So I made a lot of visual progress this time with backgrounds and officially finished all of them! And with the puzzles all I have left to do is test them, since I finished importing them (and I need to figure out how to cut down on the sprite limits in Meushi’s). This month has been proving to be busy in my personal life so that means productivity is a little slower, but hopefully, it won’t push me back too far. I did get one extra week before presenting this post, so I was able to mostly catch up to where I wanted to be by this update at least.

To start off, I finished adding ability events to all of the puzzle scenes to plan out the puzzles. Some of the puzzle layouts changed due to limits. I got pretty close to limits on others as well, and am still figuring out a couple of them that got pushed over.

I also put in some “placeholder” art for the abilities, which will probably just end up being the final for those. The only one I haven’t replaced was Gashil’s boulder because there was one in there that was fitting already. The rest have been updated though.

While making the puzzles, I made a few adjustments to the rough backgrounds as well. This included resizing a few and reframing them a bit. I’ve still been trying to figure out what all goes into what the sprite limits are on a scene, since it tends to be fairly inconsistent. But sometimes cropping the backgrounds in would allow for a larger Sprite limit, so I did that in a few cases where I didn’t need the extra walking areas.

So then I started to draw the final backgrounds! They took way longer than I was expecting, but I made a lot of progress. I started with some of the maps that were over the limits with my rough background sketches so I could remove any graphical glitches from the game.

The process I went through was that I drew the tiles in Photoshop, then I took those into a software called Tiled and placed the tiles. That way I didn’t have to line everything up manually in Photoshop while working on repeating tiles. I started with Biggert City, which was one of the biggest of the maps and more complicated, so it was good to start there while learning the process.

Then I continued to create the maps and as I imported them back into GB Studio, it was a huge relief to see the tile count going down under my limits! The Biggert City one (above) was actually too big, so I cut down on some tiles later, but ones like the Biggert Forest (below) were more simple with more repeating tiles, so they were faster to make and also way under the limit after using tiles more thoughtfully.

I ended up making all of the forests in one day since I was able to reuse a lot of sprites for those. They became pretty quick to make once I had the process down and a larger palette of tilesets to use.

Then I went through and continued to make most of the tiles, including inside of caves, Tag World, New Lady World, and just all of the outside of mind ones (other than Frosty Falls and Timeless Abyss).

I saved most of the backgrounds that are inside of minds for last because if I ended up needing to keep any as abstract and less detailed, those ones would make most sense.

And then finally I finished all 87 of the backgrounds!! I got the process down and a bunch of tiles drawn that can be reused. I did switch back and forth and make new ones as I built them in Tiled though.

For next time, my goal is to get all of the collisions in there as well as test all of the puzzles (with the new art and coordinates set up). If I have time to add the talking animations in there and start on the logo/title art, that would be ideal. I will be out of town for most of that time, so progress will get much slower and I can’t make too many promises.

My hope was to have the entire game finished by the end of next month, but we’ll see how it goes! I do have another project I need to work on in the months to come that takes priority, so luckily there are a couple of months after that before my latest due date on this one.