Good job finishing your game! Here's my story:
I had life stuff during the BGJ week + both the jam starting and ending time were 3 AM my time lol.

My initial idea was a top-down shooter where you collected resources to fend off a storm of assualters, but scrapped that almost instantly in favor of a mix between Tetris and autobattlers (which worked out pretty nice).

I did music composition via Jummbox (online Beepbox mod) whenever I found time in the mornings. The rest of my game was developed later in the day.

Despite a very limited amount of time, I was able to pull through and finish the game. This is the second game jam I've participated in (the first was GMTK 2024).

Here's a link to my game: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2962784

nice job guys, for me it was hard to complete my game as i was sick at home with covid, but somehow managed to pull through on my third idea and even got to finish it, which is something i didn’t do in some time as i mostly quit my projects if i can not get them to look good, it’s stupid because early in the project it’s supposed to be all about gameplay and how it feels to move the player around, but somehow i always end up starting projects with too big of a scope and the moment i start thinking about how to make it look good and the work i’ll need to put in to create artwork for the whole game, is the moment i start giving up on it :D over the time of 10 years this has left me with a bunch of unfinished projects but on the other hand also a lot of re-usable stuff and knowledge about a lot of aspects of game development. I am so happy i decided to join this jam as it was a huge incentive to finally put my foot down and finish the damn project, and i think it turned out really well, both gameplay wise and artwork, and in how it feels to move the player around :) If you have a gamepad/controller you can check out the result here => https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2969404

In a game jam, everyone gets at some point in this situations: lack of sleep, anger, ruined friendships, copy paste code and the worst part... giving up(some at least). i had everything lol. Everything was good until one day I didn't do much because the last part of my game was supposed to have like a rotating platforms maze, but the player just didn't want to change position with the platform when rotating(apereantly because of Unity) and had to scrap something already planned and had to improvize with a very low quality maze :(. And because of it, I couldn't code the ending, or do more expozition for the story lol

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-12/rate/2973690 Here's mine if you wanna try it :)

I actually didn't think I'll make much for this with me having my day to day job I just decided to make something small.

Day 1.

 So I looked through the list of ideas from like a month back and saw "Black Friday fighting game" so I just said screw it and started working. I also decided I'll try to get some more of my progress shared on the discord. By the first day I finished the basic movement code and swinging a chair, plus the funniest mechanic I could think of which was throwing the chair, I didn't have a good sound effect yet but It already felt nice with the most basic ai code which was just pathfinding to the player. Plus I started work on the shelve random generation and stun mechanics.

Day 2.

I started working on animations because giving player his walk cycle and giving enemies both a walk cycle and knockover animation (which is probably one of the funniest things in the game). Next I added health and figured out how to actually make obsticale avoidance which was far from perfect. But at the end I also managed to finish up a basic attack animation for a short ranged attack.

Day 3.

Actually before work I managed to send a message onto the find a team chat to grab a composer/ sfx designer, so I send a clip from yesterdays progress. I added an actuall hud so I know when the player will die and when his weapon is about to break and I don't think I touched that hud ever since. I also managed to add the ability to pick up new weapons. I also added the ability to slow down the player if he's holding a weapon.

Day 4.

Before I left work I already found an SFX designer by the name of Navva. After a quick exchange and helping him a little to set up godot and github to run what I'm working on. This day I used to set up a dictionary to easily add new weapons with different sprites and statistics, I also finally updated the wierd chair sprite and added two new weapons plus did some light bugfixing and added a effect so enemies and the player flash red when damaged. And a arrow pointing toward an objective plus started work on giving you an option to interact with it (just make a progress bar for a hold action if you are in range)

Day 5.

A lot of change I added the new sfx I was given, I color shifted the entire game into blue to give it the effect of a colder light like in a butcher shop, I also added some new shelve variations. But for some important developments I also added an ability for enemies to throw themselves at the player, which bumped up the difficulty drasticly together with the hoard mechanic which would spawn a hoard based on how the player is doing and how much time passed from the last hoard. I also started working on sprites for new weapons that people in the chat requestd

Day 6.

I managed to convince one of my friends to help me with recoloring some enemies while I spend my day doing new weapons implementing more weapon statistics adding an option to even use different sprites to enemies and I did a lot of optimization for the ai script to make it run even smother and finished the day with finishing the gameloop with a win condition.

Day 7

A busy day as weekend started so I spend it implementing the last of sfx, adding some polish, getting a main menu done together with it's art doing a lot of ai modification, screen shakes, added a death animation, even more weapons,changing a lot of the systems to add a lot of exeptions for the knife as it was the only slashing weapon and not just a heavy blunt object. I also run some playtest with my friend to balance the difficulty to something closer to someone who didn't play this game before.

Day 8

I had maybe the last 2 hours before the jam end to do anything left, so I just done some polish added a thing that the player actually physicly carries the box he is delivering on his back and did even more tweeking with both weapons and small gameplay changes together with adding the last weapons to end with a grand total of 13 of those.

Overall the game is currently doing really well with it reaching #2 in popularity and currently floating around #37 most rated. And I had fun talking with people on discord. https://mentel.itch.io/mall-melee

I started with an inkling of an idea. A family with years of resentment for each other, who get pissed off by the smallest things their family member do. And you try to keep calm before they explode in rage. I was a bit unsure if this would make a fun game, but it was very different from anything I've made before, so I was intrigued. The next day, I spoke to JapeNess about the idea and he got excited about it. We made a plan - who the characters are, what do they do to annoy each other - and what the the gameloop is.

The rest of the week I spent about 8-10 hours a day on the game, I did design, programming and sound design. JapeNess spent 10-14 hours a day on graphics and animations. The idea and the gameloop was super simple, one of the simplest games we've ever done, but to get it all working, we both spent more time on it than we've ever spent on a 1-week jam before.

At the end of the day, we managed to release the game, Bittermiff Family Dinner, though we had to cut corners. Didn't have time for a tutorial, or a family pet that was planned, or touch screen controls, and very little time to improve clarity on which objects were clickable and needed to be clicked.

We were pretty happy with the game, but weren't 100% sure we got the funny, chaotic, stressful feeling we were going for. After seeing a few people play it and receiving lots of positive feedback from other jammers, I think we succeeded after all!

Once the ratings period started, I set myself a goal of going through 10% of all jam games, so 152 games. I reached that goal today. I gave thoughtful, hopefully useful feedback to more than 100 games, but started cutting myself slack on that front yesterday. In a big jam like this, there are obviously games of varying quality, but I've enjoyed going through them. There are lots of different takes on the theme, some of them very unique.

I've been collecting some of the best games here: Best of Brackeys Jam 2024.2

Thanks Rockerzz for making this post! This is a nice place to gather your thoughts.