Day 236. Basically all of my dev time today was spent doing admin/project management stuff. Wish I had gotten some real coding done, but this work is important too. Being an indie dev means wearing 20 different hats sometimes. Maybe I should hire a scrum master... Just kidding.

Day 235. Added merits-earning functionality to Tobu Tobu Bouzu. I'm not happy with how it interrupts the cutscene, so I'll be revisiting this in the future. But this is all I had time for today.

Day 234. Didn't do a lot today, but what I did do was very much needed. Did some refactoring and migrated stuff out of bank 0. It's still pretty full, but at this stage in the game, I'm not really adding anything substantial to bank 0.

Day 233. Took a first pass at the credits screen today. Short and sweet for now since the team is currently just me. Speaking of, I'm looking to hire a composer and a (tileset) artist. DM me if interested. #ScreenshotSaturday #gameboy #gamedev

Day 232. Call me Bowstradamus because today went exactly as I predicted it would yesterday. Finished up the end game areas today and started a little bit on the credits screen.

Day 231. So close to finishing the end game areas. I'll definitely have them both done by end of day tomorrow. Then once I implement a credits screen on Saturday, the entire game (in MVP form) will be playable from start to finish. Pretty pumped about that.

Day 230. Ditto what I said the last two days. Hey, gotta have the occasional day where I don't run up against the character limit, right?

Day 229. Today was the same as yesterday: more progress on all sorts of endgame stuff. Had to make some fun modifications to my events system in order to meet the demands of the end cutscene. Don't let that get your hopes up though, it's still fairly modest lol.

Day 228. Things are going smoothly. Made a lot of partial progress on multiple different endgame tasks today. For example, adding the map stuff and scripting some of the events, but not fully wiring everything together.

Day 227. Started back on the Victory Road/Elite 4 equivalent areas. Might be able to finish both of them before the end of the month. That's the goal, at least. The main unknown variable there is how much time the pixel art parts will take me.

Day 226. Did/doing a number of misc things today. The most #ScreenshotSaturday-eligible thing is probably these newly redesigned booster packs. Only the ones in the middle row are new, but it looks cooler to have every pack in the same image. #gameboy

Day 225. Finished implementing the (first pass of the) secret area. Kinda crazy to think that the original scope for Ningami 3 was limited to just this secret area. The game has grown so much since its initial designs. Man, the final product will be so good.

Day 224. Worked on some more of the custom logic for the secret area today. It feels good to see it all coming together. And at this rate, I think I'll be able to wrap up the MVP for the whole feature tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Day 223. Yeah, so this first pass art isn't great, but it gets the job done for now. This is a screen unique to the secret area. Even with the ?'d out text, it's pretty easily guessable what this is supposed to be. But let's keep up the kayfabe, shall we?

Day 222. Been busy fighting off a cold that I picked up from my travels this past week, but I still managed to cross off one checkbox on a Trello card today. Gotta do at least something every day until this project is finished. No 0 days allowed.

Day 221. Made some tweaks to the booster pack screen that are specific to the secret area. Commonly missed detail about this screen: the kunai that opens the packs is actually the cursor kunai. You can even see it leaving the text box. #gamedev #gbdk

Day 220. Today got wiped out by traveling, so all I did was migrate my recent work from my laptop back to my desktop. As a reminder, I have a public Trello board for this project. That and these daily posts help keep me accountable. trello.com/b/PpQevObS/n...

Day 219. Finished off the strings and events for the secret area today.

Day 218. Didn't have much time for gamedev today, but I I got the strings and events for this secret area to the ~95% done mark. Slow and steady wins the race.

Day 217. Did more of the same from yesterday. Turns out this area needs a lot of custom logic. Might even take a week or two to finish all that I have planned for it.

Day 216. Wrote some extra dialog and events for the super secret area that I mentioned yesterday. No pic because spoilers, but also because I'm posting from my phone today.

Day 215. Gonna be on the road for the next almost week, so all I did today was get the project set up on my laptop. Not sure how much time I'll have to work on it while I'm away, but I'll continue to do at least something tiny every day. Even if it's just playtesting.

Day 214. I'm showing more spoilers than I want to today, but here's the first pass at whatever this super secret mystery room is going to be. And now that I have a placeholder map for this room, I can start coding the good parts. #gamedev #gameboy

Day 213. Finished coding all of the custom logic for the "Victory Road" area. To minimize spoilers, here's a look at some related event code. Event sets are named after their trigger condition: F[lag value], A[button interaction], T[ile stepped on], or N[PC talked to]. #gbdk

Day 212. Spent my dev time today implementing more of the unique Victory Road logic. Well, I spent some of my dev time on that. The bulk of my time got eaten up by me trying to debug the broken parts of that new logic. Hope I can get it all fixed up tomorrow.

Day 211. Light day today. "Victory Road" needs quite a bit of custom logic, and I starting coding some of that today. Here's the least spoilery part: when you're on a Victory Road map, the normal save anywhere feature gets disabled. You'll have to save using other means.

Day 210. Y'know, this part that I'm working on is really more of a Victory Road parallel than an Elite 4 parallel. Well, whatever you call it, I finished implementing its maps today. I won't spoil any of the details, so best I can do is share this blacked out overview.

Day 209. Worked on the "Elite 4" zone's maps. Again, no spoilers, so here's some more text parser bts: $ is a special char that instead prints an icon based on the following char. It can also inject variable words or numbers, but I never ended up using that in this project. #gbdk

Day 208. Wrote some endgame dialog today. Since it's spoilers, here's some early game text instead. My text parser reads ASCII strings and word wraps when needed, but also: \xFC means to show a yes/no prompt, \xFE adds a line break, and \xFF indicates the end of the string. #gbdk

Day 207. Pagination is in place now. I'm going to pretend that the laggy text writing is a stylistic choice for now.