I’ve been trying to find a good jam to do for a while. It seems I miss every Ludum Dare because of previous plans (it takes place over 48 hours of a weekend, and it seems like I always have weddings or travel plans those weekends).
Gamedev.net is having a week-long game jam called Week of Awesome starting September 22 at midnight and lasting a week.
I’m going to use this opportunity to finally learn Unity. I spent the last day and a half going through Unity’s Stealth game tutorial. It’s a nice change from doing everything myself with XNA/MonoGame. In my own engines/games, I have incomplete/narrow implementations of nav mesh navigation, physics, global illumation – just the bare bones of what I needed. It’s nice to have access to robust, flexible implementations instead. It’s also somewhat reassuring to realize how similar game components and scripting work in my own engine vs Unity.
There are still a number of things I’d like to get experience with in Unity before the game jam starts (24 hours): 2d stuff, custom shaders, generating meshes programmatically. We’ll see if I have time for that. I’m trying to figure out what useful functionality I’d potentially want in a game that I haven’t “practiced” with Unity yet.
As for other tools I’ll be using for the game jam:
- Photoshop, of course
- Blender for any modelling I need to do (this really depends on if I end up doing a 3d game or not)
- Sony Vegas for any audio clip editing, and a Zoom recorder for any audio recording I need to do
- Pencil and paper for any hand art I need to scan in
IceFall Games 
learning unity for the week, sounds like a good plan, hope it comes together for you!