Just some notes on this experience. Likely more for myself moving forward, but you're welcome to learn from my mistakes!

Jam was totally solo - not by choice, but it turned out to be kind of refreshing. With the exception of some open source materials and images, everything was done between Unity, Blender, and FLStudio.

I had this grandiose idea that I could cheese some Shadow of the Colossus mechanics in two weeks. I then spent a week and a half getting  sucked into creating a synthetic fall and some light platformer mechanics. Fast forward through the last tumultuous days and this is the best I could do. It may not seem like much, but there's a lot going on under the hood. More importantly, as soon as I started hitting hurdles I began looking at SotC documentation and, my gosh, that game deserves all the credit. SotC isn't jam material, even on a gimmicky level, but I wasn't about to give up.

My initial thoughts:

Create a boss model in Blender. Animate it. Throw on a mesh collider in Unity, make it a trigger, turn it into a climbing surface. The rest is just fiddling around with rotations and making it look smooth, right?

 I hit a wall as soon as I applied the mesh collider. Mesh colliders are intended for static objects. They don't update with animations. You can write your own system around it, but rumor is it's easier to just shut your computer off (instead of, you know, overloading it). Also, who has the time?! (*this is what SotC did though!)

 I'll try to spare boring details, but I rewrote my climbing system 6 or 7 times. My assumption is it would be like a walking script, but vertical (raycast to the ground, return the normal, rotate the player), I was wrong. There was also an issue with the enemy having 3 primary trigger colliders (segments) and parenting the player to the associated one. As soon as the player is parented, all the colliders merge and whenever one trigger is set off, all of them run. In looser terms, when you're starting at the bottom of the giant and move your way to the middle, you'll notice the player gets passed off to the next collider - this was tough.

 The answer is it's a smorgasbord of things. There's a collider manager that oversees specifically the boss climb. When you reach the middle, the bottom gets turned off, and the top goes on standby, and the player is parented to the mid. There’s a barely noticeable (hopefully) “pass-off” function that runs between segments that I’m pretty proud of. While climbing there are a series of checks to ensure the player faces the center, stays on the edge, and hopefully moves in a sensical direction (what the player perceives is “up” or “down”)  while the whole thing is flipping and rotating. Pattern follows to the top. If the player jumps, the current collider goes dead for the push, all colliders are assessed and primed to receive the player. For re-entry to happen, the collider has to prove to the player controller that it's the one holding the player within it's bounds. I've seen more complex things, but for me - this was a lot!

 There are a lot of things left to be solved - the player slips around the boss platforms really easily, sometimes climbing just gets sticky, there's no climb + attack, and animations could've been cooler... But it is what it is. I may update it over time. We'll see.

Anyway, there's some word vomit. I love SotC and hope to genuinely pay it tribute someday, but until then, this is what it is!