Lightpen would not work well on this (as has been stated). However mouse and joysticks will be supported. I hope.
There are some times in which the development work produces little visible results even when relatively good advances are obtained. The last days I worked on routines to load a room from a resource, creating the local objects and setting everything up. I also worked on how objects are loaded into the game, how they are added to the drawing queue, adding extra flags and fields that were necessary.
And I also included some basic routines that alter how a new room is displayed (with some kind of curtain effect, left to right or right to left to begin with).
Some code reorganization and bug solving later I have a new version of the engine which is 1K larger and inits the game as expected: loading script 0 and running it. From this script the first room is loaded, displayed, the camera is panned and then set to follow the Ego, which is set as Object 0 (boy). Changing the ego is easy and let the player manage other characters if the designer wants.
You'll see I also improved the scrolling in this video:
https://youtu.be/8X57xr6rnGk
I have some routes to follow from here now, but each one has its own obstacle. I need to start working on the full script language, but that implies working on a kind of compiler or writing test code will be a nightmare. I also need to work on the way to include masks for that elements that shall be drawn in front of the characters (such as the fence of the house if the user walks near the windows). This means adding a way to edit these masks in the editor and also a way to do the actual masking, which is not something trivial to do efficiently and supporting scans which have been set in INVERSE mode. I also need to start working on loading things from disk, but that is even more difficult, and needs some careful designing...
So many things to do yet, but progressing adequately
.