Basic procedural sprite generation - buildings, people and quilts

Ok, I've now begun working in Pico-8. I haven't made a game in it before and haven't really explored the API or its Lua underpinnings for that matter. But it looks similar enough to p5.js/Processing, and I'm inspired after watching zep's great talk from 2018 at the NYU Game Center on Pico-8's design constraints that I'm feeling inspired. By the way, he uses the term Cozy Design Spaces to describe his constraints. I'm not motivated by the term cozy, especially here. One of the thing that excites me is that you can draw a bunch of minimal sprites inside the IDE/dev environment, and then draw them to screen. But you have to do some math to figure out how wide to draw and to place them on the map. I actually wish there were tighter constraints that all sprites are drawn at the same size but you specify their scale optionally to make them larger or smaller. But anyway, I've got to use the engine as it exists and I digress.

Step 1 was drawing sprites: 8 example people. 8 quilt squares. 8 buldings. Loosely my goal is to make a sort of procedurally generated village where you wander to different houses, meet people, and collect quilt squares. You then can return home and assemble these pieces into a quilt composed of the found squares, or remix their order. And that's about it. An alternative idea is to instead collect artifacts with procedurally generated descriptions, and maybe assemble some kind of wunderkammer. cabinet of curiousities for your own private institute like the museum of jurassic technology. Anyway, I'm improvising as I go, not necessarily a smart approach but I'm having fun. We'll see which direction I go. 

Another shorter talk I watched, by Mike Cook, on Procedurally Generating Information Games I found really inspiring. And I enjoyed his roguelike-ish desert "vignette" (I'm going to nick that term) called Nothing Besides Remains, where you wander a minimal desert environment, exploring described ruined remains. It's influencing this vignette I'm making here.

Anyway, here's a screenshot to give a flavor. Probably not super impressive right now, but it's where I'm at! Baby steps!