard drive
• Oxygen supply
• Space-time continuum

I don't need a lot of ideas in this list. A rule of the coherency game is that I can only keep around as many ideas as I can remember. Four is fine to start.

Now, I start comparing every pair of ideas to see if they have a reasonably strong coherence(a term borrowed from philosophy), or whether they contradict each other. This is an informal process and relies on your good taste, which I'm sure you have. Coherency isn't exactly consistency, but consistency is a good starting point for judging coherency. What we want is concepts that can support each other well.

• Running out of space : Hard drive ✔️
• Running out of space : Oxygen supply ✔️
• Running out of space : Space-time continuum ❌
• Hard drive : Oxygen supply ❌
• Hard drive : Space-time continuum ✔️
• Oxygen supply : Space-time continuum ❌

Where the ideas don't make sense together, I should start changing, adapting or combining them. This optimizes our idea set towards coherence. The reason why we want coherence is because it puts the whole concept on solid ground, where it's easy to get our imagination going and think about which features are important and give them a hard priority. When the concept is incoherent, its implementation tends to expand in scope without ever resolving.

• Running out of space
• Hard drive
• Vapor
• Recycling

What I noticed in the last set was that while hard drives and oxygen didn't spark any ideas, there is a gas seal in hard drives, which made me think of vapors, which made me think of vaporwave and how it recycles stuff. So I swapped in both vapor and recycling.

• Running out of space : Hard drive ✔️
• Running out of space : Vapor ✔️
• Running out of space : Recycling ✔️
• Hard drive : Vapor ✔️
• Hard drive : Recycling ✔️
• Vapor : Recycling ✔️

OK. This is looking like something. A trash planet vaporwave aesthetic, where if you run out of bytes on your hard drive the game is over. 300 megabytes. Let's add in some more concretely mechanical aspects so that I can start thinking about how to build it.

• Running out of space
• Hard drive
• Vapor
• Recycling
• Driving

• Sector editor

• Running out of space : Driving ✔️

• Running out of space : Sector editor ✔️
• Hard drive : Driving ✔️
• Hard drive : Sector editor ✔️
• Vapor : Driving ❌
• Vapor : Sector editor ❌
• Recycling : Driving ❌
• Recycling : Sector editor ✔️
• Driving : Sector editor ✔️

Although driving fits with vaporwave and its love of cruising in old sports cars, it doesn't fit with "vapor" - the gas - quite as well, and sector editing is a bridge too far. Recycling and driving are also kind of iffy.

• Running out of space
• Hard drive
• Re-circulation
• Driving
• Sector editor

I decided to try putting vapor and recycling back together and focus on something that would give a sense of movement.

• Running out of space : Hard drive ✔️
• Running out of space : Re-circulation ✔️
• Running out of space : Driving ✔️
• Running out of space : Sector editor ✔️
• Hard drive : Re-circulation ✔️
• Hard drive : Driving ✔️
• Hard drive : Sector editor ✔️
• Re-circulation : Driving ✔️
• Re-circulation : Sector editor ✔️
• Driving : Sector editor ✔️

So: You're driving through your hard drive's sectors to edit them. The drive is running out of space. There's a race track representing the drive that you "circulate" through. There are still a few things to work out about implementation, but I think I can run with this concept. Time to take a break.