Creating my first gamejam game, valuable lessons learnt

It should be apparent I'm not exactly a stranger to coding or 3d modelling, I've come over from Roblox and I've started using Unity engine this year for a college assignment and mods for a game, though as this was my first gamejam I came woefully unprepared and with some ambitions;

Vital Lessons Learnt

- Burnout: I've known burnout quite well in terms of my education life and I've experienced lots of art/writers block in other projects of mine, but this project was the first time I genuinely had a horrible burn out experience by over-working throughout the night (As I write this sentence it is 5:37,  and no I didn't wake up early, I woke up yesterday at 14:50) 

One vital lesson I've learnt from the short burn out period I had was I should set specific hours where I work on my game and maintain a healthy sleep schedule, its always best to stop for the night because it'll be healthier for the body and mind.

- Teaming Up: I somewhat late into the project teamed up with a sound designer, they weren't able to get any work that they were happy with for the game and so I ended up continuing as a solo-dev for this project and having to do sounds on the last day. I will admit this definitely was largely my fault, while I did setup spreadsheets and other things I never really actually hooked the sound designer into the concept of my game and didn't really engage in much meaningful discussion about it, so there was no real reason for them to work on it especially for free.

In the future I will establish communication early with possible team members and make sure that the people I am working with are actually also interested in the same idea that I am.

- Level Design: Level design by no means is easy, throughout I learnt how to utilise Probuilder, use terrain tools and bake lights, my initial plan for Mission 1 (which is not present in the game yet) was really shallow and I really didn't have the motivation to go along with it because my brain couldn't come up with solutions. I think its best to do level design more procedurally, coming up with an initial idea but building it up and assuring that its fun.

- Poor Coding Practices: I just coded what I needed to when it was necessary, generally not leaving much thought in how it should actually be structured. Perfect example of this? My waypoint system, it is a convoluted mess that requires code from the mech, the marker itself and the designated points around the map. Oh right, there's also my Dialog system which I'm happy with, but it has some flaws with how it parses text, requiring it all to be compressed onto one line rather than multiple else the JSON wouldn't work. In hindsight I really should've prepared a dataflow diagram for the game to figure out how everything loosely fits together.

For now, I'll be working on this game on the side because I am enjoying the concepts I've created for the story and I'm hoping to expand it into multiple different games from different genres and playing styles. I'd work on creating a Piratejam submission seeing how it fits right into the fact I'm rewatching FMA 2003, but I believe its important for me to take a break from making games for a tiny bit.