Although I failed my very first attempt in an LDjam I am extremely happy I participated. The weeks of preparation beforehand and the 2 days I was working on the "game" were not in any way wasted. I don't see myself as an optimist at all but I have no negative feelings associated with this experience. Here is a list of great things I took away from attempting this challenge:
1. I made a fun little space shoot them up game beforehand with pygame so I could see if I can actually do it. That game will be ready and waiting for any future polishing and modification. 2. Because I was going to participate in the Compo, I knew I had to publish the source code for this game. So I looked for a tutorial on Git. After watching a 30 minute video I knew all I needed to implement it. And you know what? It is one of the easiest and greatest things I should have learned months ago. Now any future project of mine will start with git init. 3. Pygame is an open source python library licensed under "LGPL 2.1". Because I had to publish the binaries of my game, I needed to know what that meant. It took many many hours to grasp it fully but after reading the docs, TL;DRs, looking at Q&As, and re-checking it over and over, I now know enough about it that I can not worry about any future licensing issues with pygame or any other LGPL software or library for that matter. Although I have to say I really dislike GPL and LGPL licenses and was thinking of MIT license for my source code which is far more suited to my taste. 4. To make the actual binaries I turned to PyInstaller which turns out works pretty well with pygame and many other libraries. I leaned how to publish for Windows and Linux from my Ubuntu-Mate machine. But unfortunately no MacOS, because I don't have one, nor could get "darling" emulator to work with it. 5. I learned how to optimize my python code after reading this very useful post on the matter and I'm going to take optimization into account for my future projects. 6. I read up on python magic methods which could be extremely useful for convenience and readability of your code. 7. I made an itch account which might come in handy in the future. 8. And finally I could write the base-code for a platforming game from scratch in these 2 days which will be used for my next platforming game attempts (after many many cleanups and optimizations of course)

TL;DR

1. Made a shmup game beforehand.
2. Learned Git.
3. Learned LGPL.
4. Learned PyInstaller.
5. Learned python optimization tricks.
6. Learned python magic functions.
7. Made an itch.io account.
8. Made the base-code for a platforming game.

Thanks to

• @PhilStrahl aka Pixel Prophecy for inspiring me enough to attempt this challenge.
• KidsCanCode YouTube Channel for the best pygame tutorials I've yet to come across.
• And of course @Pov and the community for making this all possible.

I will play other people's games a little later. Feel free to reply to this post with links to your game. I will play them if they have Linux support (or are WINE compatible) or are web-based.