There are about 64 hours remaining until the fifth Week of Awesome starts! I'm excited. I'm new to this jam (and gamedev.net in general), but I've done other small quick games.  My folks run a small farm and Saturday/Sunday/Monday are our busiest three days with weekend retail sales and harvesting for the Monday wholesale deliveries.  So while I've made four or five attempts at things like Ludum Dare, I just don't have the time on weekends and I've never completed one. A 7-day jam seems like more my kind of thing, even though we're shorthanded with most of the family away on vacation and this week is going to be crazy.

As a programmer and mathematician I tend to get distracted by implementing interesting algorithms (e.g. Starling Burst for Daniel Pearce's new flocking model) and then never get around to making an actual game around them.  But recently I have done a few little 1-hour toy/game things: Catching Flies, RGB Jet,  Avalanche (Windows, love file), Gas Buffer (4 hours), so I feel like I've gotten the hang of making a very small working prototype. For this jam I want to try and stick with simple mechanics and try to focus more on content, since that's where I usually stop.

I'll be using the LÖVE engine, which has become my tool of choice for quick 2D prototypes. It's a code-based engine, so it doesn't have an editor and doesn't have a lot of stuff built in. It's more like SDL or SFML, but with Lua.  It does have Box2D built in, and there are other collision libraries available, plus I've written continuous collision for circles, and I have a demo with the Minkowski sum thing for configuration-space obstacles using convex polygons. So I have options there. And Lua is quite a nice little language once you get past the no-operator-assignment thing (It doesn't have +=, -=, etc) and learn to stop making fencepost errors due to its 1-based indexing. And the whole thing is nicely cross-platform. So...yeah. Probably not a great tool for everyone, but I'm comfortable with it.

Hmm, what else? Maybe a bit about me? I've been a pretty serious hobby programmer since I was 13 when we got our first computer (a hand-me-down from my grandfather) in September of 1993, so almost 24 years now. Messed around with all sorts of languages from Basic to C/C++ to five or six different assembly languages to things like Prolog and Haskell, and of course most of the scripting languages.  Spent a bunch of time playing with Forth and implementing toy Forth systems. Studied math at university, did a couple of years of web development after I got out of school. Wasn't a big fan of the desk job thing, and am now farming full-time on a small market-garden and family homestead on a lake in Maine with a couple of acres of vegetables, a couple hundred chickens, family pigs and cows.

So...yeah. Best of luck to everyone!