I’ve just come back from a walk. Here in Cambridge, a beautiful spring afternoon is coming to a close, and I couldn’t justify staying inside for all of it.

Anyway, my game is sort of coming along. You play an adventurer about to embark on a dangerous quest. A helpful but questionably sane old man of your acquaintance finds himself unable to allow you to proceed without first furnishing you with various enchanted items that may be of assistance. So, he keeps chucking useful items in your direction and you have to try to keep hold of them. If you drop one, the enchantment breaks and the item explodes and kills you horribly.

So far I have some items falling from the sky and some deliberately arcadey physics, but it is neither finished nor playable yet.

CB2 has filled up nicely, as you can see in these photos taken with my crappy camera.

Also I have filled up nicely thanks to delicious nourishment provided by CB2’s kitchen (nourishment half-eaten before I remembered to photograph it).

Here’s my game so far:

I won’t say too much about it yet, and to be honest I’m not quite sure what I’m doing with it yet anyway. What I do know is that my game is going to have a lot more focus on the “take this” part of the theme than on the “it’s dangerous to go alone” part. I can’t see myself picking up many points for great use of the theme.

So, I’m starting to feel somewhat positive about the theme and I have an idea or two rolling around in my head. The trouble is, they are all much too complicated for Ludum Dare. I need to try to whittle one down to the very basics, so that I have a chance of finishing.

I decided immediately that I’m not going to do any kind of adventure game. The immediate reason is that I’m afraid that we’ll end up with 150 Zelda clones, but also I don’t really like adventure games.

So that leaves everything else. I feel like there still needs to be some element of movement, journeying or questing. I’m also inclined to have a prominent two-player mode, for the “dangerous to go alone” angle. The trouble is that these two things together could lead to something quite complicated. From the more concrete ideas I have, the two-player mode is the thing I’d be most likely to cut, if it weren’t for that damn theme.

Hi guys. It’s 8:41 am BST and I just woke up fifteen minutes ago.

Here’s a picture of me when I brought up ludumdare.com on my phone and found out what today’s theme is:

So far I have no ideas, so I might have to shoehorn something unrelated into service of this theme. I guess I will see if anything pops into my mind while I attend to my ablutions.

Then it’s off to CB2 to see what the Cambridge Indies are up to. How I’ve missed them .