Theme Revealed and Jam Commenced

Even with the game jam start (and theme reveal) time set as 3:00 AM, I intended to sleep in later...

...but that proved impossible thanks to my eager anticipation. 😆 Despite my sincere desire to sleep in (at least somewhat lol) in order to be well-rested, my night proved restless. After spending a couple hours "resting" as I futilely tried to fall back to sleep, I gave in and looked at the then newly-revealed theme at about 3:08 AM.

Leading up to the theme reveal, I had two concerns. First, I worried that once the theme was revealed I wouldn't be able to come up with an idea that I was passionate about, and I would end up wasting too much time and energy trying to come up with one. 

On the other hand, I knew the exact opposite was perhaps even more likely. What if I come up with too many ideas and create a giant mess of a project that I can't come close to finishing in time? Game jam "Scope Creep" is extremely common, especially for new game jammers, and occurs when there are just too many cool game ideas to realistically include in a completed game within the constraints of the jam. 

And the theme is revealed as: "IT IS NOT REAL"

I'll be very honest, at first my mind was totally blank, and I was worried. 😂 As it was just past 3:00 AM, I tried again to go back to sleep as I figured I'd have a better chance of thinking of something with more sleep. However, as I would relax and start to fall into slumber, an idea! 

My first couple of ideas felt strong, but not quite right somehow. I had read advice to keep brainstorming past your first idea, so I did just that. I grabbed my idea notebook and jotted down the ideas (that made sense lol) that kept popping into my head. I still had hope of falling back to sleep, but this was soon proven impossible...

Before I knew it, my game came to me!!! 😀💡🎮

I decided to try to go back to sleep, maybe an even better idea would come? But it was no use, as the flood of ideas for this game started flooding into my head! As I turned the page in my notebook to write down all the game-specific ideas I started to have for this potential project, it quickly became obvious that I had found my game. 😊

I won't say what it is in this post, but I've decided it's time to move the ideas from pen and paper to Google Docs and Trello haha. I plan to continue to update this devlog blog fairly regularly through the jam, as I'm already enjoying having it as a way to process my experience.