Update from the dev today: Pushed up against and experimented with a bunch of options for transformations on renpy. I've literally taught linear algebra and multivariate calc, so fighting with matrix transforms is pretty embarrassing. Saving face a little... however... is that it was just the syntax, not the math. With transforms generally in place, the last step is getting all of the visual and audio elements in place and running final checks.
Renpy has some weird parsing a formatting designed around making it friendly for writers and artists that just rub me the wrong way as a developer. The smart searching of image names, for example, is interesting but makes me generally nervous from a data reference perspective. Of course, I know that a lot of the work here was about dancing around Python syntax and making sure the renpy specific functions don't conflict with Python functions. This is apparent with the lack of f-strings in renpy. It likely won't make it into the jam submission, but I did learn about persistent data in renpy and multigame persistent data. It is an interesting solution to make the concept readily available to non devs. If the feature makes it in, I'll probably end up writing a good-old json file instead of using the persistent data.