Testing interactions and creating reusable functions

so after all the work from yesterday It might feel like I have not done as much but I have done a lot. To summarise I fixed some sprite issues along with some game map work, I tweaked the explosions and reworked some of the code to better use the colours available as the explosion dissipates, I also re jigged the code for how big explosions would be where on the screen as well as making sure they appear behind and in front of some backgrounds. I reworked the clouds and got them working as I wanted, I also implemented bombs and got them spawning and working as expected plus triggering explosions when they hit the ground.

To test the explosions and make sure I had them right I put together this test app to see what happens. You move the black box around the screen and hit z and an explosion will go of where the box is, this allowed me to check the varying sizes up and down the screen as well as explosions behind the tree line and behind the moving clouds.

On top of this I also started to track what other major pieces of work have to be done to have a bare bones game. I already have the basis for health and score in there, so I foresee only 3 other pars to code. Those are Player, bullets and collision. For the time being I am going to work on collision next and bullets after, the reason for this is I am still not 100% sure how I am going to do the player.

In both of the previous makes of this game, the player is stationary and pivots the gun barrel to angle shots. Now I could do this, but with pico8's screen size being somewhat limited I am not sure if that is the best solution this time around. Another thought woudl be to make the game proper 8 bit style, and have a moving player left to right that shots upwards a la space invaders, or I could take it one step forward and allow movement left and right but also the turret to shoot up and diagonally left and right. At the moment I have no clue how I want to do this, so I might eve try all 3 methods if they are easy enough.