A truly well made and polished game, the characters and sprites are all amazingly well done. I hope you don't take offense to this as I don't want to be rude in any way, but I had only wished that UI would've also been handdrawn rather than generated by AI. I completely understand that you guys only had a few days to work on it, but it is just a bit disheartening to see. Though, I don't want that to take away from how impressive the character/sprite art, polish, and mechanics in the game are, it is still extremely impressive what you guys have been able to do. Well done :)
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Thank you so much for the kind words and for sharing your thoughts so respectfully... no offense taken at all! Actually, we originally had a dedicated UI artist on our team, but right around the start of the jam, she ended up joining another team in our club for this event. Since our team got a late start, we couldn't ask her to drop a project she had already begun, so we had to scramble and cover the UI with AI as best we could. We completely agree it would have been so much better if she could have stayed and worked with us! Thank you again for playing and for the wonderful feedback :)
Honestly, we're actually still rolling persuasion dice to recruit her for our project asking if she'd be willing to come join our team and help fix up this lacking UI. She's genuinely super skilled and talented, so I really hope our roll succeeds! Anyway, that's the slightly sad behind the scenes story of how it happened.
Believe it or not, I can't deny that the UI alone ate up nearly half of my working time. What she could have easily pulled off in an instant ended up being squeezed out after wrestling endlessly with the limits of the machine... Honestly, as the main director, I'm still not satisfied with it myself.
We couldn't include intricate patterns like astrolabes or the backs of Arcana tarot cards, and there are various UI layouts here and there that feel a bit lacking, so there are quite a few spots I'm not completely happy with. Machines still have a hard time replacing humans.
That's actually why we wrote in our game description that if our team survives, we're recruiting 'human' followers—specifically someone who can handle sound direction (including composing), someone who can draw UI, and one more programmer. Because AI ultimately has its limits, and we literally worked ourselves to death trying to make up for it.