I did it!
My brain is soup, but I finished my game (at least what I'm counting as finished for the jam anyway). You can find the link to the game page in the updated first post of this devlog, or you can find it right here too if you want to avoid the extra scrolling. Today was mostly level polish and a couple of small additions and fixes, including fixing my credits music after my first attempt at uploading a build and realizing it was broken. After trying to reupload and having it fail six times in a row I narrowly avoided a panic attack, redid the build, and succeeded. Whew.
This has been a great, if daunting, experience, and I'm actually really proud of myself for taking it on and sticking with it until I had something I felt good enough about to post. I'll be writing up a postmortem on the whole process while it's still pretty fresh, but after the dust settles a bit. The last two weeks have been intense, and I have crammed more into my brain than was reasonable to expect it to accept. I hope to keep working on Alterplaces and maybe one day build it out into something resembling a full game, but I need a bit of time away from tilemaps and serialized fields for my mental health.
Thanks to anyone who's been following along, and a big thanks to the jam discord. It's been so great to see everyone's progress and the diversity of all the games people are making. I don't think the jam would've been half as enjoyable without the liveliness and support of the community, and it was awesome to be a part of it. Now that there's no big scary deadline looming over me I can't wait to dig into giving everyone's projects a try!