This will be my first Ludum Dare, and my first ever event of this kind.

I don’t have high expectations for actually finishing, but it will be a good exercise for getting into the full development process. I’ve worked on a successfully released (non-commercial) game before, but my contribution was pretty narrowly focused, and given the dozens on unimplemented game designs I’ve made over the years I thought this would be a good way to start producing more.

I’ve (re)learned how to use git, and got myself set up on github. A few months ago I started learning libgdx (and Java in the process), and will be using the newly released version 1.0 for the competition. I built a few infrastructure components (a re-implementation of libgdx’s Game and Screen classes, a custom entity framework, and renderer for simple geometric shapes to use instead of placeholder graphics) that I’ll be using. You can see them in the first commit here. I could go into them in detail at some point if anyone cares; it was from exploring another user’s Ludum Dare entries that I discovered the value of using an entity framework so maybe it would be of value to someone else if I explained my decision to roll my own.

For content I’ll use GIMP or Inkscape for graphics if necessary, Tiled for maps/levels if appropriate, and bfxr for sounds. If I have time for music I’ll probably try one of the generators people have made available.

Looking forward to it!