Giving up and going to bed now…
… but still rather content with my end result! I did get some fairly nice “programmers art” in there at least, got a much better hang of how to do UV mapping and texture editing in Blender and Gimp, I felt like I got more of a hang on Irrlicht, etc.
Here’s a screen-shot, sadly I won’t be able to submit anything this time, just creating binaries and bundling the correct files would take me quite a while, especially if I’m supposed to bundle the graphics engine as well.

My end result for the LudumDare #24. I would probably have needed at least one more day to get (very simple) enemies and proper collision detection in there.