After staying up too late pulling my remaining hair out last night, I came back to the project with fresh eyes and did some Google searching for the wacky errors I was encountering. From what I could tell, it looks like I somehow corrupted the project when I was rebuilding it in a haze yesterday?

Version control - something I didn't think too hard about for a small project lol. It's such a pain for Unreal, not an easy Git setup like Godot by any means, so now I'm just saving whole backup copies in other locations and crossing my fingers. 

I was thinking about giving up - rebuilding everything  would be so disheartening - but I found a forum post where someone suggested that it could be fixed by copying everything manually to a new file?

So I gave it a shot, migrating everything piece by piece, and after some blueprint touchups it looks like...

We're SO back!

I really need to sit down and make a Game Design Document (I should have done this first...) but right now I have my basic gameplay loop down and I'm having fun playing it! The timer goes, you die when it runs out, the platforming is difficult and annoying but not so extreme I want to scream, and when you get to the top the level ends with a congratulations screen! 

I have tons of ideas on stuff to add, but since this is a week-long jam, I think for the rest of the week I should focus on polishing this small bit up to make the presentation as rad as possible? I want to add speed powerups and some additional pathing, music, sound effects, random juice, a nice menu/intro screen, and put my favorite pixel shader in there. Make the level feel more alive. 

Yeah, okay, gosh, typing that all out - definitely not adding more features/mechanics except the power up... and maybe a speed run timer at the end lol. All of that "polish" is going to take the rest of the week for sure! I just think it would be cool to have a really nice looking little prototype at the end of the week, you know? 

- OKAY RANDOM ASIDE - I just beat my game loop on a break at work without cheating for the first time and IT FELT SO GOOD! Even if no one else likes this silly obnoxious little platformer, at the end of the day I'm having fun playing it - so that's what matters right?

8:56 PM: I'm home, I've had dinner, and have been messing about with the project for a little bit, but I don't have much time. I keep playing it instead of working on it... whoops! I can finish it reliably now, which feels rad, but now I'm worried it'll get boring after awhile? (this is a game jam, this is in scope, don't overscope, I keep chanting to myself)

I went ahead and added the retro shader, to cheer me up after a grumpy afternoon of errand running after work, and it's pretty cool! Needs some tweaking. Wasn't quite the fix all bandaid I wanted for visuals - hopefully I can carve out some more time to spruce the level up! I'm thinking the tower base should be more organic and woodsy feeling, though the greyboxing does look kind of neat lol.