I can sympathize with having to hack things down. Personally I think one of the best things about cramming code like this is that it forces you to find efficient ways of doing things, and you can use that in other projects that aren't so constrained. I'm planning to make a non-crunched version of my entry sometime after the jam, to further polish it up and flesh out some of the ideas.
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I agree. I always wanted to make games but found the process too steep because I couldn't manage big projects efficiently and ended up losing motivation. With this kind of limited scope projects, I'm able to build many games in a short time and the constraints push me to focus on the main concepts and features. I tend to overcomplicate things and found this is a good exercise to improve my problem solving skills and complexity management. I also love maths and procedural generation. Both of them are very useful when you try to make big things with little code.
I can very much relate, it's both an interesting puzzle and an extreme means of scope limitation. I get game ideas, but see the potential for something beyond my current skills and don't know where to start. Moving forward, my strategy for any more substantial projects will be to make a small, simple version first, then a slightly scaled-back version after I've gained the initial know-how.