So Vacuum is out now (please rate here https://ldj.am/$317397)

It was an interesting development process - so let's walk through how the game came to be.

FRIDAY

The theme was announced..

HARVEST

Moodboard

We began with a moodboard - basically going online and saving a load of inspirational pictures vaguely around the theme, we have a combine harvester, hydroponics, general photos of fruits & veg, a little reaper in there, and while a bit hidden there is a photo of children picking through a scrapheap looking for valuable e-waste. There is also a few games which have a similar theme - some literal like Stardew Valley & Banished that just have plots of farmland, and another, POINPY, that has a little dinosaur bouncing through the air to collect fruit to give to a blue, hangry catbeast.

Something recommend to include in the early concept stage is a collection of synonyms - words that are tangental to the theme that you may not have thought of yourself - helps get the creative juices flowing.

Concepts

With the general concept set out, we set to work drawing up some basic game ideas. Our general principle was keeping the scope super small - a single screen ideally - this is just for fun after all, and we do enough stressful gamedev during the work week.

1. The player will harvest everything in a single row (or column) at once, weeds and all. The goal would be to maximise how much crop you harvest, such as wheat and fruit, while minimising how many weeds you harvest. Crops and weeds would both spread out from their starting tiles, creating an organic growth pattern across the board.
2. Something simpler based on the horizontal line idea from 1. - the Grim Reaper has a farm. Pumpkins fall from the sky, souls float up from the ground. Time your swing to get as many souls and pumpkins in the single line - harvest as many as you can before time runs out.
3. Something simple - drive a tractor around a field and collect all the wheat. This is an idea I have seen a lot in the jam submissions.
4. Similar to 3. but with a twist - tractors and combine harvesters are two separate machines, and so they should be controlled independently. In this game, players use the Left analogue stick to control the fast & nimble tractor, and the Right analogue stick to control the slow and slippery combine harvester.

We left it there for the day and slept on the ideas we had, ready to begin on Saturday...