What tools/assets did you use?
Pixel Art in Aseprite, game in Unity, and some sound effects pulled from freesound.org which didn't make it in.

This was my first time using Aseprite and I have to say it was perfect for my work during this jam.

What tool(s) or technique(s) you were learning? What progress did you make with it/them?
I was learning pixel art character drawing and animation. It was my first time making a full character and definitely my first time animating one. I progressed so far as to say that I mostly gained this skill from scratch this weekend.

Lesson learned about drawing pixel art characters and animating them:
• You can apparently make pretty decent pixel art animations as a beginner.
• Feet are triangles.
• Start with silhouette and form! Pose references can help. You really need 2 shades to do a silhouette in pixel art to be able to convey 3D form.
• In your animation have hair and fabric lag behind other movement. It's very easy to add this effect and it really makes things look good! It does however eat up a lot of time when you have to edit every section of hair/fabric for every frame of animation.
• For fast motion like a sword swing, draw a frame before the swing and the next frame in the follow-through position. Don't draw a frame mid-swing, as it will make the action look slow. (I did this and regret it, but I kind of made it work.)

I also learned that Unity's physics engine is very unreliable for 2D. In the past I had bypassed their physics engine in favor of my own code, but in a time-critical Jam format I decided to leverage Unity's physics engine and animation system for the first time. The animation system was good; the physics engine lost me hours of work and made me disinterested in using Unity for 2D in the future. I guess I'll try something else next time... other people in this jam suggested MonoGame!

Anything else you'd like viewers to know about this submission?
Try it out! (Sorry it's .exe only, for some reason the web player version didn't work)

Controls:
• Move with arrow keys
• Jump with 'z' or arrow up
• Attack with 'x'
• 'Escape' quits

I had wanted to add a wallkick, a sort of flutter jump, possibly an object to attack that would launch you when attacked, and time trial over a few level geometries to race in. Of course I didn't have time to make it there with this, but you may be able to see how it doesn't take much to make a fun experience in platform games.