This jam was a lot of fun and also my first one in about 5 years. I wasn't sure whether I'd still have the energy and speed to finish any idea I'd come up with, or whether I'd get bogged down in the details of the implementation (as I sometimes do in my job these days). Turns out my fears were unfounded and the jam took me away with all its excitement and ups and downs :)

If you haven't played my game yet, please do! It's a funny little dungeon crawler with an interesting take on the theme. The idea took me a while to come up with, and I was almost worried I wouldn't be able to come up with something I'd be willing to spend the three days working on, but when it struck me I know I'd have a lot of fun making it.

Lessons Learnt

A few things I want to bear in mind for the next jam I do (I really want to make this a regular thing in my year), which may be obvious for some. - I should actually plan out my idea and attack it strategically, starting with the core elements. It's too easy for me to just identify the parts which I find the most interesting and focus on those, only to realise too late that I still haven't worked on the part which is meant to bring the most fun for the player (and not just the developer). I very nearly didn't have time to implement the "AI behind the game" part of my game because of this. - In the run-up to the jam, every morning I'd ask my partner to give me a random theme and then I'd think of a game idea for it throughout the day. This was intended as practice in case the theme turned out to be something I didn't really like! Because of this I now have about 3 different ideas of games that I want to make outside of jams, which maybe isn't a good thing given my finite amount of time. I think this really helped me with this jam's theme, though, since I struggled with it at first. - More sleep before the jam. The week before the jam was quite hectic for me, and ruined my sleep schedule. Because of this I was already sleep deprived on day 1 of the jam (I only managed 6 hours of work before I couldn't concentrate properly!). This was actually out of my hands this time, but next time I'll be careful :) - Only on the last day did I decide to check up on what other people were doing, and it really gave me a second wind. With my head stuck in my own idea it's easy to forget that half the fun of jams is other people's games, so it's a shame I didn't check in more!

Some of my favourites!

• Forest Fire has a really cool "faceless enemy", and I think the gameplay would be perfect expanded to a Overcooked-style co-op game.
• VargaVinter drips atmosphere and has an excellent world and characters that I'd love to know more about.
• The Fire Will Die is a great miniature survival game is that dying to be expanded.
• Merge Getaway is a super-slick highscore game with really satisfyingly swervy controls!

That's all really! Thanks for the games, guys! :)