Just a quick note on the time aspect: I attended Trijam to actually get me into some good planning-ahead mindset, but apparently a part of me rebelled big time. The core mechanic was working in under an hour and when I was a few more hours busy (with hardly seperatable phases of just playing, testing features, and reading the Game Maker documentation, etc.) I decided to just go with it and not bother with reconstructing my schedule. So without an underlying plan, I just continued and easily surpased the 3h, and then some more, and then some more. Arrrgh. Definitely trying to up my discipline levels for the next one. I’m quite confident this one would have fit into the 3h constraint quite well – without cutting any of the important aspects.
Cheers!