And there’s a good reason!  I spent at least 8 hours of yesterday stuck at one spot in the game - dealing with the + and - signs of camera position versus ship position (the ships are like individual tile maps, but those tile maps are placed in the world… kind of inspired by DrPetter’s Swarming Of The Machines!) versus player position versus waterline.  It is a trivial problem, solved in the end by swapping some signs around and actually watching which way things move (or, more quickly, by drawing a simple diagram, which I never did).  The reason I spent all day on it was that I was watching TV and not even trying to think about it.  Just haphazardly flicking values every so often.  I don’t think I’m very dedicated to this project.  But I’m gonna try some more today!

Once I finally stopped TV for a second though, I nailed that and now I have Miyamoto running and jumping along a set of 3 boats, quite successfully.  He has no animation, but whatever.  I think I will add enemies and things you can stomp to sink the boats today.  I’m not feeling very pressured.  The unofficialness is getting to me!

Okay, there’s now a ship editor that loads and saves!  You can’t actually choose which tile to use (of course, there is only one tile… but you can’t erase it!), but you can load, save, and exit.  And it shows you the waterline.

Pretty classy ship, huh?

Super Miyamoto!  I don’t have the foggiest clue how to actually animate him,  but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.  I really need to start on some code, I think…

Well, I spent all last night thinking up VS ideas, then watching TV and thinking of more, then when TV was over I said, “that’s it.  I’m going with Schrodinger Vs. Pavlov”.  I thought it’d be cool, an army of dogs that you can steer around with a bell cursor, vs. a guy who can place boxes that contain pop-up cats that may be alive or dead.  Then I was thinking it would be like a board game, where the Pavlov guy has cards with various dogs and bells and things, and the Schrodinger guy has dice with 3 alive-cat faces and 3 dead-cat faces.  The closest I got to an actual idea was that Schrodinger could commit his dice to various battles, and hope they were enough when actually rolled.  It didn’t actually make a game, though.

So this morning I woke up still with no ideas that worked, and finally decided it had to be the very first idea that struck me as solid.  I didn’t want to do a platformer, but here I go anyway: Miyamoto Vs. Yamamoto.  You’ll hop from ship to ship, bouncing on their various parts to sink them, then hop off before you sink with them.  It won’t be Mario, because you’ll be dodging fire directly aimed at you by the cannons and other oddities, and the ‘defeat each ship’ motif is a little different.  Got some ideas, anyway!  Time to build a ship editor!