so gööd!!! Great job keeping the pace moving quickly! I can see this getting in the video because of how well rounded and genuinely fun it is. I was charmed since beginning when you said "even an idiot could do that" and I immediately blew him up and failed.
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Hm you definitely have to organize things a bit more, even before the jam starts, if your team becomes bigger.
For our ideation phase, we pretty much did the same as usual: We start just chatting about the theme and different interpretations of it in an open round and then we all go into our own corner of the miro board and each person writes down ideas within up to 15 minutes. The thing we did differently this time was that everyone was only allowed to write down up to 2 ideas. Rather than ideas, these were supposed to be a bit more like game concepts with a little more thought put behind it.
And then we went ahead and explained ourideas to each other in vc, taking turns. Once all ideas were clearly explained, we went ahead and voted on a difficulty vs awesomeness matrix, taking the average of all the votes on both axes. We then evaluated the top themes a bit more closely on various other scales and it became clear fairly quickly that we could all rally behind one of the concepts. There were other great ones too but this was the one that seemed really feasible while also sounding like a lot of fun stuff could be made with it. We then clarified any open questions and varying interpretations of details and discussed it in the subset of people who'd do design and programming tasks. Then we split the tasks, but it became clear that it would be good if the initial prototype should just be built by one single person (Jonas) while others took on some other tasks like making an art moodboard or setting up some prefab objects for later or went to bed. That helped because then on the next, first proper day, we had a solid base that everyone could work on.
Generally, not everyone was always there at the same time so quite often we worked in groups of 3-5 people rather than having all 8 members of the team present. That made these work sessions pretty managable and chill.
For these availability hours, we always set up a kind of time table on miro where everyone drags boxes to the times they think they'll surely be present. That kind of visualization helps a lot, especially when, like in our case with one of our programmers, multiple time zones are involved.
We also all have experience working with at least some others in the team. So I guess that probably helps.
I hope this is useful to you :)