I should elect my tech before the Jam starts and figure out packaging and distribution first.
This is really good advice. If you choose a lisp that doesn’t have a good out-of-the-box distribution story, it will eat up a lot of your precious jam time unless you get that solved ahead of time! The jam rules mention this already, but perhaps it could be emphasized more.
While I don’t love Appimage for general-purpose application distribution, it’s actually a pretty good fit for games, especially if they’re single-player.
I worked with my son this time who is 9 this time around.
Also really good advice! I’ve been collaborating with my kids for the past 6 years on this (they were about that age when we started!) and it’s become something of a tradition to play thru all the entries together and talk about what we like and don’t like. Kids are great at finding bugs and noticing when things don’t make sense.
Yes the cover image is generated by ChatGPT (spit!) but so what?
This will probably not be allowed next time. It’s important to credit the original creator of whatever code or art you incorporate into your game, and these tools make that impossible.