On the final stretch now, just had a chance to step back and look at what I’m actually doing. So far the process has been roughly:

* Stay up for theme announcement (2am)

* Grumpily think about ideas

* Get some sleep

* Continue to be unhappy with every idea I’ve had so far.

At this point I decided I can either go for some clever interpretation of the theme, or something more dumb-fun. Given the lack of inspiration, I plumped for the latter. So, I quickly made several decisions:

1. It would be a platformer.

2. The main mechanic is throwing cats around.

With this solid, and well thought-out plan, I spent the first day building a platformer where you throw cats (fluffy grey boxes), with enemies who will chase you unless distracted by fluffy grey boxes. I had a reasonable amount of time to play with the mechanic itself, and I’m happy with how it’s working. However, not entirely sure what the larger gameplay looks like – there’s currently no real challenge to avoiding the enemies.

So the plan now is to spend a good chunk of time boiling down some level design with mechanics tweaking to try and find how this might actually be fun. Hopefully that will leave some small portion of time for some polish! HAH.