Hey, how did you guys deal with the deadline? Between things we ended up submitting the project 41 seconds before the deadline, you can imagine the adrenaline rush!  We had a great time overall, living with intense, stressful but also very funny moments.

10 days sounds like a lot, but the truth is that they passed as if nothing, we would have liked to polish some things and improve the design of the levels, but we're really proud of making our first game, it feels very rewarding.

We would love to hear your opinions and recommendations about our game! https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2022/rate/1554637

I dealt with it by not sleeping and crunching the last 2 days to get it into a playable condition. haha Game balancing just didn't quite make it til the end so my game is a little easy.

The first couple days I was pretty frustrated and to be honest a bit stressed because I wasn't getting anywhere. After changing up my project I found that I had a decent amount of time left. I did work on it a bit more in the last few days but it wasn't anything that was getting in the way of the rest of the things I had going on. Or...not that much anyway. What I did understand from this game jam though is that there is no way I could do the 48 hour jams that seem to be pretty popular. At least not at my current game dev skill and the schedule that I have right now.

I have to agree.  The 10 days that I spent learning and rushing to make my game was a lot of fun and frustration and excitement and so many things (good and bad).  But the one thing I learned, or maybe I just reinforced it to myself, is that "crunch time is bad."

As the deadline rushed towards me, I was rushing to fix a nasty bug with the enemy animations not stopping when the enemy died.  When I discovered what was causing the bug I realized I could fix it with a rather simple "If it's dead, stop animating it" test.  So I hurriedly added the test, compiled the game, gave a quick test to make sure the  problem was fixed on the affected enemy, and then uploaded my game.  Then I went back to play my game a bit more, and I realized that my enemies no longer did their death poses.  That had worked right up to the end, so I was confused about why it suddenly wasn't working.  

Well, it turns out that, in my rush to fix the bug on the enemy minions, I put the "if dead, don't animate" test in the wrong place.  I put it ahead of the "is this a minion?" test.  So I applied the "fix" to every enemy instead of just the broken one, and ended up breaking my boss enemies.  ARGH!  If only I'd have taken another five minutes to think about the "fix" ...

That said, though...  The best thing I learned is that this jam was a whole lot of fun, and I cannot wait to do it again. 

Congratulations everyone!  I'm looking forward to playing as many of your games as I can.

We dealt with it by pretending we only had 9 days. So we submitted a day early and got some early feedback, which we then used to fix bugs and polish.

I actually had to scrap my original idea after the first couple days, so it ended up being 7 or 8 days to create. That was a little disheartening. However, I think the end result was more enjoyable than what I had originally set out to do.

Though, it also meant a lot of crunch, which was fun to some extent, but has left me so tired that I haven't been able to make the updates I've wanted this week or deal with some of my household tasks. Thats ok though, all this rest has left me with lots of time to play everyone's games.

Given that this was my first jam, I did learn some lessons about keeping the complexity low and if you're bashing your head against the wall about an idea, either go work on something else, like the art, and then come back to it, or just make the tough decision to cut the complexity and consider it for a later update.

Main things I did to help with the deadline was: (1) keep the gameplay simple and cut any planned mechanic that was too involved, and (2) plan to have the game working as intended by the Saturday before the deadline so I'd have a couple days for tweaks or nice-to-have additions. Still didn't submit until the last hour and a half, but wasn't stressed at all leading up to the deadline. :)