First, don’t forget that most vets put in a lot of work to get where they are and be as efficient as they are. They didn’t learn how to throw a game together in 48 hours overnight, and it can take a long time to get comfortable making games. I’ve been at it since about mid-late 2012 and I’m still no expert. I’ve been trying though.

I have no real idea of how a game should be laid out, this causes issues when coming to add new screens, new levels, and other objects into a game.

My two first attempts at making games in adult life took about half a year and seven days respectively. The latter was submission to a miniLD. The reason they took very long time was not so much that I wasn’t working on them. Rather I was inexperienced and I was trying to do everything myself. I was coding in python with only pygame to help. The very next game I switched to Unity3D and I did something that actually worked as a 3D game even if I had to learn both Unity and Blender during the 48h of the LD. Now Unity is just one in an array of tools out there that all share the nice feature of taking care of all things you really don’t need to be bothered with. I would, start by investigating these type of platforms (you can find them by seeing what people have used in the last round of LD for example). That is the technical starting point. E.g. if you feel you get stuck in programming details, maybe try using puzzlescript or similar and see how that works.

One thing that worked for me was to start small. Before my first public jam (GGJ2012), three of my friends held a one-day jam at my house. That was good practice. See if you can organize the same, then critique each other’s pieces afterwards and try to teach each other tricks you discovered.