Though this Ludum Dare went even less smoothly than I'd prepared for, but I managed to create a core experience I enjoyed. Regrettably though it was lacking in enough meaningful content and balance for me to have confidence in it as a submission people might share/discuss.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/my-precious-orbit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-o83pJd788
Still I wanted to be able to round it out into a completed project as I enjoyed the base I had built for it, so for anyone else who were also engaged by the submission I entered,
its post-LD release can be found here - https://swiftillusion.itch.io/my-precious-orbit -
which I'm absolutely happy to have as a small completed game.

Below is a summary of my experience/followup plan if you'd like to see/read more
SATURDAY
Ludum Dare started for me on Saturday at 11am, so I was awake with lunch eaten and ready to jump in.
It got off to a good start with my favorite part (game design/conceptualization).
Below is the initial document where you can see how my thoughts trailed along.
Then I cleaned up and separeted the games core elements in-case I needed to adapt it to an even smaller scope
With all that done in the initial 3 hours I was happy and ready to get working on the gameplay.
My first priority was the characters movement as that had to feel just right. The prototype character was just a quick dummy so I could test the initial spatial movement.
http://i.imgur.com/QDUMjzJ.gifv
That was ready around 5 hours in. The camera was next though, while tweaking the player movement/rotation alongside it. It was a nightmarish mess of quaternion math trying to get the camera to smoothly/dynamically follow the players position/rotation. After experimenting searching and guessing for what felt like forever I stumbled upon one amazing person who'd shared the simplest equation ever that worked!
So this day ended around 3-4 am.

SUNDAY/MONDAY
These 2 days were so horrible with the little I accomplished I can't entirely recall the order of events/what happened separately across both days.
~~~The Sun/Planet models
I wanted to have a colorful array of planets/suns, so keeping performance in mind knowing I'd want a lot of solar systems visible together I wanted them to share the same texture/material and just offset it randomly for each. However somehow as obvious as this at least seemed to me, Unity had no way to accomplish this. Each material 'instance' actually costing individual drawcalls instead of like my previous experience with this in Unreal Engine 4 where instances were used to cut drawcalls.
This led to a mess of trying to find solutions, eventually stumbling across and combining/guessing my way through a solution to offset each meshes indivisual uv's which ended up working absolutely great.
(Because I'm unable to program/I use a visual programming tool -flowcanvas- finding even working code doesn't mean instant success as I have to try and workout how to translate it into that tool).
~~~Character revision
I wanted to work on revising the character with a roughly skinned character to test its gameplay functionality.
This started off well enough, however the process I've been using to import character into Unity since I can remember randomly decided to stop working. The root bone of the character wouldn't export/import into Unity, even attempting previously functional characters caused the same result.
Not having the slightest idea how this could have started I had to guess my way into a roundabout solution that involved extra work. However, once I tested this the original root bone, no longer attached even remotely to any part of the character and not selected for export decided to show up in Unity. I was beside myself trying to comprehend this. Eventually I had to just cross my fingers with the roundabout solution and hope nothing more would break.
This resulted in having to re-animate the character from scratch multiple times and a mess of other time wasting processes in combination with the ragdoll tools to get it ready.
~~~Character physics
This I know was the last event of Sunday/Monday, as it was 9 hours of headaches and squinting at the screen with intense concentration to spot whether or not the character was snapping between frames or the ragdoll was lagging behind. It was just a mess. I rebuilt the ragdoll/physics for it countless times, compared demo scenes, shut options on/off thinking it did/didn't work but then discover the camera jolting around and having to tweak that, only to find the issue was with the character. A serious nightmare.
After the 9 straight hours of this I just had to settle with not being able to have continued slow motion (the character would visibly shake/snap) and have the camera move only on the fixed time update alongside the characters physics.
At this point there was only 9 hours left until the submission deadline, so I had to skip sleep and brainstorm what kind of gameplay I could achieve with essentially only character movement working and planets blindly following the player.

TUESDAY
After madly brainstorming/calculating what I thought I could accomplish/what had the least risk of going wrong to move forward with, I roughly put together a mental concept/schedule of what I needed to accomplish.
Player defeat/loss condition, Element of progression/impact, Enemy Interaction, sound.
I hoped for about an hour each with an hour safety net for bugs/tweaks/balancing and time left to write up the project and upload/submit it.
~~~Player defeat/loss condition
I added a new element of the characters concept, the gems around the head/globe and thankfully quickly managed a solution to track them and remove 1 each time a sun collided with you, making sure the first ones to disappear were those facing you to make it more visually evident. This also helped in that I didn't need to start adding/working on 2d elements and it complimented the 'scenic' space view during play.
I Also wanted to make sure the defeat was impactful so I stopped the camera following the player upon death.
~~~Enemy Interaction
This was relatively simple, destroying enemies when they were hit with your swing. However at this point I worked on additional tweaking of the players collision/punch collision to try and get it feeling smooth.
~~~Element of progression/impact
I then split up the destruction of suns by having them lose their planets, starting with the furthest one out.
I also tweaked how their planets did so to make it more apparent (with an additional explosion effect for them-they also expand outwards from the sun before doing so).
~~~Sound
Thankfully this was mostly taken care of as I made the above additions though I didn't have time to find/add music, I barely managed to get the title menu and credits added very roughly onto a plane in front of the camera. I also made the title smoothly move off the screen instead of disappearing to feel less rough.

CONCLUSION
Somehow I still had something I was at least comfortable submitting even if I knew it was lacking thanks to the core experience I made sure to keep refining even throughout the lost time from the various bugs/issues.
If I had just pushed forward without doing so, I would likely not even be writing this as I wouldn't have been comfortable submitting something that was both incomplete and without a core experience/layer of polish and consideration that I hope comes across in this submission.

NEXT? (after playing and giving feedback to other entries)
While I had been working on a RPG Maker MV project I'm currently recovering from an eye operation, so working with pixel art isn't something I can manage when I still have to zoom in most webpages to read comfortably.
So the current plan is to enter the '1 game a month' game jam via Unity in 3D from the start of next/this month, and hopefully have a smoother experience with that than this Ludum Dare ^^;.