Start
After a full day in the office trying to focus on my enterprise work when all I wanted to do was work on the game concept, I finally was able to leave for the day to start working on a game. Throughout the day I was jotting down ideas and mechanics in a design document as they came to me between build cycles at work. As soon as I got home I went to start prototyping....but found I had no tools installed. After a few hours I had all of the tools installed but ran into a problem where my XNA project couldn't load my XNA Content projects assets. Eventually this was figured out....a few hours later.

Prototype Early!
To my fellow game developers or even developers in general - Prototyping is extremely important to do up front. There is no point making levels, characters etc if your concept is boring and not fun to play. Thus, prototype the core gameplay rapidly so you are aware if you need to change upfront and you haven't lost a lot of time.

Prototyping
I wanted to fully prototype the 4 major gameplay aspects last night. Unfortunately, I got caught up trying to fix a bug in the first prototype for a few hours before realizing "Hey, this is a competition, this bug is minor, so what if the character lerps its distance, it still moves to the correct location!". After this realization, I moved on to prototype 2 of the remaining 3 major gameplay aspects which made me feel as if I accomplished something.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to the 4th and most critical gameplay aspect last night which will literally make or break the game and I do not even have a clue how to implement it currently.


Rough schedule and current status
Day 1
[s]-Get a core screen rendering with nothing on it[/s]
[s]-Prototype field of view[/s]
[s]-Prototype tracking[/s]
[s]-Prototype last know location with tracking[/s]
-Prototype emotion and influencing

Day 2
-Start building a level to feel out the mechanics
-Prototype selection and squadron building

Day 3-5
-Content; multiple levels, enemies etc
-Sound effect production
-Music production

Day 6
-Polish the turd
-Menu screens
-Cinematic screens

Conclusion
All in all, I am very excited about the competition, the goal is extremely ambitious and contains many things I have never done before so it is going to be difficult as well.