As the compo started at 3:00 am for me, I spent the first 3 hours thinking about the theme sleeping.

Then, for about an hour I thought about the themes and possible game concepts. I found it hard to incorporate both into a game mechanic that is still fun to play, so I decided to stick to Growing only. As a huge fan of the game Osmos (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hemispheregames.osmosdemo) I thought this is a perfect fit, so I want to go into this direction. For the next half an hour I did some rough planning about the things that need to be in. I want the game to be playable as soon as possible and then improve it in small iterations. Here is my rough planning for the next couple of hours:

Thank you for two very intense days of programming, thinking, struggling with art and sound and at the end – a submitted game! Thank you PoV for organizing all this, thank you to all the other devs for sharing your ideas! And thank you to all the gamers out there who don’t want to just stick to the mainstream titles of the big companies, but are willing to work through so many experimental games to find the gems. You are all awesome!

This was my first game jam and it went really well. Time management worked out very good (about 16 hours and 14 hours work, so I got enough sleep) and while I think I did not pick the most innovative idea (it’s actually very similar to Osmos HD) I am happy with the result. It turned out that I have absolutely NO idea about how to create sound effects or even music – so better disable it. 😉 On the other side it was a lot of fun to work on a green field project and be able to do things as I like to do them.

So here is what I’ve done:

Play it here

I don't want to discuss whether the final round themes are good or bad (though I have an opinion about that 😉), but would like to hear what you think about completely neglect the theme. If I have a good game idea that I would like to work on in the context of compo, but I cannot fit it into the theme, should I go for it anyway? If I remember right, one can exclude voting categories when submitting your game, so this could be an option then. Is it allowed to neglect the theme completely after all?

Just woke up and checked the theme. Then skimmed through my list of "concepts I'd like to prototype some time" and a turn based battle royale seems to fit the theme very nicely. Might be a concept some others also go for (because "running out of space" is somewhat the definition of battle royale), but I am really eager to try this out.

I wonder how feature complete this can get. I aim for single player only and try to cut as many features for my mvp as possible, so lets see how this turns out.

Any ideas for a name?