I finished my jam game! You can play Loose Leaf on Itch now. It's really really short, but I think it came out pretty nice. I learned a lot and I'm excited to do this again sometime soon.

The biggest thing I learned coming out of this is that I want more robust editing tools next time. Drawing maps in aseprite worked, but the back-and-forth between the visuals in the editor, the collision data also in the editor, and additional metadata in text-based config files was really inelegant. Next time I'll find a better way to be able to transition between these sources, and also to blend procedural art with manual tweaks.

— Feb 8th, 2026, 1:33am on John Holdun’s Blog