I want to add my two cents. You can agree or disagree, i don’t care.
THE PRIMARY REASON TO DO A GAME JAM IS TO HAVE FUN AND TO LEARN ABOUT GAME DEVELOPMENT AND YOURSELVES.
Those of you who work on a game for the jam before the jam, you’re cheating yourself. the whole point to a game jam is to simulate the pressure of a deadline and to encourage creativity by constraints, by making a game and applying the theme to it, you’re not challenging yourself, you’re not pushing yourself creatively. you’re not even on the same level as those who create everything from scratch in the time limit. In fact i’m going to be extreme and say that you’re ruining the spirit of game jams. People who are doing this are not game jamming, the whole meaning of a game jam is similar to how musicians jam. Jamming in music means producing music with no preparation at all. the word game jam comes from game and jam session. The whole point of these game jams are for you as a game developer be pushed to your limits and to see what you can come up with in just the allotted time. If you wrote a song before a jam session and then tried to play that song will know you are not jamming. Without any pressure to “crunch” before the deadline, you’re not even participating. It’s like taking steroids in a physical sport, you didn’t show up to play, you showed up to cheat yourself.