- Keep your scope minimal.
- The theme has already been revealed, so you can go ahead and plan your idea/pull references. Just don't touch the code/art/music yet.
- It's a ~3 day jam, so at 8 hours a day you'd get around 24 hours of work on it. I wouldn't recommend working more than that or you'll go stir crazy.
- First day should probably be main mechanics.
- Second day should probably be content generation.
- Third day should probably be a bit of content generation and a lot of polish.
- Style is like salt, use it to cover up mistakes and make weird things look intentional.
- KEEP YOUR SCOPE MINIMAL. You're not making a shippable project, you're making a tech demo where the tech is replaced with fun.
Viewing post in Tips for first-time jam person
Well put, can't really add much to this!
It's also good to remember the theme, Virtual Pet, is really easy to keep a small scope on, and you definitely should. If you try to plan for making a very simple virtual pet with all the basic features, get that working, then in the remaining time you can start trying to just tack on features. Like PhilBlank said, it's more like a tech demo, so if you're hacking things together at the end, as long as it works, there's no shame!