Hey, can you elaborate on this a little bit? I tend to err VERY far on the side of caution when deciding what to use during game jams, which results in a ton of pointless rewriting of code. I'm planning to do Trijam every week for a while, so any extra guidance you can give would be a big help.
Specifically:
1) Are there any rules of thumb I should follow when deciding what's fair game and what isn't?
2) Yes/No answers to any of the following would be nice. Can I use a . . .
-Small utility library with things generic math functions, code for shuffling an array, custom generically-typed collections, and an enum for cardinal directions
-Generic object pooling system
-Custom SoundManager class that pools audio clip instances and can limit simultaneous instances globally or per-clip
-Shader for a generic visual effect, like making a sprite flash a certain color or dissolve pixel-by-pixel
-Noise texture for use in a shader (eg, an image file containing raw Perlin noise) that can be generated procedurally, with no direct interaction from a human via image-editing software. Some of my shaders depend on these, and it's annoying to re-generate them.
-Title screen script that implements "Start Game" and "Exit" buttons
-Stub script containing a class declaration and empty method declarations, but no fields and the methods are all empty, as part of a project template