Great idea for a thread and thanks for sharing your insights.
I'm the programmer from Marco Yolo which you can find here if you are interested: https://itch.io/jam/kenney-jam-2023/rate/2179052
We had spent some time familiarising ourselves with the asset packs before we got started so that we could quickly imagine what to make once the theme was announced. We really loved the tiny dungeon and roguelike character packs and were quite eager to use those if we could. We had already dreamed of making a weapon / armour system with the roguleike character pack. Needless to say we were not disappointed when the theme was announced!
We didn't plan to spend inhumane hours working so we did have sleep and screen breaks, though probably not enough! Being up against the clock was really motivating and we ended up quite addicted to our concept once we got some good progress on it.
It was really satisfying to be able to prototype mechanics in such a short time - we managed to include procedurally generated worlds, varied encounters, different enemies and armour as well as some (hopefully) funny dialogue. Code quality definitely suffered as a result of the rush though. Our artist loved working with the Kenney packs - hopefully you'll agree he made some really awesome encounter backgrounds with them.
We also lost some time to source control funny stuff but I think that's just the price of doing business! We were trying to be quite conservative with our ambitions on the project and so we discarded a lot of ideas that would have really fit but I think that was necessary to finish in the time with something we were happy with. We had a playable build earlyish on Saturday afternoon which gave us plenty of time for testing.
Overall we managed to make a pretty entertaining, pretty playable rogulike in 48 hours - not bad for our first game jam! We'll be back next year!