Yeah, as a jam game I figured that you didn't want to hear about rough edges this far out.
I sadly don't have a recent simple thing to link to on the exploration project, but this somewhat out-of-date slide deck has an overview. It's a Python library for representing and reasoning about exploration processes in games, with a focus on Metroidvanias. Part of it is a journal format for writing down what you notice and what decisions you make as you explore, and Eyes is both small enough and complex enough that it will be a great thing for me to ask students to work through. You can see my journal file for Eyes here, and a very basic visualization of the final decision graph is here.
