It's been a very long time since I did a game jam (over 5 years I think???) but I just participated in the recent GMTK jam, here's my game:

The theme was Joined Together. You play as a pair of divine dragons and you can control the weather by pushing the clouds and doing a rain dance to either bring rain, peace and prosperity (or flood the village and starve everyone).

It was really fun exploring this movement mechanic and the symmetry between the dragons and trying to make something beautiful.

Reflections on game jams

It's a bit weird revisiting game jams after so long. I've done about ~13 game jams in my life when I was 14 to 18 years old. I'm a little astounded at the amount of energy I used to have. I usually worked straight through 48 hours, or napped for an hour or two every night for 72 hour jams.

I'm 26 now. I feel like I just couldn't do that now. In this last jam by productivity tanked around midnight.

I wonder if I really was productive for all those hours or if I was just going really slowly and I hadn't noticed. A lot of those games I made had a lot of content, so it was often a lot of grunt work that didn't require too much focus.

I definitely feel like I could make games a lot faster at 15 than I can now, despite knowing so much more. Part of it is (1) Flash was a really good tool and (2) It was the only tool I used and I got really really good at it. I haven't stuck to one game framework/workflow since, partially because I keep searching for the perfect Flash replacement, but I'm getting a lot faster at making stuff with Phaser. And it is really cool being able to hook into the vast ecosystem of JavaScript, which is something that was never accessible with Flash.

Anyway, making games is fun, and I'm excited for the upcoming Newgrounds game jam, and I'll be looking for artists to collaborate with! Feel free to reach out if you'd like to partner up.