I'm facing 3 giant problems with this theme that I'd like to address and I'll expose them here. Hopefully to discuss them a bit and share some new ideas.

1 - Inevitable needs to be part of the Gameplay loop!

I'm predicting a lot of games that the "inevitable" part is just not part of the gameplay loop and I don't agree with that for my entry. For example: and endless game where you eventually die and the objective is to delay you dying. Or another endless game where there is an enemy coming and you need to delay it for as much time as posible.

Basically all endless game ideas I'm getting, the "inevitable" is also the game over condition. So I'm trying to make a game that:

Rule 1 - The Inevitable don't mean game over

2 - Frenetic/urgent games

I've already discussed this one yesterday here, but something that I noticed is that all my Jam games end up being a freetic game, or at least something that the player have some sort of urgency to finish it. That usually comes due to a timer, countdown or just a progressively harder gameplay.

While that may be fun for 2-3 minutes, it really loses its bright after that. And because of that, it makes it very hard to work on a post jam update, for example. So for this entry I’d like to not follow this path. Maybe even doing a turn based game. But I’m having a hard time figuring it out…

That means say no to any idea that comes with "you have X seconds to do something"

Rule 2 - Not make a "time based" game

3 - Boring Routine game

I had an idea that you family is infected by a virus and they will wake up zombies. So you, as a father, goes out every night to find some antidotes, that only least for a day, to keep your family with you another day. Seems right, but what's the problem?

The entire gameplay happens at night, outside your house, and you need to do the same things: find the necessary resources, do X or Y, go back to you house, save your family, repeat. It gets really boring after two or three runs. Especially because it means that a lot of backtrack will happen (same level every time). I could fix that by making your house a ship that lands on a different planet/place every time, or even make the neighborhood change from run to run (as it would in a post apocalyptic scenario), but it don't fix the "boring" repetitive gameplay part. So:

Rule 3: Not make a repetitive game

TLDR...

So, in a nutshell, I wan't to make a "not frenetic" game (it don't need to be calm, GTA, for example, is not calm but you can stop walking anytime in the city and idle for some seconds without a timer streaming on you) where the inevitable don't mean Game Over (but maybe mean Winning) and level based, where I'll be able to manually build each level and make them not repetitive and boring.

It's hard!

Maybe I'm just being too serious. This is my 15th Ludum Dare event and probably mo 30th or 40th game jam, after that many games, I kinda don't want to do "just another game", so that's why I'm thinking about it so much this time.

What do you think?