Making great progress on my "Fuze" game; I don't want to give away what it is yet, but I started by writing the engine without any graphics, instrumented instead with prints of all of the key variables. I tweaked the heck out of its parameters, even adding "joy-con" rumble support to the movements.

Once I got all of that working, I drew the player sprite frames. Then tonight, I wired the player animation and frame rendering to the underlying engine, which was already written. That kind of disconnected, "walk before you run" approach really helped me break the larger problem into smaller, more manageable ones.

My next step is designing stage tiles, creating an actual level out of them, then getting the stage and collision detection working around the now totally functional player. After that, it will be designing an actual game using what will have essentially been a tech demo to that point.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: I wrote my own music-playing code, adapted from one of the built-in tutorials, and programmed four songs into my project, which I composed using this cool online sequencer. Some other people in the community are working on full-blown MML parsers, so I may swap to one of their "libraries" at some point. Kind of reminds me of the Genesis "sound driver" days!