More with title screen

I've currently spent some time working on the inventory screen, which for some reason hasn't been easy to get excited about. It seems like a lot of hassle trying to get everything to nicely display.

The first part is getting the player's keys to display. Because you can tell the atari to triple each sprite, it's easy to get potentially 6 keys to line up on the screen. The trick is getting the timings exactly right to change the color appropriately for each key.  I'm pretty close at this point.

Unfortunately, my code to pick the colors based on the key type isn't quite right yet.

The next part will be to display numbers (or if that's too hard, bars) for health, attack power, armor level, number of arrows, and other items.

Then what I really want to do is also have a password system, similar to early NES games, where you can continue by entering a password.  But I'm not sure that I'm going to have ROM space -- showing the current password is pretty easy, but a password entry system might take up too much room. We'll see.

So getting bored and annoyed with that, and after seeing some of the amazing title screens that folks on AtariAge have come up with, I decided to rework my title screen. I played around with a few designs (I tried a sky into ocean with waves that come and go on a beach, but when I asked my friend Tim what he thought it was supposed to be, he couldn't tell, so I gave up on that idea), but finally settled on this road going off to the horizon, with trees around it. It was fun to make, and pretty simple to put to together:

I guess now it's back to the subscreen....