The prize pool extended, thanks to Darkand Arts and 8Pancakes4Lunch with some awesome prizes for the Grand Winner!
HOWEVER, there's only five days left, so it's time for my general advice!
-Don't panic. I SAID DON'T PANIC!
-Don't forget to put your "player starting point" in the correct place. I don't think anyone has ever forgotten to do this before....except me ;_;(The Endra Wish, Patchwork's Jam -- you were NOT MEANT to start out in the Bathrooms.)
-If you have a lot of areas that are unfinished but non-essential, you can leave them in! The judgement phase will not take into account the finished-or-unfinished-ness of any entry, and the exploration will be fun for us!
-However, if you are building a game beyond the jam version, and you'd like the areas to remain spoiler free or they were developed out of scale, just put a blockade - a collision of any kind or an NPC saying "You can't go this way, it's not finished" will be just fine. But my advice is still make the whole dang thing visible for all.
-Get that title changed to whatever the project should be called -- it's not a big deal, but even if you don't make a title screen, don't forget to change at least the text. It helps with the immersion. Trust me. It's better than YOUR TITLE HERE or PROJECT_13. Actually, Project 13 sounds cool. Maybe leave it in.
-The game you have currently is not a reflection of "the best you can do" or "how the the world sees you" -- it's just a jam, and as I state every jam, sometimes life happens and you just can't submit the project you wanted to see submitted. My own philosophy is "something is beter than nothing" so I highly encourage you to submit even if you aren't halfway done. Seeing "what could have been" is STILL very interesting from a dev standpoint and based on feedback of ANY unfinished game from ANY previous jam, it's a PLUS to other devs and people curious about the engine(s) involved when they can see what someone was going for - what their vision was! So, submit!
-and finally -- and this is the most important - GO AHEAD and make your game playable now, and submit it.
You heard me. Submit the EARLY version now, and continue work on it and submit the best version you can later before the jam ends.
This is a failsafe. You'll get the security of having at least submitted your project.
If you climbed out of scope or scale during the dev phase, this will bring you back down to earth -- it's time to triage and prioritize only what needs to be done right away.
Finally, DO NOT wait until the last minute to upload. The pain of submitting a few minutes past the deadline because of timezone confusion or whatever is very avoidable -- and only entries submitted WITHIN the submission period are valid. no extensions, no exceptions!
Observe the timer -- it's accurate, so don't wait until the last minute!!
Now, back to devving!