Tripped over Godot's Light2D node limit of 16. Ended up just using textures additively blended instead
Need to write a simple 2d light system in Love2D/SDL/Raylib to understand the challenges involved and experiment. I've created a bunch of games in the dark at this point and likely will again in the future.
Doing things at different scales, like drawing a battle royal-esqe death circle or creating a mini-map, is easier then it looks since it's just doing the math and scaling it
probably not so at the next magnitude. I vaguley remember someone in Godot creating a big space game and struggling with the fact that floating-point percision rounding caused snapping, which they solved by just doubling up the coordinates for a finer aproximation.
Simple, consistent agent behaviors lead to emergent strategy
Arrow peg always shooting arrows(even when not converted) protects normal pegs that spawn close to them from barbarians naturally on the map, leading to less relience on good RNG for the player
Steering behaviors continue to have great ROI for relatively little effort. Getting the agents to follow the player at an offset and avoid crowding via a repulsive force works better then I thought it would. Would've liked to added pursuit and evasion behaviors(basically the agent leads the target so the player has to rapidly change directions to evade), but ran out of time. Should get a snippits library with these thigns set up prior to save time in future jams.
I was very dissapointed by the theme. Partly because "Gravity" Is too general and can be satisfied with any physics implementation(or doing a space setting), but also because I've already made one jam game with orbitial mechanics and I didn't feel like doing a repeat. Would've really liked "Unwelcome Guest", "Out of Frame", or "Mushrooms" more. But we play the cards were dealt and I decided "Gravity" could mean "Drawn to" represented by being drawn towards the light and people being drawn to a leader.
Less obvious, and viable, things I would've done with a little more time:
Make it so getting people to follow you took a little time to increase risk
Adding enemies with Pursuit/Evasion behaviors, like a wolf that tries to lead you off or a spear throwing that avoids your path of travel
Telegraphed metors that could wipe out the players band or be used to kill a large mass of barbarians
Soul
March