I've never made a game or done a game jam, but I love the hosts YouTube videos and really want to participate in this jam. So I'm going to try to learn basic game dev while doing the jam, and my goal is to just finish something on each day of it. 

If anyone has any tips/tricks for this I'd love to hear them

Normally my honest advice would be to open up your game engine of choice and just start messing around in it. Learn how it works, learn what the tools you have at your disposal are. Look up a video on how to create a mechanic or material or something and go through it.

But it's a bit late for that, so...

Keep what you contribute small, simple and manageable. We're not building the next JRPG or Assassin's Creed here. and you don't have a ton of time.

And finally good luck.

Those are the ones I have heard most of. Though you should probably wait on Unreal. game maker studio is probably the easiest to learn. Unity has a medium point between the two, and has the most customers. I haven't heard too much on Godot. 

These are just a couple of suggestions, don't judge on how I worded them.

Thanks both for the advice, I am messing around in unity trying to figure out the basics. 

The world of game development is ever expanding, and I hope that this will lead you to make amazing games in the future. Good luck tomorrow! (P.S: I prefer Unity above them all)  :)

if you don't know c# syntax, I don't recommend Unity, since c# is quite hard to learn.

This jam is good even if you are still learning the basics as you can tweak other projects and contribute that way :)

As for engine choice, Unity would have the most tutorial assets on how to do any single thing. However, having tried a lot of different engines and frameworks, Godot is the one that clicked for me overnight. 

Similar to you, I will be doing the same thing! I have always been interested in game dev and this is an awesome opportunity to learn! I already know a bit about C# from web dev but it's not quite the same implementation or even syntax between the two.

I am super excited and I hope you are too! Goodluck!

Update, I got a bit of a late start, but the day before I managed to make an almost complete bad looking clone of flappy bird so have a little bit of understanding of how things work in Unity, very basic.

I have a idea I think will be fun.

I have made a player controller.

I have made an enemy that I can kill. 

I'm further than I thought I would be lol. Still plenty of time. Thanks for all the help so far.