It’s an honour system, you can work on it for the duration of the Jam however you won’t place 1st. When you submit your project it asks for how long it took you and you’re supposed to enter the hours and minutes it took. If it’s over 3 and you get placed 1st you don’t get added to leaderboards.
If you want to compete for the leaderboard, you need to finish it in under 3 hours total. The only thing that counts is the time you spend actually making your game and the assets, not the planning time, build time or setting up the itch page. You can also split the 3 hours. You can work on it for 1 hour each day if you want, as long as the total time is under 3 hours.
