Great entry as always! I love the callbacks to past jam's themes, such a fun addition that also made for some fun upgrades! I don't care for the weak theme, I was myself about to have a really weak theme but some animations basically saved it, so why should the theme get to stop such a great entry?
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Yeah, the theme (for me at least) really just serves a jumping off point. I don't tend to plan and design at all really but maybe have a vague general idea and just start messing around and see where it takes me. It's an iterative process and sometimes (or maybe even most of the time) the initial ideas don't really work and the design takes you elsewhere. And on these shorter game jams, there really isn't time to completely pivot after already sinking some time into it. Initially the game was supposed to be a bit more mathy with counting being involved in placing tiles/scoring, kinda something akin to minesweeper, but it didn't really pan out. It kept feeling too much like my last year's js13k entry where I failed to make main hook all that fun.
I see, and I feel the same. The jam page also states that you won't get disqualified for not adhering to the theme, which for me signals that Mark thinks the same. It's meant as a starting point for inspiration, not as a checkbox you have to tick.
One of the best jam games I've made had it's main mechanic discovered during prototyping, even so I'm still very focus on wanting a complete idea before I write a single line of code. In this jam, at hour 38 or so I still hadn't gotten an idea I wanted to make, but I felt like I just had to make something so I started with one of the ideas.
This turned into spending 4 hours making an 3D elevator, but then figuring out that I wanted a 3D puzzle on each floor. After brainstorming 3D puzzle design for 3 hours I finally got an idea I wanted to make, and the elevator got scrapped entirely (even if it's still in the game files haha)