I’ve made some great progress and I’m satisfied with where I am for now. I think it’s time to hit the hay.

After some testing, I realized that, although randomized, the same patterns seemed to show up over and over, even when running on a real Atari 2600 (courtesy of a Harmony cartridge). So even if I had a means of randomizing a semi-decent cave, it would appear more pattern-based than any designed cave.

In short, instead of scrolling the playfield at the mid-way point as initially intended, I’ll allow the player to hit the far right wall and will then load in a random map and set the player sprite back to the far left side. It doesn’t have the visual elegance of a constantly scrolling background, but there was something I neglected to consider:

Each of the playfield blocks are 4 pixels wide, so they can’t smoothly scroll in. Either I wait 2-4 loops before bringing in a new playfield block (which means the player’s sprite would just be hovering statically in the center of the screen until then) or the playfield will scroll by too fast for one to reasonably be expected to react.

At least the use of multiple playfields solves that problem. I’ll need to make up a couple dozen modular sections that can be randomly fit together. Hopefully the modularity doesn’t become distractingly noticeable.

Ah, well. That’ll be for tomorrow! Then, once I have playfields loading in correctly, I’ll finish the bouncing missile part of the echolocation and add in random enemies to mix things up a bit.