So what a proposal...so offbeat. First of all, the realization is sublime, both technically and artistically. The monsters are cool and the library is welcoming. The controls respond perfectly, everything is perfectly thought out, you are never wondering what you are doing or making a mistake and the game feel is excellent... the player is always helped in his quest. I wonder how you managed to find all these names of books and authors and how you entered them all into PICO... what a titanic task.... I also wonder if you are a librarian yourself and you wanted to share... in fact I would like to know where you came up with this idea.
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Thank you kindly! The book title system is a work in progress that was turning into it's own project at the end (had to cut down for the jam). It's a big imported spreadsheet of nouns, adjectives, book formats, and possessives/people/jobs grouped by the subject/domain that then get randomly combined together, with a bias towards the subject ones. I'm pushing up against the compression limits so had to resort to the excellent Shrinko8, which got me down from 115% to about 93%.
My college work study was at the school's library which served as inspiration. Really the challenge of remembering the alphabet's order (had to sing many a song to myself working on this even now) along with dyslexia. From an aesthetic standpoint, was messing around with a unfinished raycast dungeon crawling engine and trying to think of a way to make interesting walls (beacuse so many are just: brick texture 01-33). Books were good fit for this purpose since can be as simple as a rectangle visually, which makes them look decent at a low resolution. They also essentially data themselves, so they are efficient on the backend to store (title string, author string, color number, a sprite, etc.).