So, eventually accomplished the goal of displaying a field full of lfowers after another couple hours of debugging tonight after overloading the PPU a few times, getting trapped inside code blocks that weren’t executing but eventually breaking free of them!
I gave in to easy mode sadly tonight and chose to use a byte per tile over cramming level data into fewer bytes. It may result in more obstacles for players to travel through (I’m still thinking hedges would be a good slow down / sticky trap for players btw) But genuinely relieved to get that field of flowers on screen without having to resort to turning the screen off.
Next up will likely be something to do with harvesting the pollen, but that’ll have to wait until Wednesday evening possibly now!