For me personally, it was finding an idea that could fit the theme of the jam. I spent most of the first day developing base shooter mechanics and seeing what could make for an interesting idea.

Give and You Shall Receive is a wave-based survival game where the player must survive hordes of enemies by gunning them down. The catch is that after every wave, the player must choose to give up something in order to receive something in return, changing up how they play the game.

https://mark-auman.itch.io/give-and-you-shall-receive

What about for you?

For me personally, was trying to help the 3D modeller, as I could never get my model to look the same as theirs. But I think I mainly struggled with the iMon's as they were one of the last things we implemented, and I was quite tired at that point.

I couldn't put as many memes in as I'd like. Just covering 'Carrot for a Cock' in Pico-8 took an entire morning.

We've done a few jams before, although we normally participate in 72-hour jams (notably LD Jam).  The hardest part for us was probably cutting out 24 hours of work and focussing down on a smaller feature set.  We decided that we'd borrow ideas from an existing game since we didn't want to spend too much time planning actual gameplay, and instead wanted to get working on features.

Fortunately we're a team of 4 so we can split tasks quite nicely.  I have background in Computer Science, so I took programming and music.  The other members are experienced in Architecture and Film Production, so we're quite geared towards this.

Overall, it's been quite an interesting experience, and we'll definitely be doing it again next year (if they host one).

Knowing how to split my time between coding/story/art/voices was the most difficult thing for me. I think I prioritised well enough, but it did mean everything was a little bit too rushed at the end; it would've been nice to have an extra hour to playtest and check it everything was in working order. It's a little unfortunate that the things I'm least happy with in my game are all very quick fixes, but you live and learn!

By far the most difficult thing was giving up on pixel art for me. I had 6 hours left on the clock but still had no ai the player couldn't shoot and I had no sound effects. In the end I embraced the blocks style and focused as much as possible on gameplay.

https://itch.io/jam/yogscast-game-jam/rate/536013

I stupidly spent almost the entire first day making the character animations, of which I only used about 75%.

Note to future self: do the gameplay first, make it pretty later...