Congratulations to the Evolution theme, which has FINALLY been chosen!  It’s a bit tricky to find a non-obvious idea for this one, but at least it’s not too similar to previous LDs!  I’ve got a few ideas brewin’, but naturally, I’m afraid a bunch of other people will have thought of the same things.  I suppose with thousands of games out there, it’s hard to have something COMPLETELY unique- execution is important, too!  However, I am trying to shy away from what I bet is the most obvious idea: a game where the player character or enemies get upgrades or change form (à la Altered Beast) over time.

My tools:

• Haxe with Physaxe or AS3 with Flixel, depending on the idea
• DAME for tilemap editing, should I need it
• Photoshop CS3 for whatever I can pass off as art
• GarageBand (or Famitracker if I’m feeling generous with my time budget) for music
• bfxr for sound

Also, remember last Ludum Dare, when I was one of several people who did a postmortem survey and promised to release statistics with the results?  Well, unfortunately, due to some stuff that happened to everyone in the class I was doing the survey for, I didn’t get to do a real analysis of the results.  When this compo’s over, I’ll take a crack at the analysis and post what I come up with!

I guess I should have goals, too, so here are some goals I’m coming up with off the top of my head:

• Spend less than half my time programming.  That way, I can spend more time working on the ever-elusive polish: level design, art, music, sound effects, and so on.
• Actually have music.  I have not yet released an LD game with music; I’ve always run out of time before I could compose some.
• Not get distracted so much.  I am my own worst enemy in these sorts of things; my mind gets carried away all the time.  Part of the reason I do Ludum Dare so much is to train myself to focus, and I plan on continuing that here.
• Oh, and KITTENS!  I will work cats into this somehow if it kills me.  There’s too many kitten-haters out there.

Good luck to everyone, and remember to have fun!