Here's what last year looked like for me - and I hope you'll indulge me, it's turned into a bit of a ramble. No kids, but high pressure project at work demanding some evening work so only a couple of hours available on weekdays although on the last week I somehow found more time. The Jam started on a Friday but I didn't begin until the Sunday (23rd). For the last week I had roughly planned what I was going to work on on a daily basis - this probably saved me after I had a disaster on the day before the deadline... Worth noting that last year's jam was 14 days rather than this year's 10 days.
- 23/05/2021: Added URP, Dungeon Crawl tiles, created first tilemaps, 2D Lighting
- 24/05/2021: Player Shooting, physics
- 25/05/2021: Add navmesh AI
- 26/05/2021: Characters have health, enemies drop gold
- 27/05/2021: Game loop
- 28/05/2021: Friday night (nothing got done)
- 29/05/2021: Monsters, fix physics issues
- 30/05/2021: Improved movement.
- 31/05/2021: Make enemies shoot (2 hours)
- 01/06/2021: Added player controlled light, UI for health / coins, scene linking (1 hour light, 4 hours UI)
- 02/06/2021: Game loop - exit to next level, gameplay fixes (4 hours)
- 03/06/2021: [plan] Audio / UI / Dialogue, Levels
- [deadline day] 04/06/2021: [plan] Launch!
The 03/06/2021 did NOT go according to plan - I spent the entire evening trying to get WebGL exporting working. I was still having it fail up til 3am. Got none of the planned tasks done. Honestly, I thought I was going to have to give up on submitting. Fortunately I had taken the Friday off, so I slept on it, imported all my work to a new project, and by lunchtime the export finally worked. So polishing went out the window, along with the dialogue system - I had less than six hours to get everything together: threw together 3 more levels (only had one at this point!), all the sounds / music and all the little things I'd missed.
Re-reading the above, and with increased obligations this year... Frankly I am well behind schedule ;) In general I was grateful for a patient Mrs Christh throughout last year's jam. I have a bundle of joy this year and visitors staying Thursday thru Monday so honestly I'm not sure what my end result will be - but I need to plan and also not burn out if I do decide to set designated work hours. I guess my main suggestion would be to take care of yourself but also to add some slack into your schedule in case you have a disaster... And keep copies of your project folders / use source control.