Hello! I haven't submitted to LD in almost 10 years! So I figured it was time to visit again...
Here's a link to the submission.

For this jam, I had some goals in mind, and I managed to land well on most of them and submit something.

To explain my goals, I'm working on a game engine called luxe, which is what I used, and was what motivated a submission. The timing with an LD happening and what I was working on at the moment lined up well. (please note that luxe is in closed testing, not widely available just yet!)

The main goal was finding workflow quirks, bugs and blocking issues for common use cases, as well as testing out the physics modules we've been making, which enables making this kinda game quickly. You can read more about it over here, but the gist is that the tile editor, world editor and the arcade physics systems are all working well together!

Outcomes
The outcomes in line with these goals were good, bugs were found, workflow issues were fixed and I managed to get a 'complete' gameplay loop and submit in time. I didn't have the full weekend (hello parenting) but with the time I did have, it was pretty fruitful.

Of course jams will be jams, I had more ideas to add, I didn't get to show the player all the nuance in the mechanics, I didn't get to finish the art for the ending, and sound and animations were lost to time.

Levels
I intentionally used an existing tileset so I don't get sucked into art, which helped focus on testing the things I needed to test. Building and iterating on the levels was left till quite late, around 2 hours before submission deadline, but I was happy to find that the workflow held up well enough to handle that... (not recommended).

The two images below might be a spoiler if you look too closely before playing.
What I did was draw out and iterate on the level as solid tiles as quickly as possible, using the editor to iterate on the gameplay. I moved the spawn point around and jumped into each area as I progressed to make sure things were what I imagined.

I then spent just over an hour on switching the solids over to actual textures, which if not careful has a trap to fall into, spending way too much time on detailing. I managed to find a balance and get a detailed enough space in the time. Considering the size of the map I ended up with I'm surprised it was that quick, but I'm glad it was! (note the editor ui shown is wip).

I was indecisive about doing one area vs multiple but I decided to do one in the end.

Mechanics
For once I had an idea that actually fit the theme! I quite like the idea and I saw a lot of fun fall out of the mechanics while playtesting, so I'll probably expand the game a little bit to expose those to the player better. I liked the idea that the player doesn't have health but the plant does, which led here. People seem to like it too!

Implementing the mechanics in code was pretty quick, I spent way more time on iterating and playtesting than coding (also a good sign). Codifying the ideas into concrete, predictable rules that you can learn was the plan, and I managed to get that right (even if not all of it easy to discover for the player, it still behaves reliably).

An example; The puddles give you health for splashing in them. If you single jump, you get 1 health, if you double jump, you get half health, and if you jump from a height you get full health. This creates a risk reward situation where if you have low enough health to warrant a jump from higher, you might miss or hit something else on the way down and fail.

The rest of the mechanics are just as well defined and I was happy with the outcome.

Conclusion
I had fun, I finished something and I got a lot of good testing and feedback from doing the jam, as hoped. I hope you like the idea and the game!

p.s there was another luxe game submitted which had different goals, robot walk!
There's a post mortem for that game over here.

You can find me on twitter ruby0x1 or @ luxeengine, or you can find me on the luxe discord if you want to chat or have questions. I'll be checking the comments here too, if you have questions feel free.

Thanks for reading!