SAGE 2023 - Demo Luigi and the Quest for Nothing 2 (Chapter 1 & 2 Demo)

The first game, made to coincide with "The Year of Luigi" had a simple goal - to create a silly game in the style of the original Super Mario Bros., with references to obscure games here and there, with a soundtrack fully arranged by me.
A "director's cut" version had been released in 2017, redoing the soundtrack entirely and changing other things to make it more accurate to the NES limitations, as well as fixing other issues the game had.
In 2014 I started working on the sequel not knowing how big it was actually going to get (or where I'd be taking the plot), but I settled to make another platformer, this time in a graphical style inbetween that of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, scaled down to the Game Boy Color's limitations, as a large part of my childhood had been emulating several obscure games on the platform, both good and bad. So I ended up giving the game several aesthetics and references from those games, as I already had in the previous game, but taking it a step further, to make the game feel like it belonged in the GBC, as much as I could with Game Maker anyway.
Development started with the 7th Mario engine by Gate of Green Baron Games, formerly known as DeeY, CatezeeY, Gatete and other names - that was on Game Maker 8. At this point in time I had already decided the game would have roughly 5 "worlds", and decided on how exactly it would end. I would even hint at a possible 3rd installment... but not directly related to Luigi and the other two games. That idea is still not completely scrapped, but is unlikely that it will ever see the light of day.
A couple years passed, and I was still developing the game (as well as arranging AND re-arranging music, the more I figured out how sounds from the Game Boy sound chip SHOULD sound like, its limitations and whatnot, though this time around I was mostly using some music just taken directly from those same obscure GBC games I've mentioned before) and I had a slightly outdated copy of the source code on the cloud. But one fateful day in 2016, my external hard drive, who I bought, ironically enough, to backup important things, such as the game, was acting up due to a faulty cable... it would still work, until the day it stopped, and even caused my entire Windows installation to just... not work anymore. So a few weeks stranded on the islands of Linux, I still couldn't get that external hard drive to work again, and a new cable couldn't fix it. Nor data recovery tools. And to this day nothing that I've tried could bring it back to life... not everything in there was important, but progress on the game was there and it was lost. All I had was my backup in the cloud, which wasn't the most up to date thing, but it was better than having no game at all.
Before trying to regain the lost progress though, I decided to attempt something many would consider to be lunacy: to port over the game's code, from the outdated Game Maker 8, to the newer (but also outdated now) Game Maker Studio 1.4.
I was already familiar with it, but porting the game over meant having to replace a lot of now obsolete functions, and, possibly the worst thing - initializing uninitialized variables, for you see, we users of the classic Game Maker loved one very convenient feature that enabled a very bad coding habit for many - treating unknown local variables as zero... and the game's engine was full of them. It probably still has one or two of that in the code to this very day, but I managed to fix most of it I'm pretty sure... well, that came with other issues too, but those were eventually also taken care of. Fixing those issues and even other issues I had even in the Game Maker 8 version motivated me to continue work on the game, and eventually I added back some of the progress I lost. But one other thing was lost along with the source - my exact ideas for the ending, potential bosses and levels... just ideas in general. But... they probably weren't that great anyway. One thing I do remember is that the original ending would've had Luigi retrieving the "Nothing", and going back to Mario, who'd just facepalm in disbelief to this whole thing, and then... hang Luigi in a clothesline, saying "you don't move from here until I come back..." or something like that, for some reason. Then perhaps the potential "3rd game" would begin, with Mario this time. But Luigi deserves to shine, and so not too long ago I have decided to take the story into a completely different direction, since the original game was already a silly game with crossover characters added in for no reason, I think it wouldn't be bad if I went all out with the crossover aspect and make it a part of the plot. It still is a silly premise for a silly fangame at the end of the day. And in the last demos I've showcased I teased this aspect a bit. The same will apply here. In the last demo made during SAGE '21 the game had once again been ported over to a newer version of GameMaker, this time, the latest one - the 2.3 series (now just called "GameMaker [current year]"), and as a result I can now visually make cutscenes other than just programming them by using the new sequences feature, which is pretty neat. Of course that means I gotta stop being lazy and actually animate them. Eventually...
The transition process to the new version of GM was much smoother, straightforward and less problematic than the transition from GM8 to any version afterwards, so it wasn't much of an issue.
I used to have predictions about when the game would be completed, but not anymore, really. It'll be done whenever it's done, and I probably won't be making another fangame with this much content and ambition in my lifetime, so let this be the one.