[laserDinosaur]

Strangely I find the opposite - Themes like 'you only get one' imply a certain gameplay mechanic that I think leads to some real interesting games. You only get one..life? Second? What thing in games do we take for granted that we get multiple of? Themes like 'minimalism' are too broad for my liking - what does minimal even mean? Is it minimal because you only used 20 of the keys on the keyboard? Is it minimal because you didn't use every single feature in the Unreal Engine? I could submit any platformer ever made and say "it's minimal because it's limited to a 2D plane". It's so broad it quickly becomes meaningless.

[Lockyy]

I agree with you on the broad themes point and I really liked the 'You Only Get One' theme, at first I couldn't get past the 'one gun', 'one life', 'one minutes' ideas that I felt everyone would go for but I ended up making a simulation where you only get a single interaction after world generation and then it simulates a little village gathering food and building farms etc. and I was really happy with the result.

[laserDinosaur]

That sounds really cool - Do you have a link by chance?

[Lockyy]

Yeah, I made a gallery of my progress through development as well. Unfortunately it gets pretty slow after several decades of simulation, not much chance for optimisations in the time frame given. Windows download available here: http://tinyurl.com/q8m7hnd Source code: https://github.com/Lockyy/YOGO-Moment-of-Interaction Gallery: http://imgur.com/a/13k1R

[nimblegorilla]

Good themes inspire people on multiple levels. "You only get one" does nothing except imply a limited gameplay mechanic. Minimalism inspired some people to create games based around minimalism in art or philosophy.

Another problem with "you only get one" is that it came after "10 seconds" which came after "minimalism". The last 2 themes are just subsets of minimalism and it is getting kind of old.