post-mortem and follow-up from LOWREZJAM

firstly, a HUGE thank you to everyone who played THROUGH and offered comments or feedback. it's much appreciated.

as some may have suspected, the game was rushed and maybe half-finished at best by the time the jam ended. no excuses here, i started late and bit off more than i could chew! so, sadly, this version of the game lacked a lot of choices, challenge, or fun, instead being dependent on your ability to follow a compass and the luck of the draw as far as procedural generation.

i do plan on following up on THROUGH and iterating on it to create a more complete and fun game.

here are some of my upcoming plans:

1.  fix bugs related to harvesting plants. 
   1. tech details: i originally implemented them as a tilemap. this proved to be wonky when using the tilemap as a collider due to the way Godot handles tilemap collision. i could not figure out why it is buggy in time to fix it for the jam. i'll be reimplementing them as sprites, the way that the stones are.
2. add shade/sun system
   1. i spent a day during the jam trying to get this to work and failed to get it to look the way i wanted to due to the way 2D lighting is handled in Godot by default. 
   2. going to revisit it and see if sun/shade can be implemented without 2D lighting (faking drop shadows) or if the 2D lighting method can be made to look a bit better
   3. "overheating" status will be based on being in shade or not, so you have to balance staying in the shade as you move vs. moving to the next stone fast enough to avoid dying of thirst
   4. some plants will provide shade rather than being harvested for water (the trees)
3. add oases
   
   1. an oasis can be drank from once a day to restore your heat/thirst bars
   2. at night it spawns enemies who chase you and deplete your thirst bar
   3. you can attack enemies with a torch but that depletes your "heat" bar, once gone your torch goes  away
4. add various compass "modes"
   
   1. after collecting a certain number of stones, you can change your compass mode to see the closest plants/oasis/stone rather than just seeing the closest stone or portal.  this will make you choose between seeking something to help with survival vs. pursuing an objective and make it less about random chance of finding a plant while on your way to the objective.
5. implement gamepad support
6. implement settings for music/SFX volume
7. implement difficulty settings
   
   

there's probably more that i'm forgetting, and many people made great suggestions as far as what to do to make the game a little more exciting, and it's much appreciated. looking forward to seeing what people think of new versions of this.

take care, all