Only managed to get to the smaller items on the list today, but they're still just as important as everything else. First up was to finish dynamic level loading. All screens adjacent to those that the camera can currently see are constantly being added to the list of screens to load. To ensure they only get loaded once however a 16x16 grid is used to keep track of which screens have already been loaded. Once a screen gets loaded it's added to the grid and won't be loaded again unless the player has traveled far enough for another screen to overwrite it.
Next I finished camera movement so that the camera can follow the player vertically as well as horizontally. While doing this I needed to build a vertically oriented part in my test level and realized that it's quite difficult to do so with only solid tiles in such a small space. So I also added functionality for semisolid platforms which only have collision from above.
Finally I gave the player a mid-air dash as the original design calls for. Took quite a bit of tweaking to get what I was looking for but it's finally in. Here what is looks like when put all together.
My next goal will likely be an animation system and implementing some animations for the player. Player animations have already been planned out on paper as well and are pictured below. So I just need to turn them into actual sprites and then build an animation system capable of playing them.
