Wow, thank you for the very detailed response! Very happy to hear that overall you found it to be a good experience.
A couple small things to note - so the untextured body was actually a bug in the build process. The character models were fully textured and worked in editor, but somewhere in the build process it had an issue compiling the material shader. The fix turned out to be simply re-saving the material and it worked just fine on a subsequent build, however I only noticed the bug right after submitting so nothing could really be done since we didn't feel like it was in the spirit of the jam to upload a new build with the fix even though it would have only been slightly after the deadline and the option was still there. We will be uploading a build with a lot of small bugs and frustration fixes post-rating period though!
As for the level design I will certainly take your critiques to heart. Originally our team had a dedicated level designer and I was just the environment/props artist, however that team member unfortunately went AWOL within the first few days so my workload effectively doubled by having to not only create all the environment assets, but also create the level - something I have very little experience in. I think with more time I could have made certain parts of the level more uniquely identifiable, but sadly I just didn't have as much time to work on that aspect of it with all the other things on my plate. I understand with the low lighting it might seem like some tunnel sections were copy/pasted, but truthfully not one area of the cave is identical to another. I hand placed every one of the over-1,500 environment meshes that comprise the environment 😅
The next time I end up having to do level design within the confines of a jam though I'll definitely focus on trying to make key areas more visually distinct! Thanks again for the detailed response!
