This is going to be a post mortem for my most recent entry, The Tiny World (vote, when active). I hope to be short and sweet:

Things done right

• slept well
• ate well
• drank plenty
• took breaks
• knew tools well

Things done wrong

• to little CONTENT planning — I was way overly ambitious, and had to axe half of the planned content.
• spent time working on a question/answer feature that is only used in one or two places, and doesn’t really need to be. That ate up time I could have worked on other features or more content.
• little direct experience with the intricacies of the well-established genre/game type I was working with — more foreknowledge of how text adventures stored and manipulated data would have been useful

I think that hits all the main points. Over all I’m pleased with how The Tiny World turned out, but I think there’s a lot of space for improvement on almost all fronts.