Well it's Ludum Dare 52 so it seems there's only one option for me: My game will feature a standard deck of playing cards.

My usual process which seems to work pretty well for me for both creativity and life balance is to read the theme announcement, think about things actively a little bit, and then have a normal evening watching some TV with my spouse while my creative brain turns over ideas, thinking about things as I fall asleep, and sitting down in the morning to start actually manipulating objects and see if I like what my brain has been turning over.

For which the answer this morning, as it often seems to be, is no. I've been chewing over a solitaire card game which takes a pretty literal interpretation of Harvest, using cards in a multipurpose way to represent soil, cards, and actions, and . . . so far it's both overly fussy and not gelling into anything interesting.

So now I'm casting the net back open and my brain keeps coming back to how Keith Baker added a crops-and-seasons theme to the traditional card game Casino with Illimat, and some of the other stuff that interests me, and I might have something in that vague direction that I can get behind. If this pans out the only thing I owe to Illimat is the theming, so I'm comfortable with that.

Or maybe this also won't pan out and I'll be on to another idea, or back to the first one but better. That's happened before.

This earlier schedule may push me into Jam rather than Compo; I'm not sure I'll be able to get everything I want done by 3pm tomorrow, but so it goes.