SNKRX VS moonshotadv

One thing that really helped me is looking at the source code and assets of one game that I really enjoyed -- SNKRX, the creator of the game, a327ex, put everything on Github so you can take a look how a finished game looks: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX/. The repo even includes the various images needed for Steam, this was very nice so I could make sure some of the assets I made aren't unfit for their purpose: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX/tree/master/assets/media . There are also some Photoshop files provided on the Steamworks FAQ which are very useful too, but they mainly show just in which area of the image you shouldn't put important text etc.

If it helps, here's a devlog for a reasonably successful game built in love2d.

SNKRX/devlog.md : daily breakdown of what he actually worked on from the start for his SNKRX game

SNKRX daily devlog for the first 3 months << very detailed of what he was doing each day

I'm the developer of SNKRX and on top of what most other people mentioned, the truth of the matter is that making games is hard and making games while working on someone else's codebase is even harder. Anyone who has the capacity to do anything useful with your game's codebase will likely also have the capacity to make their own game from scratch, so they'll just do that instead.

SNKRX is a commercial game and is open source (MIT), but it's not an open source project -- the developer is focused on improving their game for their gaming community and not building a development community around the game.

I made a jam game a few months ago where I abstracted out the levels into a JSON file. I'd imagine you could do something similar and it'd likely be more flexible than your bitmap method. In case it's useful, here is the actual example I'm talking about: https://github.com/elennick/moonshotadv/blob/main/levels/levels.json