That was fairly surreal, but not necessarily bad! Definitely reminds me of much older games without a tutorial and with a punishing death. The music was fairly impressive and the art (and especially that little sequence showing the sister shooting fireballs at the brother) had me wondering more about the backstory. Going into it, I kind of expected this to be more experimental as it definitely gave a very trippy vibe. I couldn't quite figure out the controls and kept dying to the boss no matter what I tried. For a while, I actually thought that might be part of the game, and could have been revealing something about an unreliable narrator POV (maybe the brother is the real bad guy, now caught in an endless loop reminiscent of the suffering he made his sister feel). Going back now and reading through the comments, development woes do fill in some of the blanks, though I'd still give this another shot if the devs wanted to continue their learning journey. I'd be really curious to see how the title grows into its identity. I'll say, it could very easily be turned in a really trippy "experimental" title if you guys wanted to go in that direction. Either way, big props for making it to the end and submitting! That's one down! Keep it up!
Interesting take on the backstory. Those are real fireballs as show up in the boss, by the way. At one point when i was working on getting the goblins along the side to toss them at Bro, I tried turning them to ridged bodies. Sis's fireballs suddenly had gravity physics, and that wasn't any good for the cutscene.
We actually had sprites for the house (seen in-game as a brown rectangle) and goblin camp drawn up and implemented on the last Friday of the jam, but that commit didn't make it into the submission. Here is what it would have looked like:
This screenshot actually comes from a branch where I have overhauled most of Bro's code for walking, and doesn't have the screen pan for the boss yet, though I intend to aim for more of a fixed-camera for the fight per my original vision.
Oh nice! I appreciate the behind-the-scenes reveal and screenshot. Here's hoping someday Bro and Sis's full story will be told.