I know I've mentioned it before but it was my first time too! Not my first jam overall (I did take part in an animation one during my uni days) but I feel like surprisingly I was much more on top of planning out and completing the tasks I'd been assigned/assigned myself. It truly has been an invaluable experience and I got exactly what I wanted out of it: I learnt many new things and gained some more experience in collaboration and game production pipelines! I got to see my art in an actual game for the first time!! It felt surreal and rewarding. As per a recommendation from an industry friend too, I introduced a project organisation structure (user stories and agile) to help us keep things on task which helped us out a lot in the end. One of my mentors told me that it made me seem a bit like a producer lol, and that we were pretty much functioning like a small studio.
I also got to understand what it's like creating art to be implemented in games and understanding the production side of their design. Like drawing foliage and assets in perspective for a 2.5D top down camera, but then later realising that because it's still being placed in a 3D plane with a flat ground, the bottom of the objects needed to be drawn flat instead of rounded like you would see in regular perspective!
Overall it was a challenge, I'm sure I bit off more than I could chew but I also wanted to test myself to see how much of a workload I could handle and how much I could realistically complete in the timeframe we were given. Suffice to say I think we did well, there are some things we didn't get to implement that I regret since they really would've enhanced the experience and conveyed our intentions better, but such is the nature of jams I guess. I'm definitely getting some well earned rest and taking the time to celebrate other people's hard work!