I cant use ai at all? can i use it to help me at coding?
I think the main idea of game jams is to challenge yourself to create something within a certain time limit. It doesn't matter if the game comes out good or bad, but what you learn within the game dev process that matters.
Using AI tools can surely help speed up the process, but then you just end up relying on it more and more leaving little space for your creativity.
Just art assets. Think of it like, would someone get paid to make this for me? Like for art assets yeah (or at least want credit), but coding you'd probably go look at api, manuals, docs, forums, stuff like that for free if you couldn't do something yourself anyway. In that sense AI is basically just a fancy search engine/feedback loop to speed up coding. They're starting to teach prompt engineering in schools and shit so employers for programing are probably going to start expecting everyone to use AI for coding in the future anyway, may as well start getting used to it. Besides, who better to understand how to communicate with computers via code than the computers themselves? Seriously though, don't just copy and paste, at least read and try to understand what you are doing though.
I mean I find the debate about using AI as a coding assistant unproductive in this sense. Since I think coding in many aspects is also a creative process especially in terms of game development. So just as its not okay to use it to create game assets for you, I think its equally not okay to use it to implement systems and features for you. The whole point of the game jam is to try and create a game with your current experience and skills. Reading documentation or looking up tutorials are not the same as using AI to code for you since, since prior would almost all the time leave room for interpretation and improve upon your currently available skill set, whilst solely depending on the later would make you dependent on AI assistants, stagnate your progress as a programmer, and at best force you to mediocrity in the long run.