Today was a slog. VERY difficult to work today, ran into a number of things that did not work as planned. However, as seen from below, something did happen today – and despite it looking very … odd (because that’s not the game, nor a background: that’s the _landscape_ or _level_ from a top-down view. All 16 of them, randomly shown. I could do 64, they pack in an area of memory, and I can unpack them.
Here’s what’s going to happen from here: I’m going to take this and work on it more this week, turning it into a game. I’m not going to worry about fitting the theme, because it’s not going to do that – this is going to be a RPG/JRPG/Roguelike thing. I may try to do RL7D, I may just say “I don’t care if it fits in something.”

This is not the game.
POSTMORTEM:
What went well
I got code done yesterday (Saturday) and didn’t have that many difficulties; that was due to pomodoro.
I had fun with the little guy generation _and stopped fiddling with it and moved on, knowing I could come back later_ – and I could improve them in various ways, but they were _good enough_ and I could make _lots of them_ – and had some ideas for more things I could fiddle with. (Mind you, it may need to be _2_ or _3_ numbers per character, because of the numeric limit I discovered today.)
The status bar looks good, not too shiny, not too “coder gfx”
What did NOT
The pico8 utilities from the ‘awesome pico-8’ thing: they .. didn’t work with pico-8 and swanky paint. I filed swankypaint bugs, but quite frankly, I think I can write the utils better. (And I already did the “join” thing using zsh.)
I didn’t have enough experience with Pico-8 internals to realize when I should be using the Pico-8 builtin, and not ‘make-my-own’ lua bit – or depending on an external lib. Some more experience with lua is also needed. (Strings are immutable – oh yeah I knew that but did it sink in? No, I thought “Oh if the integers are too small I’ll stuff the data in a string.” No, no you won’t.)
I didn’t get any music or sound in – and before the next thing, I’m going to need to do something with that. Because a full game needs that (:
What didn’t have any bearing on things
I never had a really good feel for the theme. I made some stuff for _a game_ but the theme didn’t enter into it, it didn’t give me any inspiration, it was just there. I didn’t _worry_ about it, other than during reviews of things when I would say “I have no idea how I’m working the theme into this.”
The ideas I did have – they might have worked into something, but they weren’t really go-do-it ideas.
What I would like to work on next with this
Text stuff. I need to see how I can generate text, possibly from a 2nd cart, and use it in the game. There’s the possibility for colored text for emphasis, I haven’t done that yet.
I have to determine if I’m going to do a pseudo-3d-view for it, or if I’m going to do a top-down view. Top-down is easier, but I think the 3d bit may work out nicer.
The level bits make good ‘forest’ areas, but I should try a ‘town’ generation and a ‘building’ generation and a ‘dungeon’ generation.
Adventure gameplay.
So yeah, this one – I’ll work on it more in the next few days – then work on Amiga stuff (: