I’m In for my first Ludum Dare. I followed along other developers during the last competition, but I had some previous commitments so I couldn’t participate. However, I’ve made sure to have cleared out that weekend to participate.

This morning I was doing some thinking about possible tool options for Ludum Dare. Here is the list I came up with:

• Star Ruby
• Unity3D
• JRuby w/ LWGL & Slick
• XNA
• Flixel
• FlashPunk
• Game Maker

I’ve only messed around with Star Ruby a little bit. It’s nice and simple, and I really want to explore Ruby as an option for game development. JRuby is a similar option, but I have never messed with it. I have used Unity3D in the past for a school project, but it wasn’t much more than some simple code and using the editor. XNA is what I have the most experience with, and I have some frameworks and a decent codebase to help me get started with 2D tile-based games. Flixel is probably my second most comfortable tool, as I’ve worked in it for a few projects and really enjoy it. I’ve worked with FlashPunk about a year ago, and I also enjoyed working in that. However, I’d probably work in Flixel over FlashPunk, just due to familiarity. Lastly there is GameMaker, I’ve opened it up and messed with it, but I’ve never worked on an actual project with it. I’m definitely interested in it, but I’m not sure what it’s appropriate for.

There you have it, a bunch of babbling about tech options and some random thoughts.

I’ll also be using tools like Paint Tool Sai, GIMP, Bfxr, and whatever else I discover I need.

I look forward to LD48, and good luck to everyone else.