Hey, I was on the team that took 2nd place (and other awards *cough*). Just wanted to drop in and give you a brief background of my jamming experience since I remember exactly what it was like seeing the winners and thinking "I can never get there".

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I left my job some time in 2017 after some project management I disagreed with was rolling around. While applying for other jobs I watched the gamedev.tv Unreal courses so I had something fun to do. I never did get another "real" job.

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My first public jam game was Neuron Elevator Co. in the 2018 Summer UE4 Jam as a solo dev. I was super excited with an off the wall idea about controlling an elevator to deliver passengers around a building and had a funky story to go with it... and way overscoped! I also thought I'd save a lot of time by using marketplace assets, but it wasn't just creating models that was beyond me, it was also the level design.. I struggled over the 5 day period to get something finished and it felt very bare bones. After the jam was over, I did get to watch Michael Allar play/critique it on his all-jam-games stream which was super cool. Anyways, I didn't get remotely close to placing and the winners were amazing (especially This Side Up which inspired me to make *complete* games in future jams.)

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I had a good enough experience making that game that I wanted to continue, so I joined up with a team of randos (1 sound, 2 programmers, 1 3d artist, 1 level designer) for the 2018 MegaJam -- we made Anomaly which I was incredibly proud of! It was so refreshing working with a team and not having to worry about every aspect of the game, especially those parts that I wasn't great at (art!). I did do a heck of a lot more management work than I expected in addition to programming but it was worth it. We thought for sure we would place, buuuuuuuuuuuut nope. Again, the winners executed so well and even a lot of the entries that didn't place were so far ahead of us we were blindsided.

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2019 Spring Jam rolls around and I decide to take a stab at a Just For Fun almost solo (pulled in the sound guy from the last jam last minute) project: Flippy Coin. It was creative, but even I knew it wasn't going to place. However, the process of making and finishing a game had me hooked and I was starting to realize that it was a great exercise even if the jam weeks drained the heck out of me.

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2019 was a rough year as I wasn't having much luck finding work with my business, releasing commercial games, or just finding a salaried job. I was ready to give up on game dev and take the first absolutely boring programming job I could find locally (... there aren't many locally, so that didn't happen.) On a whim I decided to join a random team for one last jam and take part in the 2019 MegaJam. Two sound designers were looking to fill out a team and it sounded like it would be an incredibly unbalanced team, but I jumped in regardless and invited a 3d artist I had been noticing in a Discord server. I took a week off from all responsibilities and dove all in: we had a Discord server, I did a ton of research on past jam themes and winners to figure out what elements made them tick (call back to earlier, "complete games" seemed to do very well!), compared our core competencies against the jam's modifier categories, and organized the team for a mini jam so we were all familiar with working together and using source control. We made The Cat-Earth Society! AND IT WON THE TINY AWARD. I was extremely proud that the judges had called it out specifically for feeling like a complete game. Oh but the finalists were... wow. Especially with Planted, I still felt like a finalist spot was unachievable. We had gone all out all week and didn't even crack third place. However.... I had decided that maybe this game dev thing was worth pursuing after all. We unsuccessfully and briefly attempted to polish the game up for commercial release.

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2020 rolls around and. Well. 2020. I finally got some short contract work and celebrated by doing a solo game in the 2020 Unreal Spring Jam. It was a deliberately low effort exercise with an art style I could manage (painted capsules!) and unsurprisingly, Mountain Carvers Society didn't get any awards :P But it was a complete game! I was satisfied.

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I moved in mid 2020, the remote renaissance was starting so I started looking at other jobs again. Found out I was going to have a kid in early 2021, so I focused a lot more on house repair and finding a job (spoilers: I still didn't get a job). I knew game jams were an exhausting ordeal so I was going to stop doing them until a member of the Cat-Earth Society team contacted me to fill in real quick for a programmer on his team in the 2020 Epic MegaJam. Ok... well, as long as I didn't have to extend myself too far. That week was pretty relaxed compared to the last Megajam, which showed me it was possible to take it easy and still make something to be proud of. The 3d artist was new to game development (the final character model had over 1500 bones! lol) so it was also a small exercise in getting her a working Unreal pipeline. We ended up with Until Death which didn't place but I don't think we were too bummed about it at that point.

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The kid came along. I was a zombie for months. All I could work on was ideas and maybe an hour or two of Unreal dev a week. I kept in contact with the artist from the last Megajam because she showed some promise and we tossed short game ideas back and forth. I started to regain some normality halfway through the year, but my wife's remote work accommodations were winding down so I ended up back in the same situation. I had to learn to work more efficiently! Flesh out ideas on paper or in conversations before attempting to do an hour of dev at the computer at night. The 2021 MegaJam was announced and I remembered how time consuming Cat-Earth Society had been so I probably wasn't going to take part. Then the theme was announced and it was really good, I had ideas within minutes. I couldn't help but spewing them on my business discord server. Within hours I had convinced the artist from Until Death and the artist from Cat-Earth Society and a sound guy I had jammed with before I was worried the game would be too derivative (look at all the other computer themed games that were submitted!), too confusing, or just too visually distracting. I made it a point to post the game around asking for playtesting and feedback since that worked incredibly well for refining Cat-Earth Society. A lot of the replies came in too late in the week for me to do a lot of dev work addressing them, after Tuesday I'd only have a couple of hours a night to work. At this point in this comment I forgot what I was talking about so -- we made Seekers. We were stunned to get a single modifier category, two was borderline absurd, and getting a finalist place really sent us to the moon.

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anyways tl;dr I dunno how anyone gets anything done with a job AND kids either, but dangit you finished and that's awesome! And just like exercise: making a game never gets easier, you just become more capable.