Finally have an idea that’s approachable, I think. My first idea was basically Metal Slug meets Hello Kitty; think a big burly military sidescrolling shooter, using teddy bears and rainbows to distract rather than kill your enemy. I was going to combine the cutsey part with nonstandard shooting style, a two-for-two under the “unconventional weapon” part.

I started to make some assets and play around within a previously-existing game that I’ve made, and it became increasingly obvious that to even do anything with this idea, it was going to need a high amount of graphical fidelity, and I wasn’t going to make that within the time limit. (For what it’s worth, I found an awesome gun-building app that I will definitely be using in the future. Made this in like ten minutes, it’s pretty neat.)

It bugs me when themes like this are chosen; rather than informing the mechanics they inform the aesthetics; can anyone make a game using this theme with just boxes and spheres? It’d be pretty difficult, I think, because for something to be unconventional it has to break conventions, and with “weapon” being in the theme that means “build a combat-based game and replace the sword with a spoon” or something similar.

Well, anyway, vent over. I set a timer for five minutes and thought about the theme and how it could be interpreted. Thinking about “unconventional”, it occurred to me that there’s a few different ways to look at something being called “unconventional”: it could mean something unrelated being introduced to a process (spoon for sword), or, it could mean using something way out of its own context (using a sword on a cooking show).

Thinking about it, I think I’m going to go with this loose second interpretation: introducing weapons into something that doesn’t normally have them. In this case, I’m thinking that America’s Pastime needs a bit of sprucing up…