The theme was "Role Reversal".  I'm guessing like most people, I thought of a game where I'd like to play as the antagonist / enemy.  I chose the ghost in Phasmophobia.

The lesson from my previous game jam (MonoGameJam way back in 2021) was keep it simple - real simple.  So I opted for free game art (Urizen 1Bit Tileset by vurmux), and an 8-bit top down style.  This seemed to work really well, until I got caught up in a bug in my collision detection algorithm.  I wasted lots of time here, and still haven't fixed it - moving through doorways is still an issue.

Generating the map of the mansion was surprisingly simple.  Take the playing area as a rectangle, and divide it in half along its longest axis.  Add a bit of randomness so its not exactly in half.  Then recurse through both new rectangles, until the size of a rectangle is too small to split further.  Then make sure each room has at least one door to another room, as long as they share an edge.

Next I added the ghost hunters.  I had to get them to move from point to point - A* is the answer.  But I wasted time finding a good algorithm online, in fact the one I ended up using was ugly. I hacked in the ugly, wasting more time, but it does the job.  I had my first encounter with using AI to generate code here, it gave me a very nice looking bit of code, but it didn't work, so I abandoned that idea - no time to waste debugging it!

After 2 days, with literally a couple of hours left, I made a gameplay loop that kind of makes sense, but its lame tbh.  With some balancing, and perhaps a few more features, I think this could be a fun game.  I'll update sometime after the game jam judging ends.  

Oh, and this game badly needs some sound!  Again, no time :(