Another mountain of z80 assembly has been conquered. I will get these MACROs figured out eventually. Introduced a framework for procedural generation of the level as the player moves forward. Then spent several hours teaching my sprite drawing system how that worked. It can now place sprites in the appropriate place onscreen, relative to their (procedural) parent chunks. This should let the level be different on every playthrough, assembled out of designed pieces but stitched together by the engine. The major challenge is the low bit depth; 256 pixels is not terribly wide, and even 64k pixels would be reached plausibly in a runner, depending on how fast we let the player go.

Animations got some bonus features, much more of @cromo's artwork is shown, and the basics of player input and collision are laid down. Two days in and we're looking very game-like. Not bad! The major hurdles of the engine design are finally figured out, and now we just need to flesh out the game mechanics, and add a ton of content, and polish, polish, polish. Onwards to the second 90%!

(Apologies also for the quality of this gif. My linux workstation was not feeling desktop capture today; this was the cleanest of like 12 attempts.)