Well, just submitted my 7drl entry - I'm many years a developer but first time developing a game of any kind and that was a great deal harder than I thought it'd be!  My scope ended up slashed to the absolute bone from a well over ambitious start and even then it was down to the write that'd i'd have enough in to consider it a "finished game".

So, my utmost congratulations and respects to everyone who took part, both this year and in previous.  I have a new appreciation for what's involved!

So a question for everyone - during this year's challenge, what is the one thing that most caused you stress and frustration? The unexpected difficulty or challenge?

For me it was always continuing onwards.  Looking at the mess of code and seeing a dozen ways to refactor, but having to take that next step towards the next feature instead in order to have any chance of getting enough done.  It was torture every time and very much against a lifetime's training and experience.

Firstly, huge congrats! Finishing your first jam is hellishly exciting. And well done for sticking through the challenges and making it to the end. This is my 2nd jam, and it's an amazing feeling to get to the end. Or at least, it feels amazing underneath all the exhaustion :p

I totally feel you about scope. My job involves accurate scope estimation for projects three to four orders of magnitude bigger than these jams, and I still over estimate what I can do here. And I also wouldn't have it any other way. For me, these are about ambition and having fun and just throwing caution to the wind and seeing what comes out. Still, my challenges are much the same. Hitting day 4 and seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to scope. Knowing some of those cool & flashy ideas that you had a few days ago aren't going to make it. Hitting day 5 and an unexpected bug taking a few precious hours out of the schedule. Hard coding some super flaky code just to get that object spawning in where you need it, despite many many years of training saying how horrible this code is.

Regardless, let me second your congratulations to everyone. Whether you succeeded or not, I have a huge amount of respect for everyone who tried new things, learnt new things, experimented with something that excited them and just went for it. It's awesome to see. And if you're new to game making, or coding or whatever, and you don't feel what you've done stacks up to others, know we all have a huge amount of respect for you've done regardless of where you're at.

Hey man! Congrats mate :) I will look into your game as soon as we finished ours :D

We are 14 hours away from our deadline and we got our core game done. Scope was super hard to achive and a lot of features went in that we initially planned. Ok, it really helped that we are two people doing it and I have dozens of projects that I buried during my lifetime as a Game Dev, so it was a bit easier to scope. But yeah, this my first 7DRL and I am excited as hell to finally release our game and test out all the other submissions!

GameJam was a crazy journey for us so far, because it's stress, excitement, fun, exhaustion. I think I was never so tired in my life as yesterday night, when I kept coding at 5am. But all this is worth because it is so satisfiying to see what you have done!

I hope everyone had a good time the last week. I learn'd a lot of new things and I'm looking forward to the next days to see your submissions :)

Congrats! I've got 17 hours to go... and still haven't made the hard decisions about what to brutally cut. Unbelievable amount left to do, the pain is still ahead ;_;