The art style was mostly inspired by Hyper Light Drifter by Heart Machine. The project was good practice for learning to make sprites and animations using Aseprite. I made the following character for it with some basic animations, which I'm still very happy with:
At the core of the game would be a movement controller that would allow the player to keep their momentum. For this I wrote a "stepwise" movement controller, which would increase the speed of the player step by step. Internally this worked using an FSM with a bunch of curves to control the velocity profile at each step:
Had I continued with this I think I would have made the steps "snappier", really giving the player a jolt with each step to emphasize the movement and adding some animations (though I think the idea was that you would collect abilities over time, and that would have been one of the first few abilities).
I also put a lot of work into the autotile system, writing a series of tools to create maps. This included tools to import "blob" type tile sheets and automatically generate the autotiles with named prefixes. I then wrote a series of brushes that would used the generated tilesets to allow automatic drawing of rooms with walls:
On top of that I added an animation system where some tiles would play an animation every so often. This was done by letting an animation manager component on the tilemap replace static tiles with their animated variants.