Game Jams are stressful if you're taking them seriously. They always say something like "It's just for fun." and then you realize its 3am, and you cant figure out why your coroutine's aren't firing in the right order. That's never fun, in my experience.

I've learned to break my projects into a couple steps:

• What is the game?
• Why make this game?
• What are the features?
• What makes those features fun?
• How do you win?
• What keeps you from winning?

Once I have that general concept in place, It's as simple is breaking down the duration of the game jam. For Example, the Game Off 2020 Jam that this is being made for is 1 month long. So I am setting Pawn up to have 4 phases, one for each week. Currently, I'm ahead, which is GREAT news. Week 1 was intended to develop a general aesthetic and game programming architecture. I was surprised that I was able to get that done and more this week- and it's only Friday, still have all day Saturday to get into week 2 content.

Pawn is set up to be developed  over the course of 4 weeks with the following phases

1. Aesthetic/ technical architecture
2. Enemies and obstacles
3. level design and implementation
4. Play testing and tweaking

The goal, here is to complete tasks 1 at a time, and when the week is over, I toss the remaining features, and move on to the next week's objectives knowing that the play testing phase is coming, and I'll be revisiting everything again at the end.

It also doesn't hurt that I'm working with an incredibly talented artist, Jesse Lewis, who makes all of my work look 150% more polished.

I can't wait to offer more footage and screenshots, and finally show of the game on December 1st.