Meteor Guard (video) - 1k game

Recently I had a friend approach me for a 1k or smaller NES game. It is part of a larger project that they are working on, so unfortunately I can't share the ROM or source. I thought I'd post the video here for maybe some discussion on developing tiny games like this, or whatever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QF74FRWnc0

In total it uses 1,020 bytes. I could've saved more room had I planned ahead and rearranged the chr in a particular way. I might make an attempt at some more of these, because it's fun trying to come up with ways to save a byte here or there : ) Anywho, thar ya are.

Ha ha, pretty minimal. That's neat.

That's nice. Well done, and congrats for idea

I assume you guys already know about Escape From Pong?

That and Hot Seat Harry.

I know some demoscene programs borrow assets from fonts and .DLLs built into Windows. On the NES, is there any way to generate tiles from RAM/ROM areas or hardware features? Generating tiles "from nothing" would seem to be a useful technique for 1k games.

I could see a 1K game compo where each game is expected to be won or lost in 3.2 seconds but can use subroutines and tiles from a library that I'd provide, or subroutines and tiles from another entry if the entries are submitted together. Good or bad idea?

Do you prefer to play games no longer 3.2 seconds?

Tepples is specifically referring to the WarioWare series, wherein there are a large number of tiny different games that mostly take no more than 3.2s.

I actually looked to Hot Seat Harry for RAM clearing : )

I think the tile part is kind of a neat idea. It reminds me of Battle of the Bits 1 hour thing-uh-muh-bobs where you are provided with certain samples to use. Not too keen on having to keep a game to 3.2 seconds though.



There is a bit of something like that in this program, kinda. The explosion graphic when you shoot a meteor isn't something that was drawn up. In the routine I use to populate the chr data, I just read past the point of the data stored, populating the final tile with whatever data followed. This saved 16 bytes on another tile. So, it's not really from nothing, but still it was a way to save some space.