Tearing my hair out, but this is what learning feels like, right?

So apparently tables in PICO8/luastart at [1], not [0]. (audible groan). Would have  been nice to comprehend that some time ago instead of banging my head against a wall for a few hours, but that's alright.

Today I learned that, as well as some SERIOUS table/object nonsense, as well as the ability to creatively and arithmetically convert series/sequences in order to bend the code to do my bidding (and by "the ability to ...", I mean when my own capabilities, excel, and coffee failed me, I turned to ChatGPT like the loser degenerate I am)

First off - seriously, look at this table/object for each "area".

It is insanity, and I've only added more and more to it... AND THERE ARE 4 OF THEM IN THAT OBJECT. (Forgive me if I'm using words like table/array/object interchangeably. I have no idea what I'm doing)

So the problem lies in the fact that I have 4 unlockable boxes or "areas", so those are indexed 1-4. I then have 12 maybe 13 different cursor positions setup to  index to those areas, as well as draw the cursor sprite. Those are all tied to an unrelated x,y coordinate.... its just a mess. I'm trying to tie everything back to cursor.pos but that requires then making the cursor positions which can be 5,6,11,12 for the unlock buttons, and another 4 for the upgrade, as well as a different 4 for the click to collect reward icon/sprite/avatar.... ugh.

All in all though - pretty pleased with the progress so far. I feel like I'm spending more time on this than I should, but oh well.

Tomorrow will likely be setting up the sprites better (clearly they aren't working), , and scaling them since they're 16x16 right now and I planned for them to be 32x32 in those item boxes.. or I suppose I could shrink the boxes, but I really don't want to do that. I also still need to fix the UI so unlock means unlock and upgrade means upgrade, right now they're flipped.

I also need to think about the actual timer mechanics and rewards, yanno - core gameplay, and how to properly implement that, but hey - I can move a cursor around a screen and make it do stuff, that's the hard part, right?