Really excited to join again! I've been having a great time voting on the themes, and even took a stab at suggesting a few back when submissions were being taken. (Surprisingly, one of them -- "Transform your surroundings" -- showed up in round 3!)

Ludum Dare #42 this past August was my first game jam ever, and shortly afterward I wrote up a detailed postmortem dev blog post about how it went, and some lessons learned. One of the biggest items in the "things to do differently next time" section was to use an actual game engine. I had used ReactJS for my last Ludum Dare submission -- which worked reasonably well for UI stuff, but not so much for animations / sounds / general polish. And I've been using SpriteKit pretty heavily for an iPhone game I'm making, but it's not very well-suited for a game jam where ideally you'd want something that could be played directly in the browser.

So after some research and recommendations, I decided to give Godot Engine a try this time around. I've started reading the docs and playing around with it a little these last few days, and so far, I'm really loving it. But I'm also completely new to it, so part of the challenge for this Ludum Dare will be to see if I can learn an entirely new engine, and make a game with it, in the span of less than a week. It'll be interesting to see how this goes or if I'm completely biting off more than I can chew.

Normally I gravitate toward RPG mechanics and progression systems in my projects, but since I'll be going solo on a single-weekend jam using an unfamiliar engine, it'll be all the more important to keep it as simple as possible. Currently I'm thinking of aiming for something my daughters (ages 4 and 7) would be able to play and enjoy... Their latest obsessions include unicorns and slime, so I might see if I can work some of those in too depending on the final chosen theme!