The 3 suggestions that I like the best were:
- Pew Pew Pew
- Reginald McGillicutty's Big Boom Blast Party
- Spacey McRacey
After some thought, I decided:
Pew Pew Pew just isn't google-able enough. There's too many cultural references to "Pew Pew Pew" nowadays, which will make my game get buried even if people are looking for it. And alternative spellings (someone suggested Pew Pue Pu) are just too weird.
Reginald McGillicutty blah blah blah....I love this one from author Jeffrey Aaron Miller. What disqualifies it is really the format of the game required for the game competition I'm hoping to enter with this. The requirements of the game use a NES cartridge format that's quite limited in video ROM, which means I have to share space between the title screen and gameplay. Which means I can't spend a ton on a giant fancy title screen. (Unless I'm misunderstanding the specs of the format, which is quite possible).
Which leaves Spacey McRacey. Which is what I'll go with for now until something changes my mind otherwise.
Tonight's work was the "start game" screen (not the title screen), where players push start to register that they're in the game. (since it's a 4 player game). Mostly, that involves drawing 4 big frames on the screen that each say "press start". So I've been working on a reusable routine for drawing frames on the screen of arbitrary size and location.
That's a task that should be pretty easy. But with the limitations of the 6502 combined with the oddities of how the NES handles background data updates, it's slightly more complicated that intuition would lead you to believe (to write any given chunk of background tiles, you have spend 4 instructions telling it what tile address you want to write to, then serially write data to a register, which is great for horizontal or vertical stripes, but annoying for an arbitrary rectangle in the middle of the screen, as you have to keep re-positioning the address register).
Anyway, it's getting there!
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