Good topic! I have a few:
- Test your game and build testing into your development plans. In a month long jam, testing should take up at least a week. If you just finished developing your game on the last day and are now rushing testing, you will have a bad time. Also test your deployment!!!
- Quality over quantity! An hour long game with a few lulls is much less fun than a 15 minute game of concentrated joy. If you can create a decent gameplay loop and storyline in a shorter time, spend more time honing what you have, and less time adding more stuff!
- Actually try hard! Feels like it should go without saying, but it is an important tip. When time is limited, working harder in the allotted time and not letting weeks pass without devving makes a huge difference in the quality of a project. When someone invests a lot of time polishing their product, it really shows. A little bit of time each day over a month really adds up.
- Like Gensun said, you should make a minimally viable product quickly! Then go back and add things, polish things, artwork etc.
Figure out a list of priorities and decide which ones are paramount to include and which ones can go if time becomes an issue. This can help you deliver a more complete game by the deadline and prevent yourself from going overboard and burning out or not finishing. Taking my last Harold jam entry Harold: Show-Stopping Hero as an example, I knew my top priorities were test driving MV3D as a potential tool for my passion project, going crazy on an original soundtrack knowing there was an award for that category, and building the rest of my game around the concept of a RPG stage play. Admittedly my priorities did get scrambled at times, which takes me nicely into my next point.
Understand which parts the player is guaranteed to see and have any optional parts be near bottom priority. Going back to Show-Stopping Hero, I took a day to add in an extremely specific and conditional scene which required you to have a very low score while giving the wrong answer to a certain question. With how close I came to the deadline, that day of eventing and writing music could have meant an extra day to test.
On a grander scale, I attempted to design the game to be replayable while unknowingly designing it in the least replayable format possible; essentially a 20 minute cutscene with dialogue branches that decide your score. Although there are save points to break it up, not once did I consider how frustrating it would be to have to replay the entire game because you guessed wrong once while attempting to go for a perfect score. Simpler and more interactive games are less likely to have issues like this, but when getting experimental it's important to figure out what works and what doesn't, before and after finishing the game. Jams are a great way to experiment after all, and you can leave with some great lessons under your belt and improve as a dev in the long run.
And of course have fun. Make something you love and enjoy the process. It's a casual game jam based around the default RPG Maker protagonist. Case in point, I overscoped so badly with Show-Stopping Hero that I just straight up didn't enjoy making it most of the time. Even though Show-Stopping Hero pretty much won, the short-term ecstasy of taking the gold unfortunately did not outlive the crazy burnout I went through after devoting pretty much every open second to Show-Stopping Hero. As a result, it's hard to look back on it fondly when it was essentially enduring a month-long panic attack for $50. If I hadn't placed as well I might have just straight-up died.
Don’t aim for the maximum time - aim for the minimum time instead!
Going for the maximum time runs the risk of you diluting the experience and creating content players will not see.
Going for minimum time means you will likely create a better quality game because you can focus on just the essentials, and if your players go a little over the minimum time there’s no issue.
