I must admit I wasn’t too hot on this theme either (the runner up on the other hand…) but those are the rules 😀

Here’s my first idea:

At the start of the game, Old Man hands you a random item and tells you that it’s dangerous to go alone and that you should take it.

Every time you die you start as a new adventurer but old man gives you a different random item. The first item is now captured by the enemy but the progress of the first adventurer is not reverted.

When the Old Man runs out of items to give to new adventurers, it’s game over.

I can see a big problem with this being that in order to be interesting I’m going to need lots of items with different abilities and might not have enough time…

A non-linear game world would be interesting since you could decide on the best course of action based on the item you got. In addition if the world is procedurally generated you’d get a new world to explore every time Old Man runs out of items. I guess that would make the game a bit like a roguelike.

I’m going to go 2D but I don’t know if it should be top-down or a platformer or what… I guess I can decide this while doing the tile rendering code…