I'm not sure where to begin about what I learned.
I'm not new to programming, or trying to keep to a deadline, but I am a right old noob as a game dev. I only had two finished games to my name when I entered the jam and one of those was from the Discovering Godot course. I had to finish up the course and pick some lectures out of the next Godot course before I could even begin.
I learned about grid maps, navmesh, how to export blend files to GLTF and import that into Godot. I learned how to have my character be able to shoot or punch her enemies, while the enemies could only chase the character and beat her up, and only then if they could get close enough. I reaquainted myself with the MoSCoW rules and applied them ruthlessly to all my big ideas for my game and applied them again ever more ruthlessly as time ebbed away.
But my favourite learning experience of the month was when I finally figured out why my zombies repeatedly fell on their faces and laid stuck upon the ground when they were supposed to turn toward, and race off after the player character. For ages I was certain that it was because I had the models set too low and their feet were in the floor. I was convinced that they were sort of tripping themselves up. This theory was supported by the fact that if I adjusted the physics for the model they no longer fell over. Little did I realise that the reason they didn't fall over was because I approached them from a different direction after modifying them.
When I finally tumbled that the problem was not about their feet being stuck in the floor, I found a message in the console that said
"Up vector and direction between node origin and target are aligned, look_at() failed"
When I debugged what the zombies were doing, their transformations and so on, they were never trying to turn to the UP vector. They were often close to it, but it was never the same. But, if I took the absolute value of the vector and rounded it, I could see where it then became the same as the UP vector. The solution was then simple, write a method to compare the absed and rounded lookat vector to UP and only turn if they didn't match. I guess I'm a bit of a nerd. I get a kick out of chasing down and beating problems like that.
Anyway,, what I think I am finally getting round to saying, is I also learned what FUN it is to take part in a game jam. I might not enjoy the pressure of a short jam, I'm not yet good enough to get much done in a week, much less three days or something. But having a month and working on my plan every day, I had a ball :c)
Thank you @Rompkins for this topic. I hope I didn't go banging on too long. Thanks also @Yang Pulse for hosting the jam!