Mid-jam I feared that I won't have anything remotely playable, but in the end I was able to submit something.

What went well

• The scope was rather well chosen all things considered. Fortunately I was able to shave off a lot of features that I have initially planned, without compromising the core gameplay too much.
• I was very pleased to discover the pixel tool in Affinity Photo.
• Choice of a 12x12 tiny block size helped a lot, since this was my first foray into pixel art after two decades.
• Love2d was great to use, I didn't have any hickups.
• Somehow I managed to retain a normal sleep schedule.

What went poorly

• I have realized way too late that my logic for making pieces fall after explosion is wrong. This makes the game harder than intended.
• I've spent too much time animating the conveyor belt, when I realized I could have had it done in a few minutes.
• The controls are not well explained and somewhat unintuitive, they require more work. This is similar to my previous game, so definitely something to work at.
• Too much time wasted just playing around with the game rather than coding.

What's next
I'd like to continue working on this one a bit. There are so many features that the game is missing:

• Music and sound.
• Actual puzzles, requiring some planning.
• More levels.
• Crawling, jumping, falling…

Some of the features I wanted to have in the original game. In my head the game should have looked much more like ancient ruins, in the current version one has to squint quite a bit to find the theme.

• Sand tiles that always spill over.
• Buttons and doors.
• Water and water bricks.
• Traps.

Can you restore the Сolosseum from its ruins?

I just have the sound and music left (plus some minor tweaks).
In the meantime, here's a video of me beating the boss:

And that's it for us! After two all nighters we get to rest a little.

If you have some time, here is the link to our submission:
https://hex-zu.itch.io/submerged

You guys did awesome, hang on just a bit more! ♡

I have meshes, textures, effects & at least one game mechanic, so I might be able to finish a game tomorrow and not just a walking sim. ✨
I'm fine if it is though and I'll just focus on what I enjoy doing.

First jam where I actually went outside with a camera to get some textures, threw them into Materialize and generated my own diffuse and normal maps to work with.

A faction of gamedevs has decided to show their passion for the Mushrooms theme, and integrate it into their games anyway. So let's give everyone an additional (an totally optional) incentive to put mushrooms in here some way or another!

The ANCIENT MUSHROOM AWARD can be given by anyone, to anyone during the ratings phase. When you see a game that deserves it, simply paste the badge picture into a comment for the award to be counted.

At the end of the jam, we'll tally the amount of given awards… and nominate the ANCIENT MUSHROOM KINGS :D

Award giving kit

• Badge markup for giving the award

  ![](https://i.imgur.com/tPAx0I4.png>

• Pics

Looking forward to see your games! Don't forget to take breaks and have a decent night of sleep :)

It's coming up to dinner time so I'm going to stop and get some food in me, really happy with how much progress I've made so far only a few elements left for the initial puzzle implementation and then I can look at designing the next two environments I want to include.

It's just a small point and click but I'm doing this solo and I'm trying my best to keep it within my abilities so I can finish this time.

yay

Fancy lighting. Yay.

Ancient Ruins wasn't what I was hoping for, but after spending the evening helping my sister clean out her bedroom it suddenly feels appropriate. I knew I was going to be up late today so it's time to start brainstorming ideas and seeing what I can come up with.