Goodness! This is deeply kind - though I must confess, I think maybe ‘finishing it in 72 hours’ was helped by soaring past the deadline and submitting a day late :P
Extremely fair criticism of the performance - there is definitely so much room to tidy that up. A lot of the scenery could probably be baked into textures instead of full sprites, and I need to get the hang of using Godot’s animation system instead of hardcoding light movements… I was actually kind of hoping this would push the boundary of performance as I normally try to keep that aspect pretty tight. Something this resource-intensive gives me a chance to explore how to profile a Godot project. Hopefully it doesn’t crash anyone’s browser in the meantime!
This is exactly the response that it didn’t seem reasonable to hope for! Not joining this jam was under consideration for a while, but once the idea arose to share this world and the feeling of residing within it… that felt like a core that deserved love and soul. I’m glad you like the art - I was immensely lucky that the player in that game had already done excellent character art way back (originally used for 2D paper miniatures during combat!) and gave permission for me to redraw them, otherwise the conversations might have been a lot more empty! And mad props to Ellen, of course, for taking the idea and turning it around into the three lovely melodies you hear in game, let alone actually going out to sample a river - truly heroic to save a game about a bard from being completely silent.
I’m honestly delighted beyond words that the writing and story resonated with you. Thanks again for playing and commenting!