I've been thinking about how Ludum Dare went for me this time round.

What went right?

• The theme wasn't awful. It was brilliant either. It was just the theme. It's hard to underestimate how much of a block the "the theme is X and I hate it" can be. While there's not much an individual can do to affect the theme (except, perhaps, Mike Kasprzak), but your approach to the theme is entirely up to you. I went into this round with the explicit idea of "I don't know what the theme is, but I will love it", and I think having that attitude removed a big block for me.
• I was organised. Sketching up a design, organising tasks into a Trello board, separating the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. 
• Taking time off. As usual, I took a couple of days annual leave so I didn't have the added pressure of during to game jam while also working 8-hours a day. (As you'd expect, my employer would take a dim view of me writing a game while at work.)
• Avoiding tutorial paralysis. It's very easy to fall into the trap of "I don't know what to do, I'll watch a tutorial". Avoided it this time by just getting stuck in, and only looking up tutorials if I got stuck and couldn't find the answers in the Unity documentation. (Big thanks to Brackeys and Code Monkey.)

What went wrong?

• Getting a migraine on the first day of coding. I get headaches fairly regularly (to the point where it's useless for me as a possible symptom of covid), but this was a full-on "thou shalt not get any work done today" head-smasher.
• No gamedev between jams. This, I think, is a biggie. It's very easy to get distracted -- family, work, the latest TV show/game -- and not do any gamedev in the "off season" between game jams. Since I only do Ludum Dare, this means there's been 4-6 months between jams where I never even loaded up Unity. Inevitably, the early parts of the process were "how do I do this again?". Later parts of the process were "why did I do that?". I need to make sure I do gamedev between jams to keep skills current. And on a related note...
• Only doing Ludum Dare. Sure it's the Big Kahuna,™ but there a dozens (hundreds?) of other jams out there, of varying lengths and formats, and doing more in the time between Ludum Dare jams will help me keep/hone my gamedev skills.
• Not using the Unity debugging tools. I lost a couple of hours to a bug (half the user controls and half the UI stopped working in a standalone build, but worked just fine in the Unity Editor) that I managed to resolve within minutes of doing a development build and using the debug logs that gave me. The problem was code in one class's Awake() method depended on another class's Awake() method being completed first, something explicitly advised against in the Unity docs. Moving a single line of code from Awake() to Start() fixed the bug. This relates back to the "No gamedev between jams" point above.
• Procrastination. I'll deal with this one later.