I'm an amateur game creator trying to build up my skill my custom engine until I can make stuff worth money. It's taking a while as expected, in part because life keeps getting in the way and in part because I'm comparatively slower to pick up skill (as judged by literally seeing other art students in my art classes get better faster than me).
Part of my attempts to build up skill and test my engine have been regularly doing game jams. I think this is my 8th one so far, but it's hard to tell cause not all of them have been on sites that still exist. Also one had a weird structure that resulted in my making 6 attempts at games in one month. That was an experience.
For this one, I had trouble cause the theme left me blank for ideas for 4 full hours. I finally landed on a series of one-button gameplay ideas that would get combined into a contextual one-button game once the player had been taught them all. Unfortunately the only way I could think of to design the ideas was visually, which took too long. On top of that, the system level setup ended up taking up a third of the time available. I ended up finishing a set of art for 5 stages, but finished and polished 1 with only 3 1/2 hours left. So it became one gameplay idea for the whole submission.
Someone before the jam started mentioned that using a custom engine is a bad idea. I don't regret doing so. I want my engine to improve. But I don't disagree either.
