the title says it all. never made a game or coded in my life but I'm throwing myself into the deep end. what do you think I should use?
Watch some videos about game engines to learn about the pros and cons of each. I personally did not find Unity as intuitive as most people seem to, and found Godot much faster to learn. Godot is also a lightweight engine so it'll run pretty well no matter what hardware you're working with. The downsides are, you have to be willing to learn how to code with GDScript and there are less tutorials than there are for Unity. (Especially because Godot just updated to version 4.5 this week, many tutorials will be at least a little outdated.) However, this will also encourage you to learn what you're doing instead of blindly following tutorials. And you have almost 2 weeks to practice :)
Unreal I found easier than Unity (again, that's not everyone's experience -- I encourage you to try a few engines and see what you like), but Unreal is a pretty heavy-duty game engine, you certainly don't need all it's fancy features for a game jam and if you're just working on a laptop or something it may struggle to load and run quickly/smoothly. I haven't personally tried Game Maker but if you're into platformers or RPGs there are additional engine options as well. Again, plenty of videos on YouTube comparing so you can get an idea of which you may want to try out.
Honestly I would give Game Maker a try. It's free until you want to sell games with a single purchase not subscription. I started out trying to learn godot while I've never tried scripting in my life until then and it was very confusing. There's mixed tutorials on different versions of godot that made it very difficult to accomplish anything as a complete beginner. I think I spent about 8 hours trying to make a 2d sprite both walk and animate in all directions and stop when there's no key input and for whatever reason no matter how hard I tried I literally couldn't make it work no matter how many tutorials i followed which I think was probably 13 total. I switched to Game Maker and got it on the first try no bs for just MOVING A SPRITE. But go with godot or other programs if you're trying to make it 3D. Good luck out there! :D
I big recomed for me is Gamemaker. I'm studying game design right now and i have used both Gamemaker and Unity. Unity is fun and able to do both 3D and 2D but the simplicity of Gamemaker makes it perfect for beginners. 3D is very challenging in Gamemaker but don't underastimate that and say that it's a week engine because its really not, u can do a lot in Gamemaker.