SpiceWare's Blog

Very cool! I'm glad you decided to give the ColecoVision a go. It's a great little system with tons of cool quirks, and I bet you can easily give Pixelboy and J-F a run for their money on 'best homebrews ever made'!

Thanks!

 

The SF is just an experiment with newcoleco's Sprite Demo and some graphics I had handy. While the sprites can be twice as wide(they can be 8x8 or 16x16) as on the VCS, the VCS sprites do not have a height limit. The snowman in Stay Frosty is 25 scanlines tall, so I used 16x16 sprites and split him into body & head. The sprites are also monochrome, so you have to overlap them to get multicolor characters. Overlapping is not without issues though as even though the CV supports 32 sprites, it can only show 4 per scanline. The snowman is using 4 sprites, with 3 overlapping at at given point. This means I could only show 1 other sprite in the same horizontal zone as the snowman. Other objects would be drawn using character graphics, so only fireballs would be affected by the limit. And since fireballs naturally flicker, 2 per zone is easily done.

 

I'll probably expand this experiment to a full blown game later, but first I'm going to do an original game, Dragon Defense Squad. I've had the idea for a while, just never got around to it on the VCS. It's basically Dragon Riders of Pern meets Missile Command. The bonus round is important as Dragon Dung is used to revitalize scorched earth.

Dragon Defense Squad? Dragon poop used to revitalize wasteland? This sounds too cool for words.

The siren call to finish Frantic got me. I'll return to my ColecoVision Diversion when Frantic's done as I still plan to do DDS on the CV.