This game was made over about three weeks for Horrorjam. We only had the idea for the jam a week into October you see. Briefly, Horrorjam is (ostensibly) ran 1st to 30th October, with the goal being to submit a vaguely horror/spooky-themed game in time for Halloween.

This is an adventure/horror game with multiple endings and (hopefully) lots of interesting things to discover and find out, I don't really want to give away any more than that for fear of spoiling things.

Making a horror game for the first time and having not played all that many horror games, this was a challenge to say the least. I've never made such a story-heavy game before, I tend to stick to arcadey games, so making something less action-packed and more slower-paced was fun/challenging too. I felt really unsure how to inject some Horror into proceedings. I didn't want to make a 'jumpscare monster chases you' game as I couldn't see that working in Pico-8, so I had to come up with a creepy story instead--intimidating!

My iceberg problem in this was thinking that once I had chat, an inventory system, and different entities (NPCs, scenery, items) that everything would just fall in place and I'd have a relaxed couple of weeks coming up with a really dense adventure game. That was absolutely not the case. Also proper y-sorting so things are displayed behind each other correctly was something I left to an hour before the deadline, so you can imagine how elegant and carefully designed that is.

I got inspiration for the fractal trees from this cart by @bjornkri: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=36014

1.02 - Lots of fixes: Several scenery quests were not working properly.
Added a page number style display to objects, npcs and scenery, so you know how many things a given object/character has to say.
Filled out the free space in the sprite sheet to improve the graphics
Made a proper death animation
A mistake in the tree code was severely affecting performance on runs with lots of large trees.
Reduced the possible amount of rain, for better performance.
Moved around several items in the swamp area to make exploration more rewarding
A few new sprites for items
Slight improvements to item description texts, shortened a couple of sentences that were too long for the text function.
Saved a whole bunch of tokens by changing entity coordinates to screen coordinates rather than map coordinates
Reduced the interaction range slightly
Made the end screen more descriptive regardless of ending.

1.01 - Lots of fixes: Increased the radius on item, scenery and NPC interaction.
You can now only go to sleep when you're tired.
A dead NPC could still hold a conversation.
Several NPC quests didn't work.
Talking to the scavenger could crash the game.
The meditation mat didn't work.
Debug messages removed.
Debug circles on the beast removed.
Messages display in different colours now to help differentiate between NPC dialogue, inner monologue and item descriptions.
Moved the Archaeologist's report to make it easier to pick up.
Entering/exiting the ruin shouldn't get you stuck in the wall now.

1.0 - Shoddy 'jam version', nothing to see here, move along :)