I have been toying with the idea of a classic game which started on NES but also bounced over to the old IBM pc, commodore 64 and amiga. In recent years it has even gone moble (phone that is). I don't intend to get pretty with it or too busy on the screen but if I can find a viable and efficient way to do some simple full screen side scrolling, I think it may be possible and rather playable. I had thought that all levels might be too much for ROM but after watching walkthrough videos of speed runs, THere doesn't seem to be too aweful much but rearangement of backgrounds and platforms. Like I said nothing too pretty just playable and hopefully fun.
Introducing Castlevania 2600. I have been working on laying out and delegating sprites for certain things. But not a whole lot further.
So far player 0 is simon. and variations of missle 0 and a duplicate of player 0 with diffrent sprite data are the whip and mace. The missle 0 is also used for most if not all of his alternate weapons. Player 1 falls under 2 things. Starting with candelabras. This allows 4 levels of fixed locations horizontaly for candelabras to be located. Their sprites never change so that makes part of it easier when duplicating sprites upto 3 of course. Enemies fall under the second. They usually stay on platforms and ground in between Candelabras horizontal locations. If however they go across the plane of candelabras, they automaticaly take priority. Missle 1 is used for projectiles from enemies. Some enemies actualy use parts of the playfield and inturn fire projectiles using the ball. The ball can also be used for small medusa heads. There are other possibilites but these are a few.
I thought about what data storage and retrival might be like and have a few ideas but which may be a wrong direction to go in, could use some input here. If candelabras are a fixed distance from each other and only 3 can be on any row then each row can be represented by groups of bytes in ROM which is loaded into ram when that area is being displayed. Each row has it's own group totaling 4 rows at any given time. For an example, say that each row is represented for a full level by 16 bytes a piece. Each bit represents a possible candelabra. Obviously a 1 is a candelabra a 0 means none. Each row extending from start of level to finish with 16 bytes gives 128 candelabras possible locations for a full level. This should be plenty but the number of bytes for each level could be changed. But as far as the candelabra go this hits a total of 64 bytes for storing raw candelabra data. Items from them is a diffrent matter.
the big hurdle to overcome is asymetrical playfield that scrolls. There won't be alot of resolution verticaly. Most areas are low pixel height except for significant detail where something has to stand out from the rest which is only in specific locations like dragon skull canons. There shouldn't be alot of color variations to the playfield graphics.
I now have some help with the game making process; unlike past projects, so hoping things go well, there may be a demo in the future. Anyone is welcome for their wisdom and insight if they feel this could be a viable project.
I also have started porting graphics over and hope they look good enough for a player to enjoy the game. I will append this soon with some images of characters I have came up with based from the originals.
I now have some simple layouts of simon with all 3 verions of his main weapon

Edited by grafixbmp, Sun Feb 8, 2009 11:27 PM.