http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/

The upcoming Ludum Dare (begins in just under two weeks) is going to be my first. I've read about it plenty and always dreamt of participating, but until now the idea of programming a game seemed lightyears beyond my reach. I've still never made a game with a graphical interface, but that will hopefully change by the end of this LD.

For those who don't know, Ludum Dare is a sprint game-development challenge/contest. At the time the event starts, a theme will be announced, and then you have 48 hours to develop a game completely from scrach that utilizes that theme somehow (if you opt to do the LD Jam, you have 72 hours, and can be part of a team instead of being required to work alone).

In the past, I've seen some pretty interesting games come out of this, and a few that were pretty amazing as well. Even if it's not something you feel like participating in, it's at least worth checking out to see some of the games that'll show up.

At the moment, my friend and I are trying to decide what to use to develop it. We're both working with Microsoft's XNA at the moment (my friend has some prior experience with it, so I figured learning that was as good as anything) to prepare, but we might end up shifting to something a little 'dumber' to help speed up our process for the event. If anyone has any suggestions there, feel free to throw them my way; I'd love to get some other opinions.

So, anyone else thinking of diving into this? I think it'll be a fun challenge, even if we don't end up finishing our game in time.