Day one starts... we brainstorm and have ideas. Then suddenly, BAM ... Rather than LibGDX/Artemis, let's try making something in Unity instead. Not only that, but let's make it 3D instead of 2D. How exciting!

Being the graphics person on our team, I do have some 3D experience in the sense of level design: Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Natural Selection 2. But modeling, not quite. So rather than another jam filled with pixelart, I installed the latest version of Blender and found what appeared to be a much-used tutorial series on YouTube by Blender Guru. Time to make a donut.

I followed the tutorial until it had covered texturing/materials and figured that was the point where I should get started on something to put in our project. @daanvanyperen had been figuring out how to operate Unity in the meantime, successfully inserting my sprinkled donut into the level area and doing all sorts of nifty things with particle sprites to boot. @astronautmikedexter managed to accept our general aimlessness and started various musical theme ideas in spite of it all.

I remembered fellow Ludum Dare veteran @imphenzia has a YouTube series where he very quickly created low-poly models, and so I spent a little while studying his workflow. Then I got started on our horse.

There are some issues applying the UV mapped texture, but it's sufficiently recognizable as a horse... though it's kind of a generic horse. No real design decisions made there. Ah well, you have to start somewhere. We'll fix that tomorrow.

All in all, this Ludum Dare is the most experimental in a while for us. I already learned more today than I usually do throughout the entire jam, so in that sense we're very successful. Let's see what tomorrow brings.