Back from my vacations, all over Portugal… Well deserved, I might add! 
Anyway, what better way to finish vacations that with a Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition?!
I’ll be cross-posting the progress on my game throughout the competition, so stay tuned!
Anyway, I’m using the same framework as last time, done by me, just added a 3d tilemap system (doesn’t have any type of querying yet, just rendering at the moment, I’ll add the rest during the competition, according to needs).
You can download the framework here, if you want to use it (it has two sample applications that show most if not all the features):
- D3D9 initialization and some helpers
- FMOD interface for sound
- 2d Sprites (with sprite caching, etc)
- 2d Particle System
- Text
- 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.
- Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)
- Simple 3d camera handling system (just with a “look at” operation)
- XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me… the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I’m too lazy to figure out how they work)
- 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)
- 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)
- LUA library support (it’s actually ripped from my engine, so it’s a good support system for LUA)… Last time I used cutscenes and scripting, and loads of the game code was much simpler because of that…
- DDS image loading for an offscreen buffer (just supports R8G8B8A8 images). Might be useful for some level design stuff, although I’ll probably go back to my old days of text files
- 3d Tilemap (Kind of a blocky heightmap with an automatic texture atlas generation and partition of the map in chunks for possible culling (not implemented))
On the tools side:
- Visual Studio 2005 (hope I can get used to it again, been using 2010 at work)
- Photoshop CS5 (for 2d graphics and textures if I decide to adventure into 3d, and for map creation, etc)
- 3d Studio Max (for modelling if I go 3d, or for title screens and such otherwise)
- sfxr (or Bfxr) (for audio effects)
- Wolfram Tones (for the music creation – fun tool, saves loads of time) and MIDI Converter Free (to convert the MIDI generated by Wolfram Tones to OGG)
- Live Writer for blogging
About the themes, I have a gut feeling that “Dreams” is going to win, although I don’t have any ideas for that… or any of the others, to be honest, since the times in the past when I tried to think of an idea for all the themes it didn’t work that well… 
Anyway, very excited about this all!
Good luck if you’re participating (and you totally should, it’s great fun!)