As good as it is, I don't want to copy it outright.

The first fire was just plain bad and I still need to clean up a lot of rough edges on my latest fire, but I think it'd be helpful to know what you're seeing if not a fire, so I can easier fix my mistakes.

I honestly haven't played too many of them, as most are japan only/no one talks about them enough for me to care to dig them up. Most have heard of Castlevania III, though. I haven't gone over it with a fine tooth comb, but from what I remember from it... no. The artists didn't really take advantage. In fact, they may not have actually used the extended attributes (what allows for a different palette per 8x8 region instead of 16x16) at all, they may have chosen MMC5 for any of the other cool coding things it offers. I've seen "regular" NES games that look much better. Look at these backgrounds! All with "regular" graphical limitations.

That's because the Japanese version of Castlevania III didn't actually use MMC5, I believe.  Instead it had a special chip to greatly improve the music quality.

You have a point with mentioning other consoles.  I'll just go ahead and consider this an 8K game or whatever it would need.  A game like this is unorthodox for the Atari 2600 to begin with (unless you count the Swordquest games) so I can probably consider this a game that would have been bigger and premium of back then.

Thanks for the compliments as well.

The one thing that would make the game implausible would be ROM storage, since it relies on a lot of bitmap graphics (I just show the ones for one type of wall and one type of enemy, but you can imagine there would be a lot more variety) as well as maps to navigate (some Atari 2600 games are lucky to even have more than one screen or level).

I'm also thinking about signing up to atariage.com's forums, just for kicks and giggles.

Looking good, I can make out the face, loin cloth, and boots quite well. I don't quite understand the armor visually, I see gaps from the color changes, are you thinking of filling those gaps in the the lizardman with Missile pixels?

Nope.  They're meant to be "reflective" of the background based on how I tend to shade metal.  It makes more sense on a dark background (at night), but I felt I needed to make it look reasonable at daytime too.

I looked up your inspiration a bit, are you thinking of using the clipped background for HUD space and create a couple icon stacks on the left & right of the screen since that would work well?

Maybe, but only for actions specific to how one would deal with monsters before battle (attack, flee, parlay, etc), and considering this is the Atari 2600 that kind of gameplay is likely out of the question anyway.

In fact, I've decided another reason it'd be best not to care about the sides of the screen is because then I can represent different sizes of monsters by making them wider or thinner.

The actual HUD elements I've decided is a N-E-S-W compass and map coordinates because besides a mini-map, those are the most immediately useful for that type of screen.  Pressing the fire button will bring up a different screen for if you need to see other information.

Later today I'll post some "camp" and battle screenshots that I'm working on, but here's the compass display I made similar to how you described a score display.



@Helm: I'm glad I'm not the only one taking interest.