Taking a few days off from work to participate in Ludum Dare has been a tradition of mine ever since I first participated in LD36. (I can't believe that was nine years ago!) I've only missed two Ludum Dares since I started -- LD37 because I didn't even know about it when it happened, and LD53 because I had a schedule conflict. (I didn't ship a game for LD52 because my team got overambitious, but I still participated.) The spring ones in particular tend to fall around the time of my birthday, so I consider it to be a birthday present to myself.

I'm probably going to use html52d again this jam unless I want to do something in 3D. This is an engine I built by myself between LD42 and LD43, and I designed it to be efficient at runtime, fairly easy to use, and very fast to load. I was tired of the headaches that I was having trying to do 2D games in Unity (especially before Unity got a native 2D system) and how slow the Unity editor was.

Other tools I use: * Noteworthy Composer - music scoring * Element - audio plugin host * GIMP - graphics * jsfxr - sound effects * Audacity - sound editing