TL;DR: I made a thing!
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dar...view&uid=89952
Ludum Dare is a game jam, where participants have 72 hours to make an entire game from scratch based on a theme that isn't announced until the timer starts. (There's also a competition mode, where you have to work solo and you only have 48 hours instead.) This last weekend was Ludum Dare 36, and the theme was Ancient Technology.
This was the first time I had the opportunity to participate in a game jam. I've wanted to do it since I was in college, but I never really had a chance before now. I'm EXHAUSTED, but it was a lot of fun.
My game, which I'll be cross-posting over into my own "Games by Coda" thread, we ended up naming "Bobble Battle." We had originally wanted to do a sort of RTS/tower defense game where an advanced alien befriends a race of primitive people, and the alien would teach the primitives how to build tools and defenses out of the materials they had at hand, but he would also go out in a battle mech to fight off monsters. Unfortunately, our artist wasn't feeling well so we didn't get the variety of sprites that we wanted, and we ran into some technical difficulties that put us behind schedule. So we took the pieces we'd put together and the testing functions that we'd used just to make sure the other parts were working, and we figured out a completely different set of mechanics that could work with what we had built and redesigned the game around that.
So in the end, it wasn't the game we set out to make, but we did indeed make a game! And honestly I think it's pretty fun for a short diversion -- it's not going to win any awards, and it probably wouldn't sell many copies if you had to pay money for it, but it's better than a lot of the junk on the App Store. :P
Bobble Battle