Jan 16, 2025 Update

Yet another small update.  While I don't have anything new to add on the core game, I've been working a little bit on some areas/maps.  Since I bought myself a cheap laptop over the holidays, I had to get things set up on there.  I figured since I was "starting fresh" on it, I'd finally set up the Tiled app up correctly and leverage some of it's "project" functionality to try to get organized a bit better.  Once I accomplished that, it was time to start building some maps.  Some of them are very large and I haven't actually tried implementing them in gbstudio yet.  So I don't know if they'll work or not.  I've just been building them in tiled and will worry about integration later.  Worst case, I can split it in to multiple scenes/backgrounds, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

Below is the lobby of what will basically be my game's "silphco" from the pokemon games.  Essentially a building of humans that you have to get through.  I plan to have some random battles and a boss battle in here as well.  I'm tentatively thinking there will be a certain order you have to do some tasks / interact with people/things.

Here is the full zoomed out view of the first floor after the lobby.

Zoomed in of an office that's in the bottom center.  I'm thinking this will be where you interact with someone/something to figure out what to do here.

zoomed in view of the top left workstations.  Not sure if I'll do anything here.

Top Center Workstations.  I'll probably have something to do either here and/or the workstations above. as an aside, this would be a cool work environment with post-it notes on the wall (or maybe pretend it's whiteboards between the windows) with workstations that resemble game boys.

So the right side of the screen I plan to have the player go through an air vent, teleporter, etc or something to get there and you can then traverse the right side of the screen to get to the 3rd floor / boss.  I also posted this view to give a closer look of how I built the interior "rooms".  What I'm not sure of yet is if I'll have all the rooms/door accessible.  And for the rooms with the "roofs" like this (as opposed to the office shot i shared above) if I'll try to figure out how to display what's inside of it if you enter the room (submaps? tile switching?) or if i'll just create another scene to switch to.  The scenes would be easier, but 'removing' that 'roof' would be pretty cool if I can accomplish it.

My 2nd floor of this building will be roughly the same size as the first floor whenever I get to it.  And my 3F of this building will be around the size of the lobby as that's where the boss battle will occur.

Like I said, not much 'gameplay' related work to share and these are still stuck in the tiled app, but as someone who is horrible with anything art (or music so that'll be fun some day) related, even though I leveraged mostly free sprite packs (with some tiles of my own), just doing the above took me about 2 weeks of worth work here and there (maybe 5-10 hours total?).  I think I'm slowly getting the hang of tiled, how to envision using these sprite packs, adding layers for effects, etc so hopefully the next few rooms go a little bit quicker!  But I'm still on track to finish my work in the year 2050, so I've got that going for me which is nice.