Hey, thanks for playing and for the feedback!
While the process was tedious at times, it was also a lot of fun and educational. It was tedious because I for some reason decided to hard-code all of the coordinates for the borders, which meant a lot of looking back and forth from the code editor to the map and vice versa. This also took up a lot of time that I could have spent doing other things such as, well, adding a collision detection system for instance, or maybe making more levels.
As for the Trijam #333 part 1, well, as you could probably already tell, I've missed it. But I will definitely try to make it to #333 part 2 and 3, but then I will be using the Godot game engine instead, because I have a bit more experience with it than I do with PICO8.
Apologies for the late reply; I just got back a few days ago from a vacation, so I hadn't checked Itch.io for a while.
Thank you for your kind words,
have a great week!