So some time passed, we had a bit of sleep and it's time to reflect a bit on what we did.

When discussing what game we should build given the theme we've almost instantly came up with the general idea "player dives and cleans the ocean from some sort of trash". After a bit of thinking we decided that player will control a vessel as it'll be easier from the art point of view this way. Meet our "Scampi":

After we've established the basis of the game we started building it right away. And at the point when some basic movement was done we started looking at how exactly player should clean the ocean from all the trash we put in it. We discussed some sort of inventory system and a way for player to get it in the vessel, but after some experiements we've decided to build an inverse kinematic system and use "hands" of the vessel as a natural inventory. When player upgrades their vessel they naturally expand their inventory and starts to look similar to a prawn/langoustine, hence then name:

And it looks like players so far enjoy this approach. We've identified some ways to improve our inverse kinematic system and some quality of life improvements will probably make it to a post-jam build when we'll polish the game a little bit.

What do you think? If you want to try it out, here's the link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/scampi