This was a great post!
I have watched way to many game development videos on youtube about game jams and always wanted to participate I just never knew if I'd get to the level to actually submit anything playable. I am super happy to have published something that is for the most part a playable game! More than anything though was how much I learned over the week about my skills and what to improve on. That for me was the main win of this last week!
Viewing post in Just want to say congratulations to all first time game jammers.
I found when I did my first jam that "level of ability" didn't really matter too much unless you were massively ambitious and wanted to chase the top spots.
So long as you can make something do something that has an objective to complete or an aim to strive towards, it's a game.
In the few jams I've done I've played games that were text based, games where the sound is terrible and blows your eardrums out, games that leave you thinking "this dev must have been on something?" ( these can be the most interesting ones, or the worst ).
So long as you submit something and get some feedback you can learn how to improve or what you might want to really do, be a coder, an artist, musician or a designer, or all of it. Above all, try to enjoy it, if you don't you're either going about it the wrong way or maybe gamedev isn't what you really want to do.