Woebegone: An “The Oregon Trail” Homage - DevLog: Day 6 (05/30/24) - "Oh, Clara ..."

Poor, sweet, gentle Clara ...

Dysentery hath taken thee ... without remorse or pause ...

To be fair, I've Died of Dysentery four times, myself, this week ... once, even, before breakfast (which seemed a bit rude) - so it's not just Clara.  Nor Harriet; though her days are clearly numbered.  If she contracts Dysentery again, even if it is from Terry, I may just leave her behind ... along with that 1,300 lbs of meat I can't carry ...

Lots has happened in the last 10 days.  Depressingly little of it related to progressing this project (though it is hard to be too upset about fishing and shark-diving on/off Bimini).  But, I did manage two solid days of project-related "stuff.".  Of that ...

• About 20 hours were just playing "The Oregon Trail", taking copious notes, while revisiting sections of R. Philip Bouchard's book, “You Have Died of Dysentery – The Creation of The Oregon Trail”.
• Some on-paper work on the UI, especially the summary, data-entry and trading activities (per earlier posts, there's some definite MULE inspiration here).
• Building several, single-function, test-beds for various MADS and Atari 8-bit functionalities/behaviors.
• Restructuring the repository (that'll likely go public next week).
• Updating my various MADS macros (still not sure that I won't, with his kind indulgence, go with @kenjennings excellent work there ... maybe with a minor addition to the DL stuff).
• Ham-fisting my way through some updated "graphics" (see below, and ignore the colors - what shows in game, vs. my editor, are unrelated):

Yes, the above can be optimized, but it also needs to include other images for various aspects of the parallax backgrounds on the "Travel Screen", so the entire 128-character set (maybe more than one) will likely get consumed anyway!

Anyway ...

Progress should be a little faster for the next couple or three weeks.  I expect the next update, hopefully this weekend, will include the "final" (graphics improvements notwithstanding) layout, and the ability to "Press [START] to Die of Dysentery", which will be in the form or both a build/.XEX and being able to make a coherent repository public.

Have to decide on how this will, in its final incarnation, be "exposed".  Principally that comes down to a choice between .ATR or .CAR ... played off against my desire that this runs WELL on as much actual, original, hardware, that won't compromise the end "product".  If I made the "landmark" graphics optional, it looks like it could run in a simple, non-bank-switched, cartridge.   Maybe it necessitates multiple versions.  

More to come ... but despite slower updates ... I'm still having a blast with this - which is what will keep it going.