Thank you so much for giving the game a try! And to answer your questions, I did not study botany, although I do have an interest in both botany and mycology, I mostly learnt from guide books and personal research, I'm basically a hobbyist naturalist on the side, haha
In terms of my career as a gamedev, my position is a little weird I suppose. I have worked on bigger games as an independent contractor/freelancer, but I also make smaller games on the side as passion projects as a way to combat burnout from bigger projects. (I just joined my first game jam this year, which was suggested by a few industry friends and I found it helped with managing burnout)
As for my education, I never studied game design, all my knowledge of it comes down to watching videos that break down game design (i.e extra credits on youtube haha) or analyzing games that I, myself play.
However, while I have never studied game design, I did study a lot of things that helped me: Fine Arts, 2D and 3D arts and animation, as well as a little music (I'm not the greatest at music tbh, but i do know the basics). I mostly took short classes/courses for these but I do have a diploma in 3D Art/Animation. From there, I simply learnt of their implementation in different game engines and picked up some basic coding (mostly basic Python on renpy, but I know a little C# and learnt to operate UE4 Blueprints too)
As for your last question, I ended up going in this jam as a solo dev despite having plans to collaborate with other participants simply due to my schedule.
This jam was 10 days long, but about 1-2 days before the jam started, I got an urgent freelance job and suddenly I found myself available for less than half of it. (I really needed the money, then) At that time I wasnt even sure I could participate at all, I did talk to them about it and decided to not join the team, I thought it would be a little unfair if I worked in collaboration with someone but wasnt able to pull my weight because of my busy and irregular schedule. I didnt want them to have any sort of resentment towards me if i was unavailable. I wasnt planning on joining the game jam at all at this stage, but when I finished most of my work on the 5th day of the jam, I, (for some reason which i cant really explain) decided to give the jam a shot anyway. It felt a little weird asking to join someone who was already progressing with the jam so instead of asking for a collaboration, I decided to go at it alone.
Anyway, once again thanks for giving the game a try! I hope I answered all your questions, but feel free to ask if you have any more!