Decided not to continue with my game this morning! Shame as I was keen to experience the new ldjam.com features.

What went well:

• Came up with idea much earlier than usual. Usually I agonise for hours before making any real progress.
• Sketched screen layouts on paper to get them right first time.
• Sketched out path through the game to reach win state before writing any code. I quickly realised what was in my head was way too complex, leading me to drastically simplify it (twice).

Not so well:

• Lack of time: some planned and unplanned social events.
• Lack of energy: recovering from an illness at the moment.
• Concept depended heavily on full screen artwork: usually I do 16×16 or 32×32 basic pixel art and have little experience with anything larger.
• Bit of time ramping up with Game Maker HTML5 + itch.io hosting (have used GM before heavily but was a little rusty; most entries have been Java based)
• Critically, the concept got more boring the more I worked on it.
• Overall as a result of all of the above, making it lacked the fun element & rapid sense of progress & reward I usually get.

Good luck to everybody still cracking on with their entries!