The thing that I most struggled with was placing in the background for my game. It may sound simple but I had to place over two thousand grey triangles which took a good 3 hours of my time. I now realise that I could've just copied and pasted, but now it just looks more natural. :) 

This was my first game jam so a lot of basics, but I think I learned more this past 2 weeks (also entered the Brackeys jam) than I have in the many months I've been learning before! The thing I spent the most time on was character movement, and getting it to feel fair when you die rather than feeling like the game was screwing you over.

P.S. just played your game - I love the mechanic of evolving to adapt against what killed them. The whole thing feels very Zerg-like.

indecisiveness on whether I would join or not. At first I wanted, then Friday came and I knew I wouldn't have much time. However, that night I couldn't sleep so decided to make a simple text adventure game for the jam. This meant an entire day wasted, on top of the many hours I knew ahead of time that I wouldn't be able to work on it.

Second problem: The first iteration of my input system sucked to use,  and at first it didn't look too bad until I got to write the fight code. Turns out that those need a loop and my old input system did not like that and the best I could do with it was recursion. So..that was even more time wasted.

The third mistake I made: It is a browser game, why do it the old way where you need to run commands to get basic info like available weapons. Just make a button that opens a modal with all the info. So, that was MORE time wasted on stuff that needed to go.

(Do you notice a theme here?)

I also wasted some time because my refusal to use globals made it hard to debug. I know that this goes against common sense, it is just a browser thing especially if your game is often waiting for the user. Basically, if I made my player or dungeon object an easy to access global I could've inspected it whenever I wanted no breakpoints or anything needed. Instead, it wasn't easy to reach from the console so that was not an option.

My main game mechanic is super super hard to design levels with.

In order for everything to line perfectly I had to run all the way from the beginning to make even the slightest change. This alone made everything so so complex which almost made me ditch this and not participate.

Also, webGL was doing it's tricks on me when I had 40 minutes left. Was more stressed than I should have. 

Since this is my first game jam, but I've been familiar with these for a while, I decided to not take any chances. The first day would be thinking about the idea and testing a few mechanics, the second day I had to have the whole game playable from start to end, and the third day would be just bug fixing, adjusting the difficulty or explanations to the player and polishing (sound effects, music, menu). It worked pretty well for me. I also decided to go with mechanics I'm familiar with, I'm pretty happy with the result. 

I always struggle with scope and I had more extensions I wanted to add in; a market, new weapons/armour/enemies/locations, a speedrun timer. I resisted on all these.

But what really tripped me up was not testing to how the game would look on build. With little time to go, I had to completely restructure my UI for windows and WebGL build because it wasn't appearing how it was in the Unity Editor.

My game's main feature has a ghost doing all your actions after you die. Basically a replay system. This was very hard to do at first.

At first, I made it record your position with all inputs and time. The ghost would glide to them. This was really hard to make and it was stupid. It didn't feel real.

Then, I made somewhat of a scripting language and made the ghost script as close to the player's as possible, only doing commands the player gave it. 

This had an issue, though: Some actions were interpreted differently because of the different interpretations of different things that were really hard to pin down.

On the last day, I scrapped it all and instead did what I should've done: Made the player and ghost inherit from the same class, and just have one's inputs be taken in on keypress for the player, and have the ghost read from an array of those inputs with time. This made everything extremely accurate unless there is a drastic change in framerate.

Oh boy this jam really screwed me, but i learned new stuff, such as the trail renderer component, how to write better code in less time, how music works, & how unity call functions in the update method, it was pretty fun to say the least, But it was hard, i ran out of time & i needed to make a second update after the jam cause there was a bug that couldn't let you even play level 2 (which is like 50% of the game), it wasn't an easy task with exams & the brackeys jam, but overall, it was fun :D.

trying my best to not be overcome with ScopeCrepe, another thing was issues with the background music, i use godot ( I'm new to it btw, my old engine was UNITY) in my last game this wasn't an issue, but when transitioning from one level to the next, the audio would not replay, or loop. this drove me nuts and i gave up on it in the end. 

Coding a bunch of stuff from scratch.  I had scripts I've previously made and used in other games, but for some reason rather then reusing them like we are allowed to I chose to spend hours trying to get basic things like moving and jumping (mainly jumping) to work.

This was my 5th jam. I wanted to take a break from unity, so I used scratch. I can say that I have a high level of knowledge of that game engine, so I had no struggles for most of the coding part. The art turned out way better than I expected. The only struggle I had was with THE LEADERBOARD. Doing an online leaderboard overall is pretty hard, but I just could not figure out how to put the largest (or in y game smallest) number on the top.

Overall, I think my game turned out all right. You can play it here: HERE

I'll be honest when I say that coming up with an idea for the jam was the hardest lol. Every idea I came up with was basically " Die and use yourself as a platform "

Then I re-watched Jonas's video about the jam and what he said was all I needed. Take a popular game or genre and turn the conditions around.

So I took a stealth game and tried to center it around getting caught. Some people think I achieved it while others couldn't really see what I was trying to do. My fault I guess lol.

Most people think my game is fun though so that's enough for me

Scope and priorities. Had to eave a lot on the cutting floor late into development. Context sensitive tutorials was one of these features ended up with bland tutorial rooms.

I was also programming in/developing features way ahead of the art and level design.  This left the features working but not telegraphed very well to the user.

This was my second jam and second game ever (did the brackeys jam like a week or two ago) and I'm quickly realising that my biggest weakness is not anything technical (I can figure out how to do most of what I think of) but its the process of taking an idea and following through the entire process of developing that idea.

I can quickly think of a few mechanics but I never take the time to fully flesh out things like how will the player be motivated, how will difficulty progress etc. I usually keep pushing that stuff off because I don't want to focus on it and I ended up having to make my game super short at the end .

Also, I focus on the wrong thing, wasted a few hours attempting to make music for my game (which I had to scrap away because it wasn't sounding good) and I could have better spent that time further planning out my game

In this jam I had a lot of recurring issues that I forgot how to fix. That was a big time waster. Also, I was steaming, and so lag would randomly take over at times.

This was my second game jam and first Godot game! It's surreal to see that people love the game I've created..

There wasn't much of a struggle, maybe because I've struggled much more on my first jam (GMTK) and previous games. It was all enjoyable to design levels and improve visuals, after I've build the prototype. The greatest learning that helped me this time is to create a minimum viable product, the basic platformer movement in my case, before working on art or other features. I've spent more than half the time just to perfect the core platformer mechanics, making it responsive and fun. That was the end of big challenges. Cool ideas come after that, and development is fast.

I've also learnt a lot playing others games; from how fast paced a game should be to making the game rewarding. On the whole a great experience!

(PS Thank you @DrManatee, happy to see my game on your favorites collection :D )

I have made several games already, but usually I'm more of a designer/writer than an actual programmer or art guy. One of the reasons I wanted to make a game jam was to polish a bit those skills, since I tend to forget them.

Thankfully, I'm think I can defend myself in the programming area, but art and animation... nope, those were a nightmare.

If you play my game you'll see that the character basically has an idle animation and a movement one, since jumping is just one frame: at the beggining I thought about having one when you posess a body, another for when you die, etc., but only those two animations took me HOURS. 

I am happy with the result, since I think they have a certain charm, but yeah, animation was my biggest hell.