I've decided I'm going to focus on the aesthetics in the early days so it can sell ME on the potential each day I wake up to it. I do a lot of "gameplay first" stuff and run out of steam, so this is a novel approach for me. We're testing out music and sfx to give us some time to iterate as the game takes shape, audio typically gets crammed in at the end and to poor effect.
For the gif I added a Z-layer when printing characters to the screen -- the transition effect is drawn at the very top layer, and the game is spawned underneath and obstructed until the effect disappears. The player can start playing the game before the effect is gone, waiting for UI transitions is a pet peeve.
Basic collision/gamestate/reloading stuff, just adding one basic piece of functionality at a time. It's the most basic a game can get right now: you lose if you touch the enemy, you win if you find the stairs. It's a shitty game but it's still a game at that. But every visual improvement I add gives me more of a sense of its potential, and if I'm not sold on this thing how am I going to convince myself to sit here and type it all out.