After a long couple days I'm happy and relieved to say that the opening chapter of Phenomenology is in a somewhat functional state. To celebrate that, I'm releasing it! I would say the opening is at around 90% complete. There's still some touch up to do with a scene to connect to later chapters and some sprite and script work that is a little sloppy or placeholders.

This project has been challenging for me, and that is a very good thing. I came into this thinking it would be tricky but that I could probably breeze through a decent chunk of it. After all, how hard can a pretty simple and short Game Boy game be to make? What I have found is that even fairly simple things are far more complex and finnicky than I was expecting. One of my biggest hurdles was creating an elevator that functioned similar to those in early Pokémon games like in Celadon or Goldenrod stores. You set up a menu and some warps was my expectation. In reality it ended up being several scripts with a ton of variable checks to ensure you moved to each floor correctly without being flung to some location you didn't want to.

Challenges like this only continued and the number of states and variable checks I needed to keep things running just grew and grew. However I was enjoying GB studio smacking me upside the head over and over when I got too big for britches and thought I was some pro game dev. I came into this project primarily as an exploration of just what was involved in game design, and I do have to say my respect for real pros has only grown.

With this first obstacle cleared I'm going to take a couple days off from Phenomenology to really figure out what has and has not worked in my process so far so that the next stage of the game might go a little smoother.

At least until my britches get too big again and GB Studio decides I need a smack upside the head.