Hey everybody! I'm curious what tools/engines people will be using to create games for this jam! Let us know here, and if you have questions about tools or want engine recommendations, post those here!
godot is pretty cool: https://godotengine.org
(and godot is great at 2d, so if you're building a 2d game with animated sprites, I think you might find that your workflow (setting up animations, etc) is a -lot- easier with godot than eg. unity)
That said I'll probably be trying out unity's new ECS system: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@0.1/manual/index.html (it has some sort of niche use cases and is mostly an optimization tool though, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend using that for a game jam unless you really know what you're doing)
Unreal 4 could be a "fun" engine to try out. (note: this is sarcastic)
Oh, and lastly, if you're very technically ambitious, you could try building something from scratch with rust!
(or https://github.com/ggez/ggez if you're less masochistic)
Well, okay, maybe you shouldn't try this if you don't actually -know- rust, but it is a great language, and if anyone wanted to -try- doing this I'd be happy to help out!
More serious answer: godot is a great engine, has a really nice editor, and is very much worth considering for a game jam if you want to try something new :)
It's also very easy to pick up and understand, and if you're new to game dev I think it honestly might be your best choice. Godot actually has a lower learning curve than unity imo, and both engines are great for rapid prototyping. If you think you might want to use godot, I'd be happy to help show you the ropes!
Godot docs: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/
Unity is also a very solid choice, though it's tailored more for 3d than 2d, and again, some of the workflows can be a bit annoying, because a lot of the editor UX dates back to ~2009, and a lot of features were added that probably weren't considered in the initial design, and no, unity has not had a major UX overhaul or redesign since then. (note: godot is sort of like unity where such a redesign took place, but the engine is only half finished, cuz it's an open source volunteer project and there's still a lot of work to be done)
UE4 is a decently good engine... for making AAA games... and a lot of the tooling and workflow follows from that. You certainly can make use of UE4 effectively in a game jam, but I wouldn't really recommend it. The engine is overcomplicated, and it was designed to make things look as pretty as possible, at the expense of user friendliness and uh, productivity. Arguably. It depends on your use case. Performance is also pretty terrible, if you're not actually building a AAA game that targets high end and next gen hardware: if Unity is a sleek economy car, Unreal is a stupid lamborghini (sorry) that gets 5-10MPG, has very high maintenance costs, and you're not driving any faster with it in the city anyways. It's also not the fastest car by any stretch of the imagination: true AAA developers generally use their own in-house engines (eg. frostbite, the naughty dog engine, decima, etc), which I'd imagine can probably be anywhere on the range from "pleasant" to "seventh circle of hell" levels of fun to deal with (note: this mostly depends on how good that studio's tools and engine programmers are). note: the notable exception to this would be if your studio rhymes with "bear phoenix", and you've fucked things up so badly with your own engine(s) that you're switching to UE4 as a sane alternative.
Lastly, I would kinda recommend staying away from JS web stuff, but uh... I guess you can kinda figure that out on your own >_<
(to continue the car analogy, using JS is generally like trying to build a car out of a lawnmower engine, duct tape, and a bunch of miscellaneous car parts, possibly from different manufacturers. Lawnmower engine not powerful enough to drive the car? Just add more lawnmower engines. Using Rust is sort of the same thing, but you have a nice, highly efficient 6 cylinder, and you can at least weld all the car parts together, and you maybe have access to a machine shop with some nice CNC machines for making custom components. With JS you also have access to a shop, but it's a woodworking shop that makes cabinets, and you have a 3d printer, but it only prints ABS plastic, which is not very good for making structural car elements out of. C++ is rust, but you're in soviet russia, all of your parts and schematics are in russian, and the machine shop is a soviet factory used to make tanks. It's a good setup all things considered, but you first need to spend several years learning russian to understand how everything works. Or you skip learning russian, make your car in 6 months, and it comes out weighing 10 tons due to all the tank armor that was welded onto it when your attempts to communicate with the russian line workers using mimes and hand gestures epically failed. Seriously, c++ has a stupidly high learning curve, very long development times even at the end of it, and your "efficient" c++ code could easily end up getting outperformed by javascript (okay, well-optimized javascript) unless you really know what you're doing. This is coming from someone who likes c++. Well, sort of. Honestly I wish we'd all switch to rust and/or d at this point, either of them would be a massive improvement over using c++ to build stuff (like game engines), albeit for very different reasons. D would resolve the "it takes 3 hours to recompile chrome from source" problem, for instance, aka why UE4 iteration times can be hideously slow if you're recompiling too many things (and aren't developing on a workstation with an i9 or threadripper or whatever, which should, if nothing else, probably speed up your UE4 dev process a bit...))
Somehow this turned into a mini essay on a bunch of esoteric stuff, but basically that's my 2c on game engines and which tools you might / might not want to use, lol
TLDR; use unity, or godot if you want to venture off the beaten path a bit, are thinking about building a 2d game project, and want to see what a slightly better set of tools and editor might look like :)