What has been your experience making 3D games in Game Jams?

I'm mostly comfortable making 2D games in Game Jams so I thought I'd get out of my comfort zone and try something 3D for the next one I enter.

I'm a software engineer by trade so I'm very comfortable with programming and I've got a little bit of experience with 3D development in the past (though it's pretty rusty).

I'd love to hear advice/tips/warnings from people who have made 3D games for game jams in the past.

What sort of strategies have you learned over time that have made your 3D jam experiences more fun and more likely to succeed? I imagine some general advice about scoping and proper planning apply to 2D and 3D equally, but figure there might also be tips that are more 3D oriented.

Are there any game engines that are specifically super well tailored for fast game-jam style iteration/prototyping/building?

Any advice for how to prototype without spending tons of time building (and searching for) 3D assets?

Got any other miscellaneous 3D jam advice? I'd love to hear it.

It's the same as for 2D jams: make sure you know your tools, and that you can make a good estimate how long a task will take.

Especially for 3D art, there are some tasks that may take longer than the entire jam if you go in depth (like sculpting, retopologizing and texturing a detailed character, rigging and animating non humanoid characters, etc), so cut corners there. You can use low poly style objects, or non animated objects (like vehicles and robots).

Regarding programming, there's not that much difference between 2D and 3D in terms of workload. Just make sure you know the how to work with the engine's 3D tools, and with 3D transforms.

(I'm assuming you work in an engine like Unity or Godot here - if you're creating your own engine it's a different story!)

Background: I prefer making 2D games, but two of my games here on itch.io are 3D games that were made during two day jams, with a group of two or three people (one artist), using Unity. All art assets were made during the jam, and we hardly used any starting code, though one game was extended a bit afterwards. Check them out on my profile if you're interested.

You can also look at the results of past jams here on itch.io, and see what's feasible in a short time period, though you never know how much was premade.