I am 16 and this was my first game jam. I've been using Unity for a while and I have started quite lot of projects but unfortunately I didn't finish most of them. Making and publishing a game in such a short time was very satisfying and rewarding.
My biggest problem during the jam was that I initially overscoped. Fortunately I realised that pretty quickly and came up with a smaller, more manageable project.
The main thing I learned from the jam is how much polish can do for a game. Most of my games never left the prototype stage. They always had close to zero polish, most of them didn't even have sound. For this game I spend much more time on things like particles, screen shake etc. and it is amazing how much impact little things like that can have. Although this game was made in under 72 hours I think it is more enjoyable than any of my earlier game because I did way more to improve the feel of the game.
Another big thing is to know your strengths and weaknesses : I'm no artist. When I try to make good 2d (or 3d) art it either takes way too long and just looks kinda okay or it's turns out terrible which is why for this game I only used simple shapes for the graphics did my best to make them look nice and the moved on to making the core mechanics and polishing the game.
I have been really happy with the comments people left under my game. Everyone has been very kind and supportive, I basically only got constructive criticism and people left me a lot of great ideas to improve my games and things to keep in mind for my next project.
Here is my submission: https://itch.io/jam/wowie-jam-2/rate/552522