Gemintronic

Not an informed answer. But, I think the dev who yanked things was mostly involved with arcade cores. So, not a biggie for me since I test homebrew with the MiSTer. It's the fact it could happen again with cores that I DO regularly use that worries me. I hope they find some sort of compromise where update_all only creates or updates existing cores/files. Had no idea it could remove them.

The ceiling may be random stuff getting removed when doing an update_all. Been hearing people complain about cores and games just disappearing. Not feeling being paranoid and backing up 1tb+ TF cards just to see if something has been updated.

That's OK. Looks like Mr. Sujano will keep us in the loop. Very cool!

Unless a particular person could effect how widely spread your games are don't worry about buzz for your creations. Traction is very, very hard for homebrewers. But, you already know this

Not a correction: just some explanation Sharkstorm was built off of my initial concept. The general release by Neo Games was Twist R Shark which came with improved spritework and feedback from Scott Dayton of Neo Games.

The SNES wouldn't be my first choice for getting homebrew wins under my belt. The Scorpion Engine is a low/no code dev suite for the Amiga, Genesis and Neo Geo (very experimental). https://forums.atariage.com/topic/354231-scorpion-engine-for-sega-genesis-game-making/ I remembered one other option for GBA using BASIC but it's looong unmaintained. https://github.com/uli/dragonbasic

It all boils down to what you can actually do. You'll be on your own for many of these compilers without much of a community to fall back on. So, pick a specific compiler and keep at it.

PVSNESLib is the easiest way until the NES Maker people move forward. https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib?ysclid=luvwwas174140684538 I had only partial success with TRSE but it's easier than learning C. https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-but-begin/downloads/

I may be just making things up at this point. Could have sworn you could drop the bat into the inside of the yellow castle. Vaguely remember dragging the bat around when he and I grabbed the same item. Shoved him into the yellow castle and he tended to stay there so one could adventure forth with less problems.

Not an expert answer. But, the most common technique is layering single color sprites on top of eachother.

The rights may get complicated even more since Collectorvision owns the Exidy name.

In my games C@tacombs of Chaos and Dragon Chalice all the dungeon levels are procedural. The best I could do is 255 floors with each floor being made up of 16x16 rooms (255). In C@tacombs you rarely need to go past floor 8 so you don't see this. In Dragon Chalice I limit each playthrough to 4 16x16 room kingdoms. I use a seed so that each time you win it gives you a different set of 4 kingdoms. Up to 255 variations. The real challenge is figuring out how to make each dungeon floor interesting with few repeating patterns. With C@tacombs it's easy to see patterns in the dungeon layout. Dragon Chalice has the opposite problem where sometimes it feels like level layouts are completely random from screen to screen.

Start small. Really, really small. Like, make a "game" that just moves a sprite around. BasiEgaXorz can make SegaCD games. https://devster.monkeeh.com/sega/basiegaxorz/ The BEX forum is here: https://devster.proboards.com/board/1

Very interested! Please add me to the list.

Were there any special challenges setting up the dev environment (IDE, compiler, other tools) for C dev on the 2600?