This was my first game jam, and out of the five days I was only able to work on it for three. I have to say, it was really tough, but it also showed me what I’m capable of – and what I’m not yet. I’m confident I’ll do better in the next jam.

What I underestimated, and what slowed me down the most, was the programming itself. I had to build the entire system from scratch, which turned out to be way too much. To avoid falling behind, I ended up cutting things out—but unfortunately too late. Because of that, both the art and the gameplay suffered in the end.

What did I learn from this?  Think small, but make it big.

What about you? What were your struggles, and what did you take away from them?

Me and my partner are in the same boat, they study Game Design at University and has been for 5 years while, i've only messed around in Unity and never made anything with substance for 5 years. We took this opportunity to finally get our head down and make something. 

We had a lot of fun doing but it wasn't without stress. We had a whole board full of ideas with branches coming from those ideas, but by the time it came to make it, i learned that i overestimated my ability to randomly throw stuff together in Unity and i personally think it wasnt good enough. I pushed through however and we ended up with something that we are both proud of.

Honestly, with the being my second jam, I think I did waaay better than last time.

I over-complicated the platform building system, and crafted a whole dialogue intro before I even got to the gameplay!

This time I did waste one day trying to come up with an idea that was simple, but I think it was worth it.

And while I really wanted to craft a system of functions that made my life easier but would probably never use again, I didn’t. I made some rough code with no optimizing and lots of repeating lines and then went back to create a function worth using.

Overall, this game turned out much more completed than my other one, thanks to the power of simplification!

I've never made a game before. Figured 'Oh it'll be easy to teach myself!' humbling experience. I had so much fun, and did not realise it was this hard :0

100% agree, thats the thing with jams aha, scope is always a tricky thing too, cause you really wanna add alot, but then realize with how tedious and long stuff like coding and art can take, you can only manage a certain amount of stuff! like you said though, think small but make it big!! 

we got stuck on quite a bit aha, mainly our save system and controls got bugged alot, even now its still kinda janky but before, oh boy- bodies would teleport to the heavens, you'd fall through the floor, I think even one time you just fell in the void aha, it's surprising how much it takes to make something as small as movement work well! Overall it is fun though, and jams like these are the best way to practice time management and make a game that's small yet fun! 

Even if we dont get 1st or super high ranking overall just the fact we (and everyone else who managed) made a full game in like 5 days is impressive! Even if you're not the most proud of the final result, just be happy you made an actual full game in such a short time :D

I have submitted games to 13 different game jams, and I am the most happy with this one. Earlier this year I took one of my game jam games and flushed it out into a full steam release. I really enjoyed putting something together with my new game framework of choice, raylib. I have switched game frameworks and engines a couple of times, my past jam games have used PICO8, Godot, Love2D. Game development is hard but as with anything it takes a lot of practice and every time you make a new game you learn so much that you can bring into the next one. 

When making this game the hardest thing was leaving so many features on the cutting room floor because I didn't have enough time. I wanted security guards, mini games to dig the graves and apply potions. But I used the second day of my development to get all the assets so I used that to figure out what was  reasonable to accomplish. And I spent the entirety of Saturday working on the game and the finished all the gravestone names and music late into the night. Because of my big push on Saturday I could rest on Sunday and make sure everything was good on my game page. Super fun game jam, and a very solid theme too

I struggled with knowing when to reel myself in and temper my goals xD I had MUCH bigger plans in mind and had to cut a lot on the final day or else I'd not get done in time. And what I took away from this game jam was that I made the right career choice, keeping game design as a passion hobby rather than a full time career. I would drive myself mad doing this for a living because I would just never sleep until my body forced me to. I think I slept a collective 20 hours between the launch of the theme, and the deadline. Never doing that again. Even as a night owl, that's too much for me xD