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Hi, as one of the art leads, I would like to add on to what the programming leads said. This will read more like a description of our process this jam including our downfalls. That said, I'm recently promoted and I couldn't participate in the last jam. The other art lead (youzicha08) had extenuating curcumstances this jam that prevented him from working durring the same time as the other artists, thus I had to organize the art team kinda impromptu, and there were some issues that persisted through the development process.

For example, we initially decided on a few color palletes and general references, but later on in development, this proved to be an inorganized system as me and some of the other experienced artists had to constantly manage the others to make sure everything was going ok. I eventually made an addition to the task planning doc where we laid out the color palletes and references used. This helped to unify the team on solid art direction but I would still like to improve on it next for next time we do a jam. Anyway, as we progressed, we realized that we didnt need some of the color palletes and just lowering the saturation and darkening one would work pretty good for the background/darker areas. 

Now for a brief review of who actually made what: For the title screen, we just had one rly good artist (sssoiree) do the screen and buttons. Later, MrPuffyWuffy animated the various parts of the screen to give a more fluid feel (ex: moving the hourglass side to side, and rotating the gear). Youzicha08 did the ending screen (and paralax background) over the course of the whole jam. Overall the jam was surprisingly quick to finish from the art and music perspective (both teams were done with essential works around maybe the 2 day point), and we had some free time at the end so for the last day or so, I worked on the base of the image, then I passed it on to some people who are good at rendering for them to fully finish (froqqo and sssoiree). Following that, on the final day, MrPuffyWuffy made the animation with the image we produced. I produced the majority of the tileset, focusing on the static parts, and the rest of the artists took the non-static parts, as well as various msc tasks such as in-game menu, rats, player, etc.

Overall, I found it really helpful to have a set color pallete restriction (for most art pieces) and to have an experienced art person avalible in vc for critique. Also its nice to have an artist with around a 12 hour shifted sleep schedule because you can pass unfinished artwork onto them to work on durring the night. I didn't do my best in leading the team this jam, and I hope to work more in tandem with Youzicha08 in the future. I will create a format for a style guide for use in later jams aswell. I also need to be more direct in critiques to make sure all assets adhere to the theme the first time they are rendered. I'm also really thankful to one of the programmers/artists (Theophylaktos) for helping implement my rambling suggestions for level decor into the game.

Glad you liked our game! When we made the game, we had no idea there were others with the same main mechanic, but later, upon finishing, we found like 2 games, i believe one is in gmtk 2026, and one in last years gmtk, with the hourglass mechanic. It is inevitable when there are like 10.5k games per gmtk but it was still pretty interesting to see that others had the same idea.

Art person here, i'm glad you liked our game! The cannons are kinda unintuitive, they remove the total amount of sand from the player so they have to jump faster, I believe the player starts with 6 seconds split between the two halves and each shot removes 1 second worth of sand. Sand cap is restored upon entering a checkpoint (perhaps for the first time?) or respawning. To be honest, it would have been better if they dealt knockback but on some levels that was deemed too punishing and we didn't end up implementing it.