edit: sorry for the essay lol
lmao true, thank you for taking the time to play and comment :) Credit for the movement (and camera, collisions, and basically all the code) goes to Shaun Spalding and his Gamemaker Action RPG Tutorial. The world design and art is my own.
The vision is something of a Stardew Valley/Pokémon hybrid where you can turn your crops into "pokemon" and battle, farm, explore, etc. Pokemon was always lacking in world feel/lore and got carried by how cool the actual pokemon are, while Stardew Valley has the opposite problem: the narratives/world are a blast to explore but it does not have any pokemon. Which is biting off wayyy more than I can chew, clearly, but it's the "dream game" I want to work towards eventually. I have pages and pages of notes written about mechanics, NPCs, yada yada. e.g. Typing will be decided by plant species (i.e. capsaicin peppers, fruit bearing plants, cucurbits, etc.) with mon designs inspired by their real life counterparts and evolution stages from seedling to mature plant to harvest ready. The structure of nature itself lends really well to this approach for typing/evolution and its easy (but time consuming) to build out a simple roster of creatures following these pre-existing guidelines. Reading for a couple minutes on the Wiki of any given species leads to multiple new ideas.
I probably won't keep anything for the next iteration of this game, but it was a great learning experience working on tile sets, animations, rpg world building, etc. for the first time. I'm glad I participated in the jam, even if it didn't exactly go to plan.