Yeah, we were basing the initial movement and camera on PaperMario / Octopath, but definitely, I was thinking of bug fables a little as well at some point. It worked for us this way because our squirrel was made in Spine2D, so we found a way to make it work in a 3D environment to explore around in.
The last day of the jam was largely dedicated to adding VFX and SFX; it was important to me that if something in the game can happen, it has to have a sound or some kind of visual feedback. Glad it paid off, haha.
A funny bug happened where the wind ambience did not work in the WebGL build. That was an interesting bug to sleuth out. It was a tiny tweak in the audio asset to fix it.
It was also important to me that the world is filled with tons of little commentary, so that the world feels more complete, given the environment that was made. I plastered a bunch everywhere and let my mind flow, but I also got someone else to help with that, too. Something I like about adding tons of dialogue is that only a small handful of players may discover this one specific area where dialogue happens. Some are inside some sneaky spots :)
Yeah, it has some feeling of a horror game at some points. If anything, it helps put my foot in the door for a proper approach to a horror game.
Thanks for playing!!!!