The strategy:

GO BIG OR GO HOME. Unless the voted theme prevents me from making a horribly ambitious, huge game, I will do so. Lots of mechanics, features, buttons, effects, etc. It will be horribly unpolished, terribly unbalanced, borderline unplayable, break most of game theory, will have bad graphics, bad sound, etc. In other words, it will perform horribly in every single category games are rated on here. But it will be big, and massive and I will ignore the fact half of it is held together with little more than strings and a flour-water home made glue.

That’s just the way I like to approach Ludum Dare. It’s not something I recommend anyone else does if they care about the final score, but it’s just how I like to do LD in particular.

The technology:

While I’ve been wanting to learn Unreal and desperately need an excuse to do so, I think I’ll be sticking with Unity for this LD. Learning new technologies in 48 hours tends to be a bad idea.

Engine: Unity with C#
Graphics: Inkscape
Models: UNITY CUBES! (and Blender for triangles)
Sound: LMMS

The goal:

So I really don’t care about the score at the end as LD’s scoring is biased in favour of short, single-mechanic, 2D, pretty, polished games. That’s not a complaint about LD, just an observation, and it’s just not the way I like to approach LD. Last time I placed in 599th place, even though many people described my game as “impressive for 48 hours”. So yeah. While placing somewhere in the 400 – 600 range in the overall category would be great, I won’t be disappointed if that does not happen.

My actual goal is to simply make as much functional, properly working stuff as possible in the 48 hours we have available. It’s an exercise of “how much bug free code can I write without an ability to do code revisions and rewrites in this short time span.”. Last LD it was a lot, this time it should be more! 😀

I however do reserve the right to change the goal, expectations, strategy and technology as the pool of likely themes becomes smaller and once the actual theme is announced.

Good luck to everyone!