Want to expand my skills after PONG. Where to go from here?

OK all,

Starting in January this year I made my first NES project. It was called Ninja Slapper and it was basically PONG but with you're guy's help I took it a little farther. It had animation on the characters, title and ending screens, and full sound engine from Metal Slime and the music was composed by me.

I had a blast doing it and then took some time off to start learning Python, however in the midst of learning Python I realized I just wasn't enjoying Python all that much so I want to go back to NESASM.

The problem is, I don't know where to start to take my skills further. For PONG I had a nice little spring board in the Nerdy Nights Tutorials. Now I think I want to do a side scroller with a mapper but I don't really know how to go about getting started on that? I know many of you on this board have learned how to write such code and better. How did you get started?

Any and all suggestions would be great.

Thanks!

-M

Scroll something, or make a game with different/more objects.

It may help to go over some source code, both homebrew and commercial disassemblies.

Unless you're looking for fancy effects, character bankswitching animation and other tricks I suggest you to use UNROM/UOROM, there's even a tutorial on NintendoAge, it's really easy and can hold 8/16x 8kb banks. However you have to copy the tiles from ROM to Character RAM, but that shouldn't be a problem. Battle Kid uses UNROM EDIT: it's UOROM, plus there are cheap, unwanted games like Microprose's SILENT SERVICE that are also easy to find that you can use to make your own carts.

You can build a simple platformer, or a strategy game, or a puzzle game, it's up to you really, just don't try to add too much complexity on your game or you will get frustrated.