Hey I get the feeling of wishing I'd done a touch more research before the event proper. I wasn't a coder for the jam, only an artist; but I'd never done pixel art before! I knew I agreed to help my friend with the game assets since he's not the best with making art himself. But I myself had never really done pixel art before! I've played a lot of arcade-type games so I felt I had a good feel of the "look" I wanted to go for but man was it intimidating actually getting into figuring out how Aseprite worked... I was familiar with digital art but woah making pixel art feels like an entirely new process compared to how I usually go about drawing! But regardless of the slight stress, I think I also managed to pull through with some decent designs in the end! Not my best work, far from, but enough to say I'm proud to have contributed!
https://itch.io/jam/shovel-jam-2025/rate/3733789
This is the game by the way! If you're curious, I helped make the items, the enemies, the bomb + explosion, and even the special encounter at the very end! ;D I definitely feel like we can improve on a lot of aspects of the game for a potential steam release! And same goes for your project as well! Even well after the game jam is over I bet you can polish up your project to improve upon it so it's in an even better state than this initial submission release! Or maybe even step away from it for a but so you can learn more and expand your knowledge so you can come back to it with a more experienced mindset!
But whichever you decide to do, be proud that you completed a project! Making a game is hard, I can barely comprehend coding and I doubt just making the art holds a candle to the entire process of game development. But this was fun to participate in regardless!
