I didn't have time to write a summary of my experience making this game and participating in my first ever game jam because I went on holiday right after making it, but I'm releasing a small update today so it seemed like a good opportunity to rectify that.

First, the update.
The main thing I've done is something that I didn't think I had time for during the jam (although in retrospect I probably would have done), which is add subtitles. All of the voice-over in the game consists of very short, one or two sentence clips and so I was able to quickly implement a simple subtitling system without worrying about timing things. It's not perfect (it won't activate immediately if you turn it on while speech is happening and it may struggle a bit if you activate two bits of dialogue in rapid succession (something that is quite hard but not impossible to do)), but I'm pleased with it and I think it makes the game more accessible.
Additionally, I've made a few tweaks to the audio system – the voice should sound better, the footstep sounds and background ambience can be controlled separately; I've improved the settings panel; I've tweaked the fog a bit to make everything a tiny bit more pastely; and I've fixed a bug where the mouse cursor didn't always change visibility as it should have.

Second, making a game in 48 hours.
I was honestly highly doubtful of my ability to make a game in such a short time period, what with wanting to make it in 3d, model a bunch of objects, record some music and write and record a voice over, so I opted to make something that really is very like the last game I made, A Thimbleful of Panic. The world is generated in the same way, from a bunch of prefabs, and populated in the same way, with a different bunch of prefabs beamed into pre-chosen points, and you move around it using the default Unity first person controller – which is not the best but I haven't learned enough yet to write my own (and certainly not over a couple of days). All of these decisions reduced the amount of coding I had to do and let me focus on what I'm more experienced with – making 3d models.
And in the end I needn't have been worried, I easily got everything working within the time-limit, and ended up with enough time to churn out a bunch of additional models and bash a few niggly bugs. In the end I think the single thing I spent the most time on was getting the objects you pick up to fade out of existence – it turns out that if you use a transparent shader then an object doesn't get rendered to the depth buffer, and that meant that all of the collectable objects got rendered on top of the fog even when fully opaque and, while by no means game-breaking, it almost made me give up on my lovely pastely fog. In the end I found a trick buried deep in a forum somewhere for switching shader rendering modes and was able to fudge in a solution, but I wasted a lot of time on such a silly problem.
Oh, and also the music. I am not a great musician but the only way I thought I'd be able to do the music in time was to record one instrument at a time, one track each, one take each. I wanted the music to sound kind of like a kid had made it anyway so my mistakes shouldn't matter as much. I did it this way, recording a track each of toy piano, glockenspiel, melodica, and then a bunch of saucepans and wooden spoons and claps, and it was a mess... but I had to keep moving and so I left it. Finishing early allowed me to go back and trim everything up, cut out the worst bit and make a shorter more coherent bit of music which is much less messy to listen to, so that was good.

The jam was a really good experience, I was really happy to complete something as quickly as it good, and I'm pleased with the game I made. It was also really nice to be making things with other people. I didn't find I had a lot of time to keep much of an eye on the jam discord server, but every time I popped by it was great to see people showing their WIPs and encouraging each other.

And you should go and play the games that everybody made. They're all here: https://itch.io/jam/pastel-jam/entries. I haven't quite have time to play and rate all of them, but I've done most and some of them are really charming.

Here's a video where I play through and talk about the game: