Lessons Learned from My First Jam

Well it has been 48 hours since the GameJam ended. This was my first jam. Before this point gave dev has been a hobby of this 52yr old Gen-X single dad.  Coding is not my primary skill (I am a real scientist though). I have to say I learned much about planning out my projects and learning to let what you think is a good idea go. Here are some of my lessons learned.

1. My original concept was to have this more of a puzzle/shooter hybrid with various levels with different goals and challenges. Because of the time constraint and making the game into something playable I had to let that go.
2. Certain technical aspects to way longer than anticipated. I based all the isotopes, their decay modes, and probability of decay on the actual table of nuclear isotopes used by physicists. Each isotope has its data in a scriptable object with the relevant data. However, there are 2-3k different isotopes and each one needed to be entered manually. That took a good 3 days of the development time. Additionally, I wanted to have all this data in a dictionary but since Unity doesn't automatically display dictionaries in the editor I had to hunt down a serializable dictionary that was free. I did find one which I used. That process was most of another day.
3. Never underestimate the time it takes to get a menu and player data system implemented. I only started working on the menu system and player settings two days before the deadline. In the end, I scrapped player settings because of time, and needed to patch some of the menus after release because they were bugged. Again, the menu system might not be "sexy" but make sure you budget enough time to get it working.
4. My code is a Gordian Knot of different design patterns and is far from optimized. Again this is on me. I cobbled together different elements and systems from various open sources and tutorials when I ran into something I wasn't sure the right way to do it. Because of that I have a combination of event listeners, singletons, and other patterns working together in some kind of franken-code. Eventually I want to go back an refactor things to be consistent in the patterns I use and limit my use of singletons to only the absolutely necessary cases.  All part of learning to be a better coder.

This overall has been a great experience. Glad I did it. :)