Here we go, the game jam theme is announced and our minds are racing.

Running out of Space

Already we are talking about key words: Space, Running, etc. 
All three of us decide right there and then...
We split up to think about what this theme means to us for half an hour or so, we come back with ideas for games and we discuss it together.

We've setup a miro, and we each presented our ideas.

Some were bad, some were good - but overall we wanted to share our thoughts.

As you can see in the image above, after presenting all of our ideas we voted:
* Green heart for "I love it"
* Yellow heart for "I like it"
* Red heart for "I don't think so...".

Few hours into discussing the ideas we realized very quickly that most of our ideas fell into the category of "Point system" (any game where we try to hit a highscore). There is nothing wrong with that, but we wanted to write a story the player can connect with. Where it feels like you have a beginning and an end. An experience.

So eventually we condensed down our freeform ideas into more concrete game ideas, based on the guideline above:

What you see above is actually the result of us going to bed frustrated. We didn't have an idea.
Before we started the jam we expected to have an idea in our hand by the end of that night (after kickoff), but we were going to sleep with figments of broken gameplay loops and no story whatsoever. We concluded we need to meet in the morning and discuss it further.

The morning after we actually had some ideas of games, culminating into 6:

6. Isometric Cube Game
The idea here was that you were controlling a human body, guiding your human into prompts. Sounds vague? That's what we though too.
Furthermore, felt like a dating simulator as we discussed about that idea further - or even Tamaguchi-like.

5. Flooding
Simple, gets the job done. You are running out of space and you need to find safe haven.
Felt like it was a points game trap. Sure we can find a way around it with a story, but it would be hard!

4. Inventory Management
Basically loop hero. If you played the game you know that eventually you ran out of space for equipment.
Felt like we couldn't add much more substance to it than it already had.

3. Investigation
The Obra Dinn type of game where you go around a place and investigate what happened there. A mystery, a thriller.
But as time goes by the clues are fading out - the space around you locks down to the center where you have to input what happened.

2. House/Pizza idea
You have limited space in your house, and tenets are coming in - knocking on your door and wanting to live with you (or alternatively people want to join the party you are hosting). As you place each tenet, you eventually get to a situation where you have to kick people out.

1. Hoarder
... And this is where we reached. After long deliberations - we have figured this is the most scoped out.
Basically you are a small creature trying to avoid things falling on you, as the room fills because the old person is a hoarder.
The more we talked, the more we leaned towards the small creature being a rat.
This gave us the idea that it's not us that's actually in danger, we are capable - but we need to babysit a smaller creature.
Twisting it into more of a survival, puzzle, adventure game.

With that in our hand we knew we have to start making the game, setup perforce, ramp up the unreal engine project and begin jamming.

Stay tuned for the Devlog of Day 3 & 4!