Currently wrestling with making Gradle behave itself in Android Studio and brainstorming what I'm going to make.
Gradle is working properly now. :D
After neglecting my dev log a bit, here's a big update:
Asset creation has taken up the majority of the time developing the game thusfar. I have several chiptune songs composed for the game and a number of assets drawn up including some spaceships and widget skins.
In code I have menus and some interfaces to define behaviour of the various game objects.
Over the next two days I intend to program in the templates for how the actual playable levels will work along with success and fail states.
Added Motion Controls using the accelerometer for the Android version, defined and implemented some interfaces, and created the Shot object for non special weapons firing. I'll be tweeting screenshots and possibly the soundtrack from soundcloud if it's far enough along this weekend so I'll be sure to link those here.
Submission has been made to the jam. Sometime over the course of voting I'm going to write a comprehensive post mortem of development. I'm happy with the amount I learned about libGDX and will be using it in future, but I'm not particularly pleased with how I didn't come into development with a strong design plan in mind. The result has been a mess of code that became more and more difficult to expand and modify as the jam enter "crunch time". I did however get to make a lot of assets using new tool I acquired over December and I'm very pleased with how my skills have developed.
All told, great learning experience and I'm happy to be getting a new tool to use for development. Maybe I'll be lucky and get a T-shirt. :)
I finally wrote up my post-mortem on my blog: http://www.gameovertures.ca/2016/01/libgdx-jam-ret...
In summary: great learning experience, both in terms of learning the basics and features of the engine and for reinforcing important lessons about planning, design, and best practices in programming in general.
Please give it a read if you have the time.