I learnt about implementing classes into godot.  I come from a background in python, so used classes quite a lot there. But  for the enemies in my game, i wanted to have functions that could be called on any or all of them, so i learnt to implement classes.

pretty much the basics of godot lmao

I learned a lot about prioritization and time management i think, I'm working an internship right now so I didn't have a lot of time every day, so I had to figure out what I wanted to implement and what to cut, and what I needed most I tried to get in early

For me, it's been learning that software isn't king or the be-all-end-all of gamedev. I work as a programmer in my day-job and make games on my own for fun in my free time. This is the first time I've actually been actively in the community during a game jam, and it was eye-opening seeing all the artists, animators and musicians in the discord, as well as programmers like myself. This is also the first jam where I really put a lot of effort into the art and music and general presentation, and having to juggle that alongside designing, programming, playtesting, etc, was exhausting and left me with a big appreciation for the craft that goes into game development besides just the code.

I've also been getting more into board games lately, so that planted the seed of great game designs and systems existing outside the medium of software, and this just hammered it home.

Though I've always ran with this philosophy, I implemented it much more into this game; Keep it simple. I think that's one thing most people miss in developing games for jams. Most people make a way over the top goal and never achieve it, or they do but have no time to polish it. My game was very simple, so I finished it on day 2; then polished it for the rest of the time. 

Thanks for making this topic!

God bless! ✝️

Biggest takeaway from this jam is that I learned I can make games. I’d never finished and shared anything before, even though I’ve spent hours and hours in tutorial land in various engines going back years. This was the first time I’ve managed to just sit down with a blank project file and create something playable. It’s by no means a complete game, but working through the processes of ideation, implementation, and iteration felt incredibly rewarding. 

spin to win

I learned a lot about sound design (randomizers, pitch shifts, low pass filters), 3D modeling (marking edges so it shades smooth in the areas it should while keeping the pointy bits pointy), tweens and lerps for dynamic programmable animations, how shader compilations can cause a game to stutter on the first play (unfortunately the fix I tried didn't work though). 

my faith in Unity is restored (i had started using Unreal) Unity won be back

I learned that you can't do everything alone. I joined this jam as a solo dev and quickly overwhelmed with the amount of items I need to check from the list before the deadline. I wasn't really skilled in art nor did I have much experience in it so it took waaaaay more time than I initially expected. And even if I did had the time to do everything I wanted to do it still feels little empty without a teammate to celebrate the finished product.

simply i definitely learned that i really need to put a tutorial in my game  and how important a tutorial is rather then just putting a how to play in the description 

I learnt that I suck at making tutorials, even for simple mechanics.

I was able to dig in to the workflow for creating skeletons, rigging, skin weighting and animating all within Unreal Engine. Its actually a pretty fun experience especially since you can link the animation to the sequencer file. This will automatically update the animation when you make changes!

I started the jam with about 5 days experience in Godot and a couple of hours experience in pixel art. I learned an absolute ton about both (I still keep finding in-built godot functions for stuff I spent ages writing manually lol) and improved greatly at pixel art across the week - which is good and bad, because it meant I kept having to go back and touch up old assets to try and keep some consistency, definitely missed a few due to time and prioritising.

The main goal was quite a focused narrative study though, I was attempting to solve a problem I had been talking about with someone - specifically about forcing an emotional payoff in a very short amount of time (so with limited space for framing and groundwork) and have it feel "earned" rather than "unearned". Kind of a hard concept to explain succinctly, but think the intro sequence to Up if you've seen that, as an example of an earned emotional payoff with very little time for groundwork. This let me trial and learn a a lot about story telling techniques in video games beyond the obvious dialogue, narration etc.

Oh I also learned some stuff about using itch.io because I haven't done anything on here before! Also just game jamming in general, my only other game dev experience was a few small game jams like 10 years ago and it was quite a different experience - mostly how involved and active the community on this one was, very fun.

I confirmed to my self that just an idea is not enough :)

From technical things, I did my first SFX (more like an attempt) and it was a lot of fun. and now I want to record sounds :D Another important thing I learned is that pre-compiling shaders for web builds is a must for action games, because the lagging during first phases of a game were killing me.

I found the shaders stuttering on the last day, because I create the first web export on the last day, big mistake. Test your release builds sooner, especially web builds.

Definitly the importance of letting other people test the game before the deadline. I was very much surprised when a lot of people said the controls were hard in our game. I was of course playing the game to test for bugs, so I naturally got good at the mechanics and therefore misjudged the experience someone would have when first touching the game - which is kind of an important part, especially in a jam ^^"

I learned next time to test what the game looks like in full-screen on itch before submitting :p

Also to prioritize a tutorial next time. Towards the end I had a few irl friends playtest and saw how, without any guidance, what I thought was a relatively simple mechanic can still be confusing to first time players. We tried patching it with a quick last minute 'How to Play' graphic, which helped a bit, but next time I'm definitely making sure the tutorial is more than an afterthought.

Lastly this was the first time I worked on art for a fully 3D game jam. I've used blender to make pre-rendered stuff for 2D jams before, but this was my first time making something in real 3D and getting to practice that whole pipeline. I definitely got a lot more comfortable and quicker at pumping out a lot of assets in a short time frame lol.

Most of what I did was focus on my movement, which through this I learned a lot of what made Celeste a lot of fun, the movement wasn’t the main aspect that made it fun, it was the level design that made players think. That was the majority of what I learned. Also I hadn’t done Game Dev in a year so this was such a fun way to get back into it.

/jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4714316