Thanks! Will check out your work, too. 😊
Had to work around some interesting Pulp constraints for this entry just to get it done, as I didn't start until Friday afternoon. For example, it's really hard (or impossible?) to have variable numbers of sprites moving around while preserving the background tiles. I ultimately decided to only let items and sprites appear and move on white backgrounds so I could always assume that they'd swap with white when they move or get collected.
(Interestingly, this doesn't seem to work all the time ... portals and scepters occasionally place over walls, and I didn't have time to track it down. Additionally, I never implemented avoiding placing portals and scepters on the player itself, because determining if two points overlap is cumbersome with nested if statements. I could fake it for monsters by starting the player on a non-white tile in many of the levels.)
For this one, too, I thought about messing with menus to support more item types (e.g., magic potions). I figured I could open it with B and make "rest" a basic action, but I didn't have time for any of that.
Next steps will be to flesh out the monster types and add another weapon or two... I want bats that move twice randomly instead of once and bows to shoot them at a distance, ghosts that spawn around graves in a level, etc. Need to add more sound effects and potentially music, too, perhaps to signal when the portal has appeared and the danger is increasing due to portal demons.
I also think I could've done myself a big favor by faking function calling ... creating a single "place_tile" function and setting the tile to be placed to a variable before calling the placement function. Instead, I ended up with a lot of last minute copy/pasta that probably led to some of the occasional bugs I mentioned above.
All in all, I love working within the constraints of a platform like Pulp. Looking forward to refactoring this post-jam and carrying it forward!