I’ve been doing a number of things to prepare for my first Ludum Dare.

First off, I set up a public Ludum Dare 23 Kanban Board  on Trello to track my To Do items. Currently it includes a lot of preparation items (getting software installed/updated/familiarized, reading, etc.). During the competition I’ll be using it to organize ideas and development tasks. It’s also quite possible it might be overkill for the competition but it’s proving useful for preparation.

I bought The Game Jam Survival Guide which I’m guessing lots of Ludum Darers already know about. It was a good read and served as a good reality-check as to what to expect and what I should be shooting for.

In an effort to make sure I’m creating something releasable I added Spooner’s releasy gem to the in-progress Astrosmash clone I’ve been creating with Chingu called Astroblast. So far I have it successfully building and packaging on the Mac. Next up will be Windows. This project will likely serve as a template for my entry’s code layout and distribution. I’ve also been collecting helpful Ruby and Chingu links to use during the contest.

Here’s a screenshot of Astroblast, my first attempt at a game with Ruby.