It's the first time my friend and I participated in a game jam of such scale! And I think it went pretty well! And I'm pretty satisfied with the state of completeness and polish my game ended up in.
My team (a two-person team) spent the first three days trying to decide on an idea. Those few days were quite a struggle as we kept coming up with small ideas that were fine yet not good enough to make into a stand-alone game. We ultimately ended up developing our game from the idea of a Rubik's Cube platformer, where we were planning to have terrain/platforms that change when you rotate the Rubik's Cube. We had several problems with this idea, though, namely how to have intuitive controls, how to implement the rotation, and how to design puzzles (might be difficult to prevent the player from going off the designated path).
Therefore, we took a step away from the idea of Rubik's Cube, and instead went with rotating cubes that are connected by poles. It's still a platformer, but with less complexity and is easier to design levels for. There are still lots of technical challenges, such as creating a 360-degree camera, making connected cubes rotate together, and figuring out the controls.
The first part I worked on was connecting all the cubes together and writing scripts that determine which cube will rotate. I viewed all the connected cubes as a graph with interconnected nodes, and wrote an algorithm that traverses through the graph to find all the cubes that should rotate. It worked, and it's the first real data structure/algorithm I've ever put into a game, so I'm pretty glad I've done it.
After that, creating and tuning the camera, the platformer control, and the interaction with cubes took most of the time during the jam, leaving us only have a day to design levels. We did manage to create 7 levels, but could definitely make more if there's more time.
Overall, I really like my game and have enjoyed this jam! There are challenges, but I feel lucky that there's nothing that kept me stuck for too long.
Here's my game if you want to try it out: