This game was made over about three weeks for Horrorjam. We only had the idea for the jam a week into October you see. Briefly, Horrorjam is (ostensibly) ran 1st to 30th October, with the goal being to submit a vaguely horror/spooky-themed game in time for Halloween.
This is an adventure/horror game with multiple endings and (hopefully) lots of interesting things to discover and find out, I don't really want to give away any more than that for fear of spoiling things.
Making a horror game for the first time and having not played all that many horror games, this was a challenge to say the least. I've never made such a story-heavy game before, I tend to stick to arcadey games, so making something less action-packed and more slower-paced was fun/challenging too. I felt really unsure how to inject some Horror into proceedings. I didn't want to make a 'jumpscare monster chases you' game as I couldn't see that working in Pico-8, so I had to come up with a creepy story instead--intimidating!
My iceberg problem in this was thinking that once I had chat, an inventory system, and different entities (NPCs, scenery, items) that everything would just fall in place and I'd have a relaxed couple of weeks coming up with a really dense adventure game. That was absolutely not the case. Also proper y-sorting so things are displayed behind each other correctly was something I left to an hour before the deadline, so you can imagine how elegant and carefully designed that is.
I got inspiration for the fractal trees from this cart by @bjornkri: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=36014