I recommend you trying out "Horizontal build" approach. It's to walk you through the entire game loop but without functional features. So basically you make a sign or print the name of the functions that you're supposed to use during each parts of the game. Unless your game is a wave-based game like my past jam games, then I think it's fair to use this approach and try to finish the most you could.

Remember we can continued to polish the game even after the jam. So the most important part right now is to have "something" to submit in the jam.

I understood the rusty feeling you have. There was a year that I completely out of gamedev circle because I had to focused on university. Then there were many periods which I stopped gamedev for 3 months at the very least and 6 months at most in the past 5 years due to burnout which originated from bad management on myself.

But the most prominent part would be the expectation you have in yourself VS your real skills. Most of the time it could be you overestimated your body limits because you didn't understand the maintenance period for human enough, which is common and understandable. Then it's also the ignorant to the workflow. I used to struggle so hard on stuffs, but once I discovered that I had workflow issue, I just start learning from 0 and focus on the workflow itself instead of the qualities. Of course skills issue is the reality that we have to live with, since the industry set the standard too high. That's why I'm aiming to make my games with the quality of 2009 instead of trying to keep up. This way I won't have much floor to aim to, so the skills issue won't be long before it's completely disappeared.

It's fine to have smaller form of games. My previous jams are out there. You could try Rabbit Dimensions for example. It's something that I could make within 2 hours with my current skills. But it took me like 8 days to finish it last year.

As I recommended many people. You could try "Horizontal build" approach first. Which is to print out the name of the functions you wanted to make in that area, assuming you're not making a wave-based arena game like my Rabbit Dimensions which only need a few functions to perform.

Well even while I was developing Rabbit Dimensions, I was also print out stuffs that I need to work, for example, player's HP, or win condition.

Back when I was just starting with Unreal Engine 4, it's the game name "Ancient Gift" which caused me a lot of troubles just to modify the third person template into a first person game. It's full of bugs and the game took over 10 GB on my storage. Just the game alone was 4GB and in GDTV Jam 2021, we need to also submit the project folder which took nearly 7 GB. That's why I already deleted the game.

But hey, it's kinda functional enough and I was just start learning unreal from that jam.

The most noticeable achievement for me was the incentivize for me to reduce the project size as much as possible. Which allowed me to start working on finding the optimal workflow for UE4 and now my project sizes are roughly 600MB when I got a bunch of stuffs.

I'm not sure if my current jam project gonna be around 600MB though. I just hope that it won't exceed 1GB so that I could upload on itch without any problem.

I'm sure unity wouldn't have such project size problem since I used unity before I changed into unreal. I stick to unreal because everything is just superior :D

I understand the struggle, I juggle between work, jam and family.
I started on monday and I don't think I will be able to work on my project during the week-end.

Let's do our best !

Nice progress. I've got a lot more done today as well, but I'll have to plan properly from now on since it's starting to get rough :D

congrats!

Good job on your progress. Your game seems to have a lot of systems involved. My game is just a walking to the next zone, fight enemies, and interact to automatically solve the puzzle which blocked the path toward next zone. There will be surely the boss fight for me since I spent my time working on the model.

There is not even a single basic system functioning in my game yet. I spent time to finish up the assets and only built a blocking level with "horizontal build" approach. I'll prepare to make a video for the next update post, so you guys could see what I'm talking about.