A short list of “tricks” I used this jam to manage. I only had a couple of hours to work on something, but I still consider it my best LD (disclaimer: it’s my second).

Try it here!

1. If you think you will not finish, change the game around. Cut scope, you can always hack in some gameplay if you are really out of time. In Sub Bomber the player jumps through gates and scores points. This was only put in the game the last hour before submission.
2.  Programmer and no time/skill in art? Keep it simple and add particles, in the development of Sub Bomber I would say a good 1/4th of my time went to the particles and it was worth it.
3. Your game doesn’t need a menu if it means you won’t finish your game because of it.
4. Performance sometimes doesn’t matter, in Sub Bomber the bubble-particles still spawn above the sea, they hide the next frame (you can see this). To do this it has to iterate past hundreds of particles and check the position, but in a jam game it doesn’t matter, what does matter is your time.
5. Using different instruments for different tracks with the same melody is a nice way to save a lot of time and prevent repetitiveness. It allowed me to create the music for sub bomber in 20 minutes (6 tracks).
6.  Changing the pitch of your music to around 50% tends to make for some nice game over music.

Oh and by the way, the highscore is 58 ;).