I'm always looking for more feedback and ways to improve. I made a Starfox-inspired rail shooter as my submission: https://null-builds.itch.io/maximum-voltage
I've made a few small games off and on for myself over the years but have been trying to push myself to do more game jams lately. I didn't do so great in my last jam and it was a week long so I didn't think I could handle 48 hours but I've used the Kenney assets for a long time as placeholders in my projects so I really wanted to give this a shot.
Ever since I saw the ship assets in the packs, I have been dying for an excuse to try making a rail shooter. I didn't have any experience with that genre and most games I've made up until now are story-based so I was worried I wouldn't be able to get it done in 48 hours. I talked myself into it though since I've learned I'm better at designing cutscenes than actual gameplay and a rail shooter is basically just one long cutscene with a single 3D curve.
I tend to do better work at lower resolutions and it occurred to me the Kenney assets have the same solid color shading that SNES games like Starfox and Vortex did so I decided to make my whole game retro (the whole game runs in 256x224 resolution). My thought was the retro style could also help excuse some of the jank as being more authentic.
Before the jam started, I rewatched a ton of Adam Younis' old game jam streams for tips on managing my time. During the jam, I made a schedule and todo list like he did and also decided to focus more on polish than content since he said a short highly polished game typically does better in jams than one with more content. I tracked my time throughout the jam and found I spent over 12 hours just tuning the player/camera and adding polish but only about 3 hours making content for the game's level. I wish I could have added more but I'm really happy with how well polished it turned out even if it is short.
In total, I spent 39 hours on actual development, 4 hours for sleep half-way through, and another 4.5 hours on frequent breaks to move around throughout the 2 days. I managed to submit about 40 minutes before the deadline which left my friend enough time to thankfully catch a major issue with the audio levels and for me to fix it before submissions closed.
One thing I'll definitely recommend to others is to download all the assets into a content manager. I loaded all of Kenney/Kay's kits into a program that lets me search and tag files faster than the stock file browser and that made it way easier to find specific effects during the jam.