Please post a few of your own lessons here so we can all learn from each others discoveries.

Personally I had few lessons that may or may not help next time.

1.Decide how big you want to make the game (levels/mechanics/characters/etc) then commit to 1/3 of that

2.The more you plan the more itll make sense in the end

3. Start, and end, simple

4.Learn techniques before hand: Yes and No, I used this time to force me to learn a few things I've been putting off but at the same time I could have used the time adding to the game instead of learning how

5.Constuctive feed back equals gold/compliment feedback equals head pat

6.Dont follow any rule 100%, improvise strategically

Next Game Jams goals: Join a team Learn from this jam Add friends art into game

1. When in a team, be weary on working on someone that's too much connected with someone else's work. Example, if there are two programmers, discuss about the boundaries between your code and your partner's code. Find smart ways to connect your code with your partner's code without getting too deep and having code that requires lots of refactoring.

2. Test external tools/assets on the first day, not the last one. Even better if you can do it before the game jam starts if you already know you'll need it.

3. Don't overthink/think in advance too much. Take small steps.

1. Don't participate in three jams within one week. You'll be dead by the end of it, and the third game will be very low quality (the other two games will suffer too).

2. If you want players to find your "secret", make at least some more obvious hints at it.

don't beat yourself up too much for not really having assets. Apparently you can get away with just colored rectangles.

If your engine doesn't have a build in scene manager you need to spend some time to make one. Even if you don't think you need one, trust me you need one.
Make sure that everything is clear and explained in the game itself.

Sound is really important. The lack of sound was one of the biggest complains I got.
Get more people to play test, sooner. Especially as I had a system setup to automatically make and publish release builds whenever I pushed to master. The fact that the player moves too quickly for some people is something that that would have caught.

A bad algorithm is better than nothing. (Looks at the awful way I generate levels and detect collision)