Hi in advance i am so glad i finished this gamejam in time this year. Last year we had a bigger team and we never finished i was so sad and frustrated. I went all out this year. And this theme was just on a week of vacation :D what helps a lot.  I started in unreal engine but moved to another engine after one day. I didnt realise web was so strong. I tried to keep the theme short duck fishing i did as a little kid and the fair what was for me the fun park for a long time until i was old enough to go parks. First i wanted to make a park builder but i thought i wouldnt finish it haha. first day i was stuck second day i  thought we msut do something with ducks and duck fishing and then everything went smoothly another inspiration for the gamejam was vinny playthrough of RACCOON for my game. 

hahahaha moby

I saw this post and wanted to respond earlier, but was super busy trying to get everything working at the last minute.
The game jam was wild ride for me though. I'll probably write a blog post about it later, but I went through like at least four phases mentally during this project lol.

Basically, the first phase was the ideation phase where I knew I wanted to make a scary game, but wasn't sure how to include Undertale references because they seem at odds with each other in terms of style.
The second phase was just committing to an idea and running with it even though I didn't really have a complete vision of how the game would look when it was done,  and getting a grey-boxed set of scenes with a bit of atmosphere that told a coherent but vague story.
The third phase where I completely crashed out for a day because I was convinced I'd spent three and half days working on a stupid idea and the first person to playtest it got hung up on one of the two puzzles in the game. I was convinced it was going to be super easy and obvious what the player needed to do, but that ended up being a bit of developer-blindness I guess, lol. I was so bummed at the midpoint of the jam, I was considering just giving up, not submitting anything , and continuing work on my long-term project instead. A friend convinced me to just stick with it and finish the game jam even if the game isn't great.

Then I hit the fourth phase where I was determined again, but had so much stuff that needed polish or needed to be reworked after the playtest and I was convinced I couldn't get it all done in time. The last hour or two before submission was just absolute manic panic, because exporting builds from godot wasn't working for any OS. Eventually I did finish everything, but it really needs a second playtesting/rework pass. Obviously, it won't get that now lol ¯_(ツ)_/¯, but I'm still proud I finished something even if it looks kind of bad. If nothing else, hopefully it'll make someone laugh.

Considering it was my first ever game jam, it went surprisingly well, even if a bit stressful. I did as much as I could before the theme was revealed, created the git repo, discord channel, wrote out a schedule (that was vaguely followed), and got some of my friends to agree to help playtest ahead of time. We scheduled the playtest for Wednesday night so we still had time to make some somewhat serious changes if the playtest went really bad.

On Friday night we did wide brainstorming, where we just threw ideas at the wall, and then Saturday morning we picked some of the best ideas we had and pitted them against each other. Then our goal was to get the main gameplay loop done by Sunday night, which we actually did ahead of schedule. Then we spent the week iterating, slowly adding mechanics as we thought was feasible, shooting to be pretty much done by Wednesday night. The play test definitely showed we had some difficulty issues, but there was so much variation between players it was hard to make it engaging while still being doable. I think we did an okay job in the end. The final game ended up being MUCH easier than the playtest, and I still think it may have been a bit too difficult. 

We had originally planned on a lot more jokes and wacky mechanics to be in the game, but in the end we realized that if each mechanic introduction added 2-4 minutes to the game, we would be looking at a 20-30 minute game, which was WAY beyond what we were shooting for, which was 10 minutes. In the end we realized that even under perfect play the game was still 10 minutes minimum, so we made sure to add cheats so if you hit a wall you could still see the rest of the game.

We made sure to get the itch page together a couple hours before the deadline, which was good because only when I uploaded the web version did I learn that Godot handles sound differently between executable and embedded, which caused a lot of weird audio issues I had to debug. I am glad I had time to fix them because I really didn't want to scrap the browser version.  

So all that being said, key takeaway for next year, upload to itch periodically and test the game there, even if it is a pain in the ass to do so.