I'm a little late joining, so am going to try to throw together something this weekend (so about 48-72 hours). It was incredibly difficult narrowing down to a single choice, but ultimately selected Gangan! Junkland Dash from the 2013 exhibit by Illustrator Zac Zedica. The game's description (translated from Japanese):

2XXX year. Junkland suffers from enemies. The King of the enemy army boss and the gangs led by him occupy the junk land and it becomes a battlefield. To get Junkland back, residents, stand up! Modify the car, wear weapons, fight!

My plan is to do a 2D top-down driver/shooter a-la the old Spy Hunter arcade game. I'm going to make it a procedural generated, endless runner though instead of having to design levels. Hopefully this will keep the scope manageable within the tight window. Will hopefully have a rough prototype put together after lunch. Time to crunch!

Day 1

I've got most of the game components roughed-out. The player handling, the basics for the endless-runner controller, basic save system(your pickups (scrap/cash), which are used for upgrades, will carry over. plus record distance is saved as well) 3 enemy types, and ramps! (which takes me back to this old NES game, Bump N Jump. I just had to have ramps). Also, have music almost finished. 

Still to do

• The level controller right now just randomly spits out stuff in kind of a random location. I'm going to create a series of patterns that it will use so it looks a little more hand-crafted.
• I've got pickups which at the moment are just created by the level controller. Need to add in them dropping after enemies are destroyed. Also something to spend the pickups on! I plan to have an "upgrade" screen after each death so you can spend your scrap/cash you collected to upgrade weapons/car/hats(?)
• Make it pretty! Right now I'm only planning to have time to create sprites for the player, the 3 enemies and a single level skin (wasteland desert). If I have time, I'll try for more.
• Sound effects. 
• There was other stuff that I've since forgotten since writing this. I'm sure they'll come to me in the far future.

A quick capture of the game so far. Going to spend the rest of the night working on pixels because it's ugly to look at right now (plus most things on the screen do not read well at the moment - especially bullets!)

Day 1, cont. (well technically Day 2, but I haven't been to sleep yet)

The night ended up being fairly productive. I went back and forth between being creatively motivated and artist block. I'm happy with the final direction, even if some items are still bothering me. Mockup below. This scene is very crowded, but I was trying to fit in just about everything. Still have a few items to design. Will spend tomorrow (today, after I get some sleep) getting everything game ready and imported into the game.

Day 2

Feeling a little burnt out. Was really hoping to be a little further a long by end of today. I don't think I'm going to have much time the rest of the week (much less by the deadline) to work on this anymore. Was able to get most of the updated sprites in. Created my upgrades and the necessary systems to support them. Didn't really get to work on the level controller and how it "builds" the level.

My list

• The level controller right now just randomly spits out stuff in kind of a random location. I'm going to create a series of patterns that it will use so it looks a little more hand-crafted. <-- Didn't get to work on this yet. This impacts enemy spawns as well. Right now they are kind of random, but the harder ones (attack chopper) shouldn't really show up until you are further along.
• I've got pickups which at the moment are just created by the level controller. Need to add in them dropping after enemies are destroyed. Also something to spend the pickups on! I plan to have an "upgrade" screen after each death so you can spend your scrap/cash you collected to upgrade weapons/car/hats(?)  Complete! Well, mostly. I want to put more effort into the enemy drops so that they aren't just dumped where they died - have them "thrown" further out front to increase the player's odds of being able to pick them up.
• Make it pretty! Right now I'm only planning to have time to create sprites for the player, the 3 enemies and a single level skin (wasteland desert). If I have time, I'll try for more. As Complete as this is going to get before the deadline.
• Sound effects. They definitely feel (or sound) rushed. Going to have to do for now.
• There was other stuff that I've since forgotten since writing this. I'm sure they'll come to me in the far future. <-- Still hasn't come to me.
• Title screen - I started a title screen (can see a screen grab below). The big empty space was supposed to be for our hero and their car. I envisioned they would just be sitting there and the sun goes down and a fire starts. Just a quite endless loop of day to night and back to day. A nice contrast to the actual game. Of course I probably shouldn't have been wasting time on this but I wouldn't be me otherwise.

I'll probably get my build up tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by.