Hello, 
This was not my first game but it was my first game jam it was really tuff experience specially for a first game jammer who  joined  a 3 days jam , personally me it was my first time doing only design and sound and not coding it was a new experience there was hard times specially on day 1 because we did not had full day so i did not sleep until morning doing nothing but design , it was my first project that i worked on very seriously  ,it was my first time adding my own music to my games i really loved what we did , and of course lesson learned , my game is playable but sadly i found a bug when testing my game in the end of the time of the submissions , but the game is still playable that's important , and generally most of the jammers did a great jb some of the games have potential so i believe some devs should keep working on that game and finish it with full features (^_^)

It wasn't my first jam tbh, However as usual it was hell to deal with. Especially when going solo, you gotta deal with everything on your own. Still, It was enjoyable experience and many people there made some pretty much peak games. Which is the exact reason what a game jam should have.

Hope ya have all have a goodluck in this one, and the next things you do in the future.

Hello

this jam was a huge personal milestone for me, after 2.5 years of sticking strictly to tutorials, I realized I had stagnated creatively, this was my first attempt to build an original concept from scratch.

Planning: i used Obsidian (canvas) to map out concepts, break down mechanics, and track my progress visually.

Engine: Godot, which was fast, lightweight, and had incredible documentation when I needed to look things up on the fly.

my struggle was that i front loaded way too much engineering, by the end of friday, I only had a greybox ready. leaving animations, visual polish, and "juice" until the final day backfired when things started breaking under pressure, i had to cut the tutorial and credits scenes entirely just to make sure I exported on time.

my main goal going into the jam was just to finish and publish a complete project. even though the crunch was brutal, im super proud i shipped it, huge learning experience!

Thanks so much for asking about struggles because I feel like I have to complain about how much I struggled with Unity.

The last time I used that engine was 6 years ago, and I've tried many engines since, before landing on Godot. Unity, specifically Unity 6.3, because I used to run Unity 5 on a weaker machine, is NOT lightweight! I've made 3D games using Godot on the same potato laptop I used for this jam and let me tell you the stutters and throttling I experienced thanks to Unity are things I would not wish upon the worst of my enemies.

Now that I am done pointlessly hating on Unity, it is time to move on to the fun stuff.

3D Modelling is always fun when working with a team. Simply showing your work to someone else and having that back and forth talk to perfect the idea really serves as a reminder that many of the games we look up to were, in-fact, made by teams of people each with their own thoughts and preferences and lives.

Being at the physical site in person was an amazing experience. I've done a lot of jams before this one but this was my first on-site jam so it was all very new to me. 10 years of game dev and this was my first time meeting game developers irl, it was enough to make an old man cry 🥹

Overall it was a pretty fun experience and, while our game turned out very rough and unpolished, and the creation of it felt like it was more tiring than it needed to be, I came out of the jam feeling weirdly energetic and so so so glad I didn't stop developing games.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about these random feelings, and I wish everyone all the best with their future endeavors!

I'm off to finish every single game submitted to this jam. (17/48 finished at the time of writing)

 I gotta admit I thought the jam would last twice the period that it did, so I had to cut a lot of corners once I realized it's 2 days only.

On day 0 I merely brainstormed ideas, throwing meat at the wall until I thought of a good concept. 

Day 1 I spent working on the gameplay mechanics and basic looks of the game and enemies, in which I spent wayy too much time before realizing I am one day away from the deadline. 

Day 2 I began building the levels which was a loooooot harder than I expected. How the hell does super meat boy manage to have 300 levels?? 

Fortunately I was done about an hour before deadline.
Unfortunately I was too sleepy to notice some mistakes I had done while making the world