Jams are normally really good for learning new skills or improving current ones. I personally feel I have refined more of my game art and animation through this jam. It has given me a new form of animation and art to try that was really fun and a breath of fresh air from my current project.

So I am curious, what about everyone else? What skills have you learned or practiced through this jam and how do you think it'll help you going forward?

I chose React.js as my base framework, because I’m familiar with it from building enterprise web-apps, and it lends itself to joyfully rapid dev. So I learned the pros and cons of using it for a game.

Pros:

• UI is easy to write.
• Game state is easy to manage.

Cons:

• It’s built for web-apps (i.e. html), not dynamic graphics, and certainly not 3D. You could add in e.g. Pixi.js, but I decided to stick with vanilla React.
• Instant state updates don’t fit well with juicing up a game. Though you can do a fair bit with css animations. I also adapted the router pattern to have a “slow router” that does animated state updates.
• If you’re not familiar with React, then the initial setup is a pain.

Overall - well, given I had about a day to contribute to the jam, I think it was a good choice for me. You wouldn’t choose it for a game with fast intense graphics. But it could be good for card games, puzzle games, hidden-object, choose-your-own-adventure, etc.

Happy to share code with anyone who wants to try this route too.

Since I only discovered this jam in its last 23 hours, my focus was on SPEED. I decided to split my attention between quick design iteration and fancy graphic tricks. I tried a few things that didn't pan out (crazy cameras, complex shaders); but ultimately decided to play with tricks of lighting and color instead.

I also learned that when I'm struggling to get a specific shader concept to work, I'm better off looking for an alternative visual solution.

This is my first games jam. I chose to do this as the theme sounded interesting, and I'm a first year at uni doing computer games technology.

I wondered what I could do with "thus far" (less than 2 months into the 3 year course) and if it'd be possible for me to make something in a short time frame to begin with.

It taught me to know my limits and assess what I could logically do or make in under a week, I chose to do a choose your own adventure style game after finding Twine and seeing it uses HTML/CSS which I had prior, mild experience with.

The biggest challenge for me was drawing, as I don't think of myself as much of an artist and I only had a notepad that transfers your input to your phone for the pictures I did. There's no erase function on it so it was all one shot drawings lol

Something I did learn though was how much can do done in so little time, as a lot of these games are incredible! They look like things you'd be able to buy on steam or other platforms rather than a one week project in a small team of friends, I am really impressed with everyone's work and it inspires me a bit as it means I might be able to do similar quality things in the future.