Hi, this thread is awesome.
My story is that I am a college professor and a gamedev from Chile looking to get back into indie stuff. We had a big project that got cancelled and game financing is very bad right now, so I formed a team with some people from my game company to do a small indie game for this Jam. We hoped this could be a nice exploration that might give us an idea for a commercial game we could do without external financing.
Most of my teammates had a lot of work to do during the week, but happily I could take more time off. So we decided to make a game that I could champion and the team helped me with stuff when they were available. Sound effects where done by my team (Sebastián and Estefanía) and I had a programmer (Felipe) and an animator (Franco) help me with the game in each of their respective areas. The idea of the game was also a collaborative effort.
About time management, we decided to make the game in gameloops that we could close if time run short, and it did run short, so we ended up scrapping the second part of the game, that included a small pokemon GBA fighting parody. Friday and Saturday Felipe and I just stayed up working until 13 minutes before closure. Felipe was in charge of building and submitting the game, as well as the menu and the amazing store page.
We are very happy with the result and we are thinking about dedicating 5 to 7 months after work to try and get a commercial version of this game, let's just hope it works!
The game: Doors, Monsters and Towers https://abstractdigital.itch.io/doors-monstes-and-towers
Edit: I've been in many game jams, but this it the first big online itch.io jam I've participated. My first game ever was done in a small jam in 2011 when I was in college (so long ago already!)