Congrats to everybody
So, my first day project was Keep The Light Alive, and it's an idea I've had bouncing around in my head for a long time (it actually started out as a JRPG concept if you can believe it). You were in a dark environment, and you would navigate by light created by your character. When you lost energy, the light would fade, making it harder to navigate as well as to see potential enemies in the dark. There would be occasional light sources that you could drain, regaining your energy while putting out light sources, and you could fire little blasts of energy that would briefly light up the area they were traveling through. I also wanted a secondary attack that would do enormous damage but would cost a lot of energy and only light up the area momentarily (BEEG LAZOR).
I focused a little too much on making the player controller work (wall jumping in particular was a pain in the ass and didn't really add anything without more walls to jump off) but I did manage to get a full gameplay loop into the game, complete with death screen. (In retrospect I probably should've focused on making an exit since I wanted the player to navigate the dark, rather than enemies that could kill you). Also by the end of it I started to secretly hope that the next dev would turn it into a top-down shooter instead, because having it as a 2D platformer/shooter felt very disjointed. (which Day 3 did do and also made the character that is now my avatar, *she's so adorable LOOK AT HER LITTLE LIGHTBULB*
I skipped day 2 because I was exhausted by the above. For Day 3 I took Fantasy Game and added some exploration elements. I programmed in a PointsOfInterest code that would automatically track when you found an interesting area and how many of them there were. I added some ruins, a graveyard, a separate tomb from the others, a group of fairies wandering the blue grass area, and made the endpoint indicator a wizard tower. The problem was that I used a few Asset Store packets to make them and they were MASSIVE files that I didn't bother cleaning out before I tried to upload the things. Woops.
I also wanted to add a fairy at the very start of the game that would draw the players towards their grove (from which you could see the end goal tower in the distance as well as the ruins I'd added) but I couldn't get the code to work properly. The fairy would stop partway to the grove and I could never figure out why, though I think it has to do with how I handled their home location.
I'm a bit disappointed my Day 1 didn't make it to the end, but I was able to get a LOT done and figure out a lot about how game creation works from this jam (triggers, for example. And wall jumps!). So, thanks a lot everybody, and congrats to those who made it all the way! ^_^