Everybody always wonders, "How do these people make games in 2 days!? That's crazy!"

Well, it turns out, it's super easy! Allow me to offer some suggestions to guide your progress through this game jam. There are a few phases of development you'll go through, and you have to be very careful not to overscope your game. It'll be much better to make a simpler game that's more well-made, than to make a bigger/better/more unique/interesting game that's less well-polished.

1) Game Design

When the theme is announced, spend 30 minutes to 1 hour brainstorming ideas. Write down everything you'll need to implement. Make sure you focus on 1 core mechanic. For example, let's say I'm developing a top-down stealth game. Once I've brainstormed, by plan might look something like this:

• WASD Player movement
• Aiming with mouse movement
• LMB shoots projectile from player in direction of mouse cursor; projectile pops when hitting wall
• If projectile hits enemy, damage enemy
• When enemy hits 0HP, he dies. Enemies have 3 HP
• Enemies have vision cones and patrol between fixed positions, and they might spend a few seconds at each position
• When player touches vision cone, enemies will run towards him, avoiding obstacles (need NavMesh)
• Include sfx and particle effects for impacts & enemies becoming aware of player

If you're super new to game dev, you probably don't know how to do a lot of things, for example you might not have even heard of a "navmesh". So, just do your best, and look up tutorials for anything you're not sure about. The less you know, the simpler your design needs to be, so that you can give yourself time to try out the tutorials.

2) Implementation

Most of your time will be spent implementing these mechanics. The more complicated your game design is, the longer it will take you to implement. The more enemy types or obstacle types or variety of certain elements you make, the harder it will be to get your game done. Just focus on 1 enemy type, 1 ability, or 1 obstacle.

Also, the less specific your game design is, the more you will realize you missed as you do your implementation. For example, in my to-do list above, I didn't say "enemies become aware of player if he shoots them," so once it comes time to implement that, I might realize that I overlooked something very important! If you're new at game dev, this is one more reason why you need to keep your game simple, because you will be more likely to overlook certain details.

3) Art

The game forces you to ONLY use in-engine basic shapes to make art - that means no Blender models, no pixel art, no custom fonts, nothing like that. These tutorials should give you some guidance on how to make beautiful art with basic engine shapes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFCVG3H3Lpo 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcNpP3uLbUA

4) Level Design

If this is your first game, don't worry about the intricacies of designing the level layout, just make a simple basic level that showcases the mechanics of your game. If you've made a few games are up to the challenge, think about how you can use your core game mechanic in fun and challenging ways, increasing the challenge and complexity as you go. Also, consider how you can best teach the player the game early on and every time you introduce a new way of doing things.

5) Menus!

If it's your first game, don't worry about a menu, but you do need to somehow tell the player if he wins or loses.

6) Polishing and publishing

Make sure you have at least 6 hours left to polish and upload your game, and fix any bugs you notice as you go. Here's a video explaining how to upload a unity game to itch.io: