Ah, it's done, 1 hour to spare i might add! The level editor proved to come through, and i was able to build 4 levels, the 4th being my most massive. It was a pretty intense week, going from "this doesn't seem to look right", to "this looks amazing!" was a wild moment. having that first real level load up and the lighting system come to life was a moment of glee for myself. I'm hoping that others well think i hit my two targets of ruins and shadows. although i'm fairly certain i've nailed shadows, ruins might not get the full points as i've kinda antiquated ruins with abandoned and made the levels look like abandoned dungeons. o well, that's for the other judges to decide.

music and atmosphere i feel i've nailed quite well, the only audio cue i don't think 100% fits, but is close is the monsters scream when he finds you, it's really close to what i envision, but not exact enough. I definitely feel though the rest of the game benefits from the eerie feel with the background music, I was even able to toss in a little sound effect for walking on bones(which actually does help the monsters find you a bit better).

Performance wise i'm a bit worried, there are two issues with the lighting system, the first is that lights that can't be seen at all aren't culled before reaching the pipeline, and second without using stencil's i'm effectively copying the whole screen to another texture to composite the final light map. this means every light is basically two full screen post processing effects. I tried using a smaller framebuffer for the lights, but their seemed to be random artifacts that'd pop up. so if you have performance issues trying out my game, trying lower the window size, as this benefits in two ways. first only the tiles within the view bounds are drawn, and only the objects on those tiles are also drawn, so a smaller view bounds reduces the number of possible lights at once, and reduces the amount of pixel processing required.

AI and gameplay i'm quite happy on, all the fine tuning on the monsters i feel they are in a great place, menacing enough to be a real threat to the player. and mostly intelligent(although when directly chasing the player they can get stuck until the player is out of range, as they change to a charging system rather than using the pathfinding system in place for normal movement). I didn't feel it happened enough to warrant spending time on fixing, and honestly i probably only notice it due to how much i have played the game.

Level design i'm pretty happy with, level 1 is small and introduces the basic's(unless you get lucky and don't encounter the monster at all). level 2 introduces doors/keys and is bigger, level 3 throws in a different way to approach the game, which gives you a key and you choose which doors you want to open in search of the exit. and level 4 i imagine is where some people well say f it as it's twice the size of 2 and 3, and much more complicated with potentially 4 monsters stalking around once all doors are open.

My original idea was for a singular level in which you are being stalked by a monster, while simultaneously finding journals to unravel a mystery about the place you are in, however as i suck at making stories, and the level editor wasn't finished until late friday, i scaled back my overall intentions to what we have now. something i'm still quite pleased with, and might actually find the level editor some future use.

as for my framework, this is it's first real game it's made something after the last year has been toiled in developing it for cross platform, while i'm only distributing the game on windows, i'm fully confident it'd run equally well if i got the build environments in place for linux, mac, android, and iOS. it was also extremely nice to work with, in the past things i've developed always seemed to hinder me, and cause me to eventually scrap everything and restart, like how this one came into existence. but honestly nothing of my framework hindered me in development, perhaps i'm finally at a point where i can grow it out exponentially rather than scrapping it every couple years.

This was a good week, i'm happy with the results, and overall am proud of what i produced!

Here's footage of me running level 2. note the key doesn't always spawn there, i just kept getting really lucky apparantly(and unlucky obviously).

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edit: corrected video audio desync.