First of all let me say "Hello." I've been a lurker on this site and forum for some time now and it looks like the time for me to "join" and dig deep into the documentation archived here has arrived.
An idea for a game hit me this morning as I zombied my way through work.. but not only did it hit me, it practically flooded my mind. So I wrote down all I could and as I wrote more ideas were pouring in. For some reason, without even realizing it, I was thinking about the game running on an NES. Which is why I'm here.
First let me get this out of the way. I'm a programmer. I've made several games before and I've made a handful of simple RPGs before. I started on Commodore 64 and Basic. I moved up to a 386 and Turbo Pascal and eventually Turbo C++. I even created two full-fledged RPGs for a TI-85 graphing calculator in high school. The common factor here is that all of these (even the calculator to an extent) were structured programming languages. I did copy & paste some assembler graphics routines for my Pascal and C++ games but never bothered learning how they worked. My senior year of high school, the first and only time they had enough people to form a Computer Science III class, we did a few weeks of x86 assembler but I never remembered past the one project we did.
So my hurdle here is tackling low-level programming. I'm here to ask for advice on where to start on my road for knowledge and for an evaluation on how difficult my projected project will be. The complexity of my vision is somewhere between Dragon Warrior I and II though on a smaller scale. Basically I see three main routines: exploration, battle and scenario. The exploration aspect seems to be the most complex aspect on a technical level and certainly doesn't require much in the way of needing advanced techniques for speed and action.
While I sift through the site maybe someone can give me a few places to start. My primary goal is to create a demo of a character walking around a four-way scrolling map. If I can get that far I'm confident the rest will be fairly simple in comparison.
An idea for a game hit me this morning as I zombied my way through work.. but not only did it hit me, it practically flooded my mind. So I wrote down all I could and as I wrote more ideas were pouring in. For some reason, without even realizing it, I was thinking about the game running on an NES. Which is why I'm here.
First let me get this out of the way. I'm a programmer. I've made several games before and I've made a handful of simple RPGs before. I started on Commodore 64 and Basic. I moved up to a 386 and Turbo Pascal and eventually Turbo C++. I even created two full-fledged RPGs for a TI-85 graphing calculator in high school. The common factor here is that all of these (even the calculator to an extent) were structured programming languages. I did copy & paste some assembler graphics routines for my Pascal and C++ games but never bothered learning how they worked. My senior year of high school, the first and only time they had enough people to form a Computer Science III class, we did a few weeks of x86 assembler but I never remembered past the one project we did.
So my hurdle here is tackling low-level programming. I'm here to ask for advice on where to start on my road for knowledge and for an evaluation on how difficult my projected project will be. The complexity of my vision is somewhere between Dragon Warrior I and II though on a smaller scale. Basically I see three main routines: exploration, battle and scenario. The exploration aspect seems to be the most complex aspect on a technical level and certainly doesn't require much in the way of needing advanced techniques for speed and action.
While I sift through the site maybe someone can give me a few places to start. My primary goal is to create a demo of a character walking around a four-way scrolling map. If I can get that far I'm confident the rest will be fairly simple in comparison.