Well, I’d say in general– keep your scope down and try to keep your eyes on shipping at all times. Your main goal is to take your idea and ship it to users–
I’ve done a lot of jams, with lots of both success and failure. Here’s what I would say really made the difference:
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Untested approaches: Have fun with experimentation, but learn to rely on things you know work at their core unless you have the time to really debug things. i.e. Stick to stable software and don’t go rushing after trendy cutting-edge features.
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4/44: This is advice for Ludum Dare basically saying you should make the fun loop of your game in 4 hours, and spend 44 hours polishing it (for context LD Compo rules give you only 48 hours starting from nothing). Basically, make a really good prototype and realize the fun first, then all of your work refining the game with extra content, bugfixes, polish, and presentation tweaks should be in service of that fun loop.
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Scope creep: This one’s a killer! Think about the cost of features– if I give my player the ability to shoot a gun, my platformer has all sorts of new problems like introducing death states to enemies, respawn states to enemies, and making sure that any level events relying on the enemies being present still work when the enemy isn’t there. Then there might be new bugs too– dead enemies start moving around again if the player alerts them, enemies that respawn keep returning to the death animation after every action, etc. Not every feature is free and you need to make sure that you aren’t adding things that will take too much time away from the core idea.
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Documentation: Make a design document. Keep referring to it as you work. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated, often times in jams that doc can be a bit of an unformatted mess. But it’s important to keep your design on paper as you go to keep you focused on the end goal.
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Pace yourself: I need to make this point clear because I didn’t take this advice on my first long term jam. Working for a month long at 48h jam time crunch (which is to say, living, breathing, and eating Unity until I dropped dead) will destroy you. It’ll leave you tired, demotivated, and eventually you’ll just shut down and be unable to work any further until you recover. It’s also generally just not healthy. Give yourself time, and keep this a fun thing by balancing out your gamedev time and your well being. That way you can keep fresh as you slowly make your way through tasks.
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Go Gold: This really applies more to long form jams like this one as well. Generally speaking, as you near the deadline you should be approaching a final game. Sometimes you may not get to a lot of the content until the last minute, but your core mechanics should be the focus of the first phase of development and flourishes after. Then you try to build variations of that for content. As you approach the last few days of development, you’ll really want to make sure you’re finalizing things– if a feature isn’t working out or too unreliable cut it, if a stage is failing to work properly debug it– get things working! This includes building your game and testing the final binary. If you’re unable to build, you’ll want to know that ASAP.
I’ll add anything else I can think of but in general, just have fun and read those scripting API docs. :)