First time is always fun ...and scary

42 and meaning of life
For many years I was passive observer Ludum Dare events and almost from first watched compo postmortem by [@quill18] I was thinking, "maybe I should try also?". Why? Because it was looking like super fun.

Then LD#42 came and I thought - "now or never".

But meanwhile for couple of years I was doing in spare time some small/medium games, never polished, never finished, never published. So having all this knowledge of "what I'm suck at" I was determined to really narrow my options for development process. And day before Ludum Dare I just remembered about Fantasy Consoles. So very quick research and yes! "I have a tool for a jam."

Why TIC-80 from about three or four of those "stable-ish" consoles? Because I just can't stand Pico-8 font and so small screen to write with. Because none of them except Pico-8 has so straightforward export to html like TIC-80. Liko-12 has no documentation right now and PV8 ...gosh I still don't know how to deploy properly game cartridge. There is also promising pyxel module for Python (which almost win with TIC-80) but there is no easy method to deploy multiplatform executable for Python app, especially app which using some sophisticated graphic libraries. So that would be dead end and such game wasn't be played and reviewed at all (who would install python and modules to get game working? nobody, me either).

Hacking Ludum Dare famous "Theme always sucks™" (™ by @philstrahl)
So I had lots of thoughts about struggling with theme on Ludum Dare. But hey! Developers/Sysops (like I'm in normal life) can hack reality with ease, right? So when came Final Round of voting for the Theme, I made a list all the entries and started to write some short ideas about each one. This effort took me maybe 2-3h but I had five ideas for game - every idea covered two or more themes from Final Round. And when Theme was announced I could go sleep relaxed and sure what I wanted to do next morning (my timezone is CET so this LD42 timespan is perfect for me).

So 9 AM Saturday, with a morning coffee, I could make a task list for a development stages and start making The Game.

Get things working ...or at least trying
They say: you don't want in Jam, be using tool you know nothing about. So I did exactly opposite.

TIC-80 (or all the Fantasy Consoles) are really good with keeping focus on game development. You don't have billions of functions and modules, you don't have "Choice Paralysis". Just one (or three) main loop functions and start writing a Game. The Game

But of course there is downside. Even with decent TIC-80 wiki, lots of problems I was facing, was solvable only by analysing other TIC-80 games. This is time consuming.
And new language... *sigh* Fortunately I know few programming/scripting languages (~12 or something) so jumping deep(-ish) into Lua wasn't problem at all. Of course you must remember about ~= not != or you don't have ++ and there isn't rand() but random() (so why there is sin, exp or abs?!?) and of course table index starts with 1. But hey!, my very first game was in C64 BASIC so there can't be as bad.

Worst part was to find out 2h before the deadline, that if you have heavy iterating on lots of tables in game main loop, you will not get decent music. This part in TIC-80 just not working good. So your Game have awesome music and the rest is kind-a "meh" or animations are perfect but no music at all.
Of course you have plenty room to optimize your code, poke here, poke4 there - but this kind of polishing for TIC-80 is very time consuming for me and 48h for everything is just not enough. Or maybe is enough, I didn't try to working on game for 48h straight without breaks.

You are the winner
The best part is after you submit your Game. The "HECK! YEAH! I DID IT!" is soo cool and you have so much positive energy, that the features you did not put to the game to make "new industry standard" like "Wrathcher 4" or "Dead Socks IV" no more matters.

And I wish this kind of feeling for every one who participate. This is pure joy of creation.

TL;DR
So many words up ^ there...

Then here I want to put some few thoughts you should get before jam:
- at least basic knowledge of how simple animation works,
- decompose project to smaller parts, each part must be finished with "playable" result,
- if you decided to learn new tool while jam, choose this with best documentation,
- do breaks for walk!
- do not forget feed your cats (or dog, or wife, or even children)!

Postmortem of postmortem
Why this name for a game. Idea for 80-tnite came from watching me some twitch players in Fortnite. I think Fortnite perfect fits in LD42 Theme :)) but because I'm not native english speaker, I wasn't pronounced the name until it was too late. So I'm very sorry for every one of you who was trying to say this name loud - that wasn't on purpose. Just saying [eightnite] is perfectly fine. :)