I somehow managed to carve out enough time last month to finish the final bonus level of the game. I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to do that, so PHEW! This means I’ve officially FINISHED EVERY LEVEL IN THE GAME! Opening up the game files and scrolling through everything feels pretty crazy; the past few years have really flown by, and now I’m looking at the light at the end of the tunnel. Everything still seems like development will be finished over the summer.
Now that I’ve finished the levels, let’s look back at my checklist: essential systems? Done. Music? Done. Battle design? Done. Tilesets and level design? That’s a big done.
While all that’s great, I still have some big things to check off the list before I can release Jimmy upon the world. First, I still have a lot of miscellaneous sprites to finish; most of these were finished parallel with the level design, but I did skip some of them, including a couple of towns. However, this is only going to be a fraction of the remaining development time. I’m going to try to finish the bulk of those while the semester is still going so I can start adding dialogue and scenes unimpeded for a month straight over winter break. I’ll finish any remaining sprites as I get to them in the story. After that, it’s testing and balancing, and, well, release. Holy crap.