This is my third game jam and I'm still learning.  For my first 2 jams I scoped my games to be small enough to complete in the timeframe, even if I was working or distracted by other things for a day or two.  This time I had a more ambitious plan, over the last 8 months of making games for jams, and experimenting on many an unfinished project I gained some confidence while improving in some areas and felt I could risk pushing the boat out a bit.  Over the last week I spent a lot of time on my game, and have been surprised at how long some things have taken, some more and some less than what I initially thought.  I knew it would be a lot of work, and I knew the deadline would give me more focus than I can normally give to game development, but I wanted to experiment with new ideas (for me) and new mechanics.

For myself, I think I have learnt 3 main lessons from this jam:

1. Any plans including an ambitious scope need to planned and prioritised appropriately.  What absolutely has to be in the game should be a high priority, and should be made first.  What parts of the game can be left out without impacting the overall "vision" for the game, these things should be at the bottom of the ToDo list so as to not distract from the important elements of the game, and if there is time at  the end, maybe try to add them then if they are still desired.
2. Never get complacent over your understanding of the engine and the tools you use.  In this jam, I thought that because I had done things a certain way last year that I could easily tweak these things to include extra logic or capabilities that, logically would make perfect sense.  However, I found during the last day, that because of the increased scope of my game, that the "ways" of doing things I had previously learned, while suitable for games that can load assets in a couple of frames, gave no end of errors as assets were not appropriately assigned or loaded when they were being called by the scripts.  Just because it worked with a small platformer with less than 10 different assets with a tilemap or 2 does not mean it will work with a game with 20 or 30 assets to be loaded and multiple tilemap layers and scenes instanced through a tilemap on top of this.
3. Practice makes perfect, it's an old saying for a reason, if you have the time to put the effort in, even if you start with nothing, over time skills and experience will grow and what you make tomorrow will most likely be better than what you made yesterday.  As I said before, this is only my third game jam, but even with this one technically unfinished, it is still a major improvement over the first game I submitted to a jam.

So have you learned anything, or tried anything different in this jam?  Is there anything you would like to do different?

(Also, the rather blatant advertising bit) I would be thankful if you could have a look at my submission (below), and below that is the game I submitted to my first jam last year if you were curious about the difference.

Orc Survival (this jam)

https://crazyhoundgamedesign.itch.io/orc-survival-another-jam-submission

A Last Stand Story (submitted to the GameDev.tv game jam 2024)

https://crazyhoundgamedesign.itch.io/a-last-stand-story

It is my first game jam and I didn't knew what to expect. The curve was basically: Having fun at start and more and more panic as the deadline started to get closer, which is no surprise. Last two days were worst and even that I normally sleep long, I was suddenly wake at 6AM and can't fall asleep as I was thinking about the game and all things I needed to cross out from the original scope. But it was totally worth it - it's such a great experience.

My two tips are probably these:

1) When you are stuck on something, switch to another task before you burn out. This applies more for solo devs, where you have to handle all the aspects of the game and you can switch between code, graphic and game design parts. And when you have nothing to switch to, just make a little break, go on walk or something.

2) Make a solid bandwidth before game jam end to check everything works with your exported game. There are some things that might work in debug, but can ruin all your effords in production.

Well done for making it to the end of your first jam.  This is the first one where scope was an issue for me.  If I had more time, I could have added more in but the point of a game jam in my opinion is to operate under constraints and learn how much we can fit into the time while having the opportunity to try different things.

Testing is always important, during development it can help identify areas to fix or polish, afterwards it ensures that what was made works as intended.