I try to work on this every day but it looks like I'm easily distracted. So I made up a schedule with various deadlines for the next 64 days so I know where I should be at.
Still looks quite feasible, even with eight areas. I'm close to halfway done the third area, which means it's ten days for each remaining area. It was slow at first (selecting, cutting, making, and modifying tiles, and that sort of miscellaneous preliminary stuff), hence why I'm only where I am now despite seriously starting in early December, I think, but it should speed up as I go. I don't actually expect that the last area should take ten days (it'll be more like Tourian than Chozodia, no items or fancy paths to route), so I might have a couple extra days for the final touches. It would be nice to have at least a whole week instead of just a few days for all the final touches, actually. If I reduce the number of areas by one (a real possibility), that would grant me quite a bit more time for the final touches since it's the polish that would sell it, not the number of areas.
I've done schedules like this before for reading textbooks while back in university. I would figure out how many days I had to read a book, and how many pages I'd have to read, divide the latter by the former, and then I'd know how much I'd have to read each day. Once I figured out how much I had to read each day, it was easy for me to start out by reading more than twice as much in the early days and then it became a game to see how far I could get ahead. Though it didn't make much sense to race ahead when it comes to reading for university, especially if I didn't always remember what I read. Perhaps it was my OCD kicking in, but if I read far enough ahead, I would recalculate the daily quota to see how much I'd reduced it by, which would encourage me to read more. It'd be like, "all right, if I read 60 more pages tonight, then I can read two less pages a day for the final month of the semester!" - and then I would read about 90 pages that night.
Again, maybe not the best tactic, because I was reading at the moment just to eliminate having to read later, and not necessarily learning at the right pace.
But if I can take that attitude and apply it to this, and make this a race against my own schedule for this project, I will certainly be motivated, and then maybe I'll be able to have eight areas with plenty of time for polish after all!
EDIT: Here's the schedule I made.
Note that it says I'm working on Area 2 this week. It's actually the third area, since this game has an "Area 0", my codename for the area since you can't revisit it - much like the openings of Super Metroid, Metroid Prime, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
