…and gutted that Double Zombie Rainbow didn’t win, but the themes I want never win.

Anyway, having set my alarm to 3am so I could check the theme (I seem to get more interesting ideas when I’m only half-awake) and go straight back to sleep, I have my idea.  I’m currently reading Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘City of Saints and Madmen’, and obviously have fungus on the brain.  So the game’s going to be a kind of ambient sidescrolling shooter/non-shooter.  It’s set in this long cave that’s full of fungi, and the player’s job is to scan all the different types.  The catch being that the cave is also full of floating spores, and whenever the player collides with one, a toadstool grows on the hull of their ship.  A toadstool which shoots bullets.  Which destroy fungi.  And then the more fungi you accidentally destroy, the more the cave starts to fight back, with boulders falling from the ceiling, spores which kill you if you touch them, etc.  There’ll be two endings depending on how successful you were at dodging spores.

My plan of attack goes as follows:

Day 1:

• Do the graphics for the ship, cave, rocks, spores, bullets, 5 or 6 fungi (I’ll be doing the graphics as watercolours).
• Code as much of the game as possible.

Day 2:

• Do the music.
• Paint as many fungi as possible while still leaving time to…
• …finish the coding.

And I’ll finish with a picture of my desk and my breakfast (porridge with honey and a little cinnamon; being still half-asleep I accidentally made twice as much as I intended):