cyps nailed it!
As someone very new to jams, I thought I’d offer two pieces of advice, with my real world experiences…
1) Don’t let small details hold up your progress. It’s so easy to get stuck obsessing over little details that aren’t going to have a major impact to the player. While that may be a good thing for a big project, it’s probably a detriment in something where your time and scope are so limited. Focus on little details only if they really matter or y everything else is good enough .
- I spent time picking and applying different wood textures for my game, just for it to end up looking horrible anyway, and to find out the textures were too big and causing all sorts of issues with lag and upload size. If I’d stuck with 1 texture it would’ve saved me a ton of time that I could’ve used fixing actual issues
2) The easy but messy answer might be superior to the hard but elegant answer. Since you have limited time, you don’t always have to go with the best technique. A quick, non-expandable design might be preferable to one that is better but would take longer to implement.
- I got stuck on an enemy spawner. I had a method that worked, but wasn’t easily expandable. I spent hours improving it, but the user would never know and I ended up not having time to use the expandability anyway!