Hey Everyone, I just want to hear about what you learned over the course of this jam. I think it's easy to get burned out, especially after long jams like this one and maybe not feel awesome about our games after seeing some of the amazing things that other people have built. It's been helpful for me to remember everything I learned and all the hard work I put in, especially with the little time I have working a full time job and having an 11 month old at home .

I decided to finally make one of my all-time favorite genres, a Platformer. I'm really happy with how it came out even though it pales in comparison to any real platformer out there, but it was a blast to design the game and the story. The animations aren't as clean as I would like, especially during combat and for the final boss fight but this is the first "full" game I've built that has an intro story, game and ending. My code is still pretty sloppy and any real engineer would likely be horrified looking at it but I was able to work out some creative solutions to problems that came up.

As for what I learned... A LOT.  I'm starting to feel much better about 2D animations and getting my player controller to feel more smooth and responsive. Melee combat, Scene transitions, Saving info with PlayerPrefs (I know not the best way, but what I had time for), Boss fight, Fine-tuning tilemaps, 2D lighting, Enemy AI, Platformer level design and maybe most importantly, how to use source control with Git and Github so I never have to worry about losing progress ever again!

So leave a little blurb about your game,  the new things you learned doing this jam and of course link your game so I can give it a shot. I'm especially looking for browser games since I can't download anything on my work laptop ;)

Here is Of The Essence, enjoy!

https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-community-jam/rate/641223

I learnt how much fun the game-jam discord channel is .... and about 1000 other things.

This was only my second jam, and I learned a ton. For my first jam (which was only a week), we BARELY finished on time and our game was super buggy.  So going into this jam I decided to plan to have the game done a full WEEK before the deadline because I expected to fall behind. Sure enough I did, but because I set such a hard deadline I still had my MVP finished and reasonably clean 3 days in advance and had a decent amount of time to clean up and polish.  I'm happy with how our game turned out, but there were still quite a few features we had to cut, so next time I'm gonna plan for even more polish time.

Also, I had a team member that was super new to Unity, and I assigned him a pretty decent sized chunk of the project. Because he was new he needed a lot of help and I had to spend more time than I expected helping him with his part. So I also learned not to expect too much from others (or even yourself) if they're too new to Game Dev.

I made Dog Days btw, please check it out and tell me what you think :)

I learned how to work in a team, and provide valuable feedback to my team members.

Also, I learned how to make the difficult decision to cut features if they're going to take too long or be too complicated.

Great question!

As a team, I think we learnt how to find a middle ground for all our ideas, speeding up the decision-making process. This was very important and led to unexpected results of our creativity mixed together!

Also, how not to get too attached to your own idea of how something in the game should be -- sometimes it's just better to let go!

I believe the biggest one was that a limited time span for developing a game is a parameter and not a limit. This totally put us in a productive mindset and cut off all the frustrating "if only". We just started writing down all the ideas we had as extras and now that the jam is over we have plenty to work on!

We somehow found a compromise with that also by placing hints in the game suggesting that there's more to it. So far it looks you kind people who tried it found many of them, and that's awesome!

Great topic!

I learned a lot of new UI and mouse related stuff. Display text when mouse over, link a button to a skill and to a slot, mouse events etc

I learned new stuffs, I had fun and I added a new entry to my portfolio, so it's a win!

This was actually the first ever game jam I participated in! I learned about how game jams work in the first place, sources, themes, and timing. I also learned more about C#. This was very fun!

I'm not sure where to begin about what I learned.  

I'm not new to programming, or trying to keep to a deadline, but I am a right old noob as a game dev.  I only had two finished games to my name when I entered the jam and one of those was from the Discovering Godot course.  I had to finish up the course and pick some lectures out of the next Godot course before I could even begin. 

I learned about grid maps, navmesh, how to export blend files to GLTF and import that into Godot. I learned how to have my character be able to shoot or punch her enemies, while the enemies could only chase the character and beat her up, and only then if they could get close enough. I reaquainted myself with the MoSCoW rules and applied them ruthlessly to all my big ideas for my game and applied them again ever more ruthlessly as time ebbed away.

But my favourite learning experience of the month was when I finally figured out why my zombies repeatedly fell on their faces and laid stuck upon the ground when they were supposed to turn toward, and race off after the player character.  For ages I was certain that it was because I had the models set too low and their feet were in the floor. I was convinced that they were sort of tripping themselves up. This theory was supported by the fact that if I adjusted the physics for the model they no longer fell over. Little did I realise that the reason they didn't fall over was because I approached them from a different direction after modifying them. 

When I finally tumbled that the problem was not about their feet being stuck in the floor, I found a message in the console that said

"Up vector and direction between node origin and target are  aligned, look_at() failed"

When I debugged what the zombies were doing, their transformations and so on, they were never trying to turn to the UP vector.  They were often close to it, but it was never the same. But, if I took the absolute value of the vector and rounded it, I could see where it then became the same as the UP vector. The solution was then simple, write a method to compare the absed and rounded lookat vector to UP and only turn if they didn't match.  I guess I'm a bit of a nerd. I get a kick out of chasing down and beating problems like that. 

Anyway,, what I think I am finally getting round to saying, is I also learned what FUN it is to take part in a game jam. I might not enjoy the pressure of a short jam, I'm not yet good enough to get much done in a week, much less three days or something. But having a month and working on my plan every day, I had a ball :c)

Thank you @Rompkins for this topic. I hope I didn't go banging on too long.  Thanks also @Yang Pulse for hosting the jam!