With the deadline well in the past now, I've checked out all the other entries and was stunned by the quantity, variety and quality of this years releases.

I've  compiled some of my thoughts regarding my entry here: https://goldlocke.itch.io/der-wanderknecht/devlog/1033407/the-promises-and-peril... .

What was your experience like, what did you struggle with, were there surprises along the way and looking back, how do you feel about this game jam?

And in case you didn't participate, what kept you from doing so?

I understand your frustration. With such a tight deadline, I didn't have time to test the final boss on other emulators or on the real console; I only tested it on Mesen. After launching the game, a few minutes before the jam finish, I went to test it on the real console and had a nasty surprise: a visual effect using OPT wasn't displaying correctly. I was desperate and tried to fix it as quickly as possible, but it was taking too much time, so to calm down, I simply removed the effect and released version 1.1 as soon as possible, and then I was at peace. :')
Making a game under a deadline was a very different experience, including the ROM size limit. I'd never been so concerned about ROM space and graphics compression. But I feel good about using the SNES's large RAM for something.
Congratulations for your game, I loved it!

I had been working on my tool-chain and engine for some time, albeit only in an on-and-off manner. This gave me a lot of confidence at the outset, which is why I budgeted so much of my time to the Mode7 work.

Outside of the UI library and the asset decompression, pretty much everything else had lots of bugs in it as my test roms simply weren't robust enough and when I tried to push systems (or use them together) lots of issues became apparent.

The ones that stick out;

• My VRAM allocator for sprites would occasionally re-use slots due to an aliased ZP variable I had accidentally introduced, corrupting VFX seemingly at random
• I crammed too much code into Bank 0 early on being lazy, and had to stop and de-tangling things and group/split logic between 0 and 1, to avoid long-jumping all over the place
• My player state handling was too rigid, and made it difficult to introduce the platform mechanics I wanted, so I had to stop and re-write it to make the movement feel good (though I heard loud and clear that input mapping was still not what people expected!)
• My toolchain for palette quantization/optimization has some bugs when animating palettes, which would cause palettes to not coalesce correctly, resulting in bad (or missing) colours. I ended up swapping some animations to be blitting instead
• My engine incorrectly set some VBLANK only registers ouside of VBLANK, which worked fine in emulators and hardware on my test-roms, but caused issues once enough real logic was occurring each frame. So I had to refactor and buffer them correctly

You get the idea! For every feature I added to the very short game, I spent far more time just bug-fixing systems I thought were ready for use already. Add into that a fulltime job, Wife and Kids, and all the other things real-life throws at you I just simply did not have the time I thought I would have for forward progress.

Pretty much all my time for level design, music, etc... which got crunched down into the last 5 days of the jam to polish what I had. Which is why the music has short loops, menu SFX are missing, the levels are short, some jumps are not possible, and tutorial text/NPCs were dropped.

Lesson learned, humble pie very much eaten :D And at least I have all these fixes integrated back into the engine/tools for any future projects now!

Interesting write up, I do wonder how much of your struggle with the HiROM to LoROM rewrite could be alleviated via better tooling/linking, I assume the issue is swapping things from short to long addressing on subroutine calls and jump tables, because at least coming from a c background, those are sort of beyond the scope of the programmer, it's the linker's job to figure out what subroutines are related and to put them all into banks.