Hey! Glad I was able to be an eye-opener!
I don't do devlog videos but generally I base my execution on rapid prototyping and fast iterations, and I was very fortunate to have playtesters during this jam. They helped catch areas where I found people got stuck at or confused by, and made me prioritize UX a lot more than I otherwise would have.
I will consider writing a longer devlog, but as a start, if one is using Unity, what has helped me a lot on the technical side of things is enabling Fast Enter Play Mode which allows one to instantly test gameplay, and using Hot Reload which is a plugin that allows for instant compilation during Play Mode. Combined, these keep my iteration speeds at its max, allowing me to focus on develop and iterate constantly and debug any issues on the spot. Being able to change values on the fly and see the results instantly accelerates my decision making skills a lot!
Once that is done, the bottleneck is less on the software, and more on how fast your brain can think and how fast your fingers can translate those ideas into code - mainly a lot of it is execution and maybe experience too.
When it comes to the jam, there is a lot of task prioritization involved - I focused on creating an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) where my key priority is to make the bare minimum of what works - for Last Fuse, this was the building system in v0.1 - which does not even include combat - this is so that I can at least deliver what I believe to be a working prototype of what I want to showcase and get a feel. The benefit is also being able to have a working prototype for people to play and get early feedback which is super crucial for UX
Additionally, although I had a lot of ideas at the beginning, I made sure to design them in a way that I could cut them if needed (5 endings down to 3, removing meta upgrades, so that in the event of a lack of time, I would still have a solid MVP). This meant I would regularly prepare versions that incrementally improve the game from the early playable prototype. At each stage, this allows playtesters to give me feedback well before time was up, and it is through that playtesting session that equipped me with information on what to prioritize in the remaining days.
Once I'm able to scale up, I work in the order of first getting the mechanic to work without bugs. In the context of the combat system, it's making sure the enemies shoot the right thing, increase heat correctly as the core mechanic, and being able to die properly. That's the minimum. Then comes balancing, which was a challenge in itself as I wanted the game to be challenging, but not too hard because not everybody here is familiar with the strategy genre. I didn't do the best job, but I tried to balance it according to a wider spectrum of audience to have the lowest barrier of entry.
And finally after that comes polish - adding muzzle flashes, bullet VFX, explosions, randomizing spawn points and pushing the presentation, using Slerp() instead of LookRotation() for turrets, etc. However, that's not to say I leave polish to the last thing all the time - sometimes I add polish during development which accelerates it because from the start I wanted a quality end product. And once I get the game-feel down, it starts to paint a clearer picture of the over-arching vision and further enforces what needs to be worked on.
This is getting to become a wall of text and I wasn't expecting to write this much haha. This brief devlog, I wrote goes a bit into how I slowly scaled up from an MVP and the order of which I developed the various systems - in what I believed to be decreasing priority. Even the end product had things I needed to cut as I lacked the time to make it work, so I will be working on the game post-jam to further improve it and address the feedback that I have gotten from the players who have left their thoughts here! :)