Am I right in assuming that you aren't animating while the player is moving, only while they are stationary?

They move when Link moves, although, I have it 'animate' (aka, draw the new tile to the back buffer) the tiles that are visible. I might need to make that window a little bigger if Link moves and exposes a new tile...That should be a quick fix though.

Alright, that screenshot shows it much better. It does seem to animate much slower while link is moving though.

Oh, this is turning out quite well, nice job! I've been spending the last few days cleaning up an old RPG engine of mine, so it's cool to see someone working on making one, too!

I'm not sure how you process tile animation, but I have my tiles set up as something like:
tilesprite_ptr,tiletime,tilenextAll of the tiles are accessed as an indexed array, so tile0 is the first 4 bytes, tile1 is the next, etc. During initialization, I make a buffer of "tiletime,tile#" for each kind of tile. In an interrupt, I decrement the first byte (time counter), and if it hits zero, I use tile# to access the tile data and figure out "tilenext" and load that data into the slot, essentially evolving the tile into its next form. Further, when this happens, I set a flag indicating that the tilemap has to be rerendered, which is also processed in the interrupt.

Using an interrupt for the evolving the tile animations and rendering allows for consistent animation speed regardless of how bogged down the engine gets, and regardless of using 6MHz or 15MHz. When I toggle 15MHz mode, my sprite zips around the screen without causing the tile animation to change in speed, so it looks like my sprite is Flash

I'll get back to the animated tiles, cause I feel I can improve it...

Since I want Link to cut a bush, I've been working on the bush mechanics. Afterwards I'll work on sword mechanics...

I added 4 new routines: Replace Tile, Add Animation, Delete Animation, Draw Animation.

When Link cuts a bush, Replace Tile changes the map ID for the bush into a grass tile. When I do that, I add an animation over it to look like the bush disintegrates. I can add multiple animations to the same screen, and even specify what animation I want. It could be a bush being cut, or a spark of a sword, blowing up bomb, etc. I've been testing out these routines, and I think it looks good.

Check out the screen shot. These bushes don't stand a chance to Link's piercing gaze!

If you want to do it like in zelda games where enemies move around on the map you might want to start i9mplementing your engine being able to handle multiple moving objects at the same time, though. IDK as a practice it might be an idea to make bushes such "movable" objects?

True..I think bushes and rocks are part of the map background for link's awakening.

For starting enemies, I'll probably start with some static enemy, and get it to where I can have multiple static enemies on the map. They'll take damage, hurt link, and 'blow up' when their health's gone. Then I'll start working on a way to get them moving...idk. I'll have to think it through. There's a lot to consider. They have coordinates, actions, hitboxes, health, etc...

For the animated tiles, I was thinking of storing the addresses in a list, like I have illustraited above. Is that possible/how would I do that?

This is looking awesome, love it!

Alright, so it's been tricky getting this next step set up, but I think I got it.

I made a routine called CheckBush (I couldn't think of another name...). Depending on Link's direction, it checks the Tile ID for 6 points running along the sword. If any of those 6 points is in a tile with the bush ID, it replaces the bush with a grass ID, and adds a cut bush animation. Unlike the original L.A., I have it set up where you can cut 2 bushes at once if the blade lands in between both bushes. I like it...but I might change the cut bush animation to make it more leafy...

This is getting surprisingly big...i think the next step should be to put Link's sprite data, or map data in an app variable separate from the program..but I don't know how to do that, nor how to read from the app variable. Would I need to unarchive the app variable to just read from it? Any examples I can look at?

And for those who likes screen shots, watch Link mow his yard!