ok so today was about physically implementing this guy, which took longer than expected... this is what they mean when they talk about scope.
(Between you and me, I call him spikey mikey)
However, it works surprisingly well, for a large batman shadow which spans three screens (thats actually 3 images, as evidenced by the redundant sheep)
in the end, this was made about as I expected:
1. set up some external variable to control the three sections all at once
2. assign those sections visual parts similar to the code determining which block is assigned to each platform
3. set up some basic roaming behavior. just left and right.
also, the sprite sheet for mikey:
the first two are "calm" the second two are "angry", and the last one is asleep. The way I have it set up, based on a random integer, it will switch between the first 4 forms, the angry forms only when standing still. As the game progresses, the angry form should become less and less frequent, and mikey should move slower (this is easily operated using my gamewide "gamemode" variable to indicate progression, like from the title screen to the game)
(if you're wondering why the sheep and the lambs never got sprite sheets, its because I never but the images into a singular tileset. I put them in before I learned about blit-ing parts of images so each frame of the sheep and lamb are individual images in the game file)
I'm going on a trip this week, but I'm hoping that between the hubbub I can finish my game!