Your level has an impressive look an feel! Nice trick rotating the sprite towards the camera. The shadow artifact you were describing looks like shadow acne to me. I love the idea to have the level just as a simple set of bitmaps and then auto-generate it. This makes the level edition incredibly fast. Congrats!
Kudos on the animation system and physics. Nice to see your day/night cycle too. And the volumetric clouds and God Rays? Awesome! Very nice to see camera collision too. Regarding the animation, it would be cool to see they blending between each other, but I get that your main focus was the graphics part and there's only so many things you can do in that short amount of time, right? The Frustum culling is really nice and being able to see it working was a very nice touch to the project.
