Make a demo (which removes 'changing views' and needing to worry about controlling input from a user) on tic80/pico8, and then use the concepts you did there and do the same thing on some 8 bit platform - NES would actually be good because while c64 uses the same chip, there's a lot of ... "oh I need to have a stable raster" stuff which is not REALLY neccesary but "perfectionists" like me get bogged down in (:
but: prototype, then when you know how to do the effect in one thing, deal with the limitations and changes. It's a good way of breaking it down to smaller blocks to work on.