I considered shadows under the platforms too! But my engine has a limitation where you cannot have any single object bigger than 2-3 tiles when on the ground, otherwise it breaks rendering (depth sorting, you can somewhat see this bug with the player's shadow rendered on top of the player when standing on the ground). Since the platforms themselves never touch the ground you don't see this issue, but you would with shadows. I'd have to either make the shadow smaller or figure out a way to fix z-sorting, which I might do in the long run anyway.
On the same note, making a custom engine is without a shadow of a doubt not worth it. I joined this game jam when I was feeling pretty unhappy with how little progress I make for huge amounts of work just to test how far my jam has come. I discuss this a bit more in the bevy (rust game engine) discord - https://discord.com/channels/691052431525675048/692648638823923732/1548727771574... . For reference it took:
- 3 weeks for inverse kinematics + procedural walking animations + real-time vector rendering of this
- 3-6 weeks for data streaming of a large open world (not used in this jam but the engine supports it)
- 1-2 weeks for a level editor
- 1-2 weeks for an asset editor
- 1 week for FSM animations
- way too much more to list. Overall this framework / engine has been in the works since ~October last year, but even then was reusing code from other projects in Jan/June 2025.
Just getting a player to run and jump which normally takes a few hours in godot or unity took me months. Definitely not worth it unless you're oddly fixated on an art style like I am.
The last note - The sounds / font are third party (listed in the description of the game page) -
Thanks so much again for commenting / playing!