I fell off my ship: A late entry to Bitsy Jam #92

Hello? Is this on? Oh hi! Errmm yes, yes, welcome. I wanted to say something about this Bitsy game I made in a few days or so! But maybe I let you just play it? Oh, you have? 

Okay okay well, what do you want to know? ... well, how about I tell the story of how hard it was to make a deceptively simple mechanic, and then you tell me how you'd have done it a thousand times easier (please)?

Brace yourselves because it's a bit confusing:

At the start of the game you try to reach your ship, but it keeps slipping away. Usually, Bitsys do this by changing room on each step while restricting the player movement to a line, for example. However, I wanted players to be able to move anywhere, each movement taking them to the next room. In each room, the ship appears to be farther away.

My first approach was tinkering with the edit-room-from-dialog hack, but there were too many sprites to replace and since I wanted to be able to tweak the different ship positions to have nice spacing, it felt it was too tedious. So I wanted to go with the method of changing rooms (I did end up changing individual sprites to tweak the position of the ship anyway. I don't know why I didn't use Libresprite to plan it properly and export the sprites... I guess I like pain).

So what I had to do is create a one-way exit for each possible player position, which grew exponentially on each room. Thankfully, I saved some time by copy-pasting the exits from the code. But it still required tedious, repetitive manual labour.

I did have an idea where I could fill each room with an invisible item using the edit-room-from-dialog hack, and such item would store the player's position and use that to spawn it on the next room. But I couldn't figure out how! A nice person answered my question about this in this forum post, but I had already done the dumb work.

TL;DR: Never underestimate the work that goes onto Bitsys. It's usually a LOT more than it looks.

Well, I hope you enjoyed it! I'm trying to get music made for it, which should elevate the experience a thousand percent, as audio often does.

Alright, see you... out there.