Shiny Little Pieces

Lots of stuff done recently, but no time to write about it. Let's start with the easy stuff. Wrecks work now. So when things crash they explode and create fire and debris particles (from the particle generator!) then create a smoking hulk of a thing that continues to smoke and burn like so many doomed moths. It's actually pretty cool, and creates the chaos and general destruction that I wanted for Paper Zeppelin.
With that out of the way, I went ahead and created a level using Excel (I need to think of something else to call the editor, but really, it's a re-purposed tool. So I'm at a loss really). Discovered a couple of things. 1), the level at 500 tiles wide takes a good amount of time to finish off, but is still short enough to stay interesting. 2) It's easy to make stuff too easy and way too hard. Right now, the first level is too easy and needs additional tweaking and tester, um, testing. 3) The system didn't like loading a level that was shorter than the one before it.
So regarding that last thing, I hated it. No matter what I tried, the issue was that the system would load up the next stage, but simply ignore the bit where I told it to reset the place in the level. Consequently, when I tell a computer to look for something that isn't there (like the 57th letter in the alphabet) it tells me to "Please Reinstall Universe and Re-Start" also, to go straight to hell. So I beat on that until I got it functioning. In the end I told it to skip a cycle. Since each cycle is a 60th of a second, I can get away with it without creating any gaps in the level. So on a step where computer wants a number beyond the scope of the stage, I tell it to reset to 0. Then, if and only fuggin if, the number is currently a gods damned zero, load the new level. So that's good now.
That's it for now I guess. I'm tired and ready for sleeps.