Yeah, I must say, speaking in a purely pragmatic sense I don't think that 2 weeks out from AVCon and the Indie Games Room is the best time to hold one of these. It's largely the same pool of developers, most of them simply won't have time for both, and those taking stuff to the IGR have been comitted for weeks already.

My IGR game can potentially get a quick re-tooling to suit this theme, so I might give that a crack over the weekend and also maintain my game-in-every-jam record. I don't like my chances, though.

Alternatively... some form of text adventure?

Aha, I'm in the same boat as you with AvCon, but just that statement makes me really want to make a Text-Based-Text-Based Adventure Game.

"You encounter a rogue G. It is Brandishing a COMMA with reckless abbadon! What do you do?"

I'm hopefully going to have an entrant to this game jam, but I do need to be designing levels for avcon as well, so I don't know whether I will actually be able to finish it or not. But I'll give it a go

I've got a half completed shmup engine, so I'm gonna try to make a simple shmup where all the enemies are letters, but beware of the giant boss 'Z'!

That sounds like a good idea. What you could do to expand that idea is make the player score by hitting certain letters and form words. That idea reminds me of a game in the TIG Source Asemblee competition in which you had a shmup where you had to hit certain tiles which formed the background of an RPG level which could be played.

Thanks everyone for their entries. The jam has now closed.

I'm looking into arranging a meetup early next semester.

Update: I put together a write up on the front page. http://gdc.org.au/?p=252

Just for reference I've tried to book a room in the new building but the forces that be at the Uni aren't allowing it.