In addition to your game engine and development environment, you will want to have your art tools at the ready. Nothing is more frustrating than finding that you need to download and install something after the Jam begins, so test out your tools beforehand.

In a survey of Game Jam post-mortems, participants listed unfamiliarity with the art generation tool as the number one thing that went wrong. More frequent than code bugs, more annoying than installation hassles, more constricting than running out of time, it is the art production step which is the most common roadblock on the way to finishing your game.

If you are making a 2D game, ensure that you are thoroughly familiar with the program (such as Photoshop, GIMP, or Inkscape) that you plan to use. Know ahead of time what size and file format your art should be in order to work well in your game engine. Do your textures need to be square and 'power-of-two' in size? Can you use the Alpha channel? Will using images that are too big cause your engine to render poorly (or not at all)? Test out the process before the Jam. Make a sprite and get it working in your game engine.

The same holds true for 3D art; not only should you know how to sculpt a 3D mesh using 3ds Max, Blender, Sketchup, or Maya; but you need to be familiar with the export process. Practice getting art from a creation tool into your game, because there are always technical hassles. File format woes; size restrictions, technical constraints, bugs in the exporter are some of the potential hurdles.

Even the audio content pipeline should be premeditated. Does your game engine require .ogg files, .mp3 files, or .wav files? What sample rate should be used? These and more questions should be sorted out beforehand to avoid hassles later.