Ya know... as important as the title screen is in a game... I think in this game the explosions were far more important since you see them ALL the time.  That's why I made so many versions until I finally made something I was happy with.

Hard to believe I actually thought this looked great at one time.

This one is bigger!  Had to cut a few frames though.  This is the only explosion where I had a special case to do integer scaling in the kernel giving me a larger explosion with a low rom footprint, but burning precious kernel cycles!

The flashing colours draws your eyes in.  The constant colour explosions were easy to miss.

This was just a brief in between step for the next explosion.  At this point I had the full sized explosion!  Actually I think this one was too tall vertically.

Next step was adding some detail.  I didn't like it much though...

The final version.  I liked the circular shape.  You don't see many circles on the 2600.  Also the colours rapidly flash between dark and bright which catches your attention immediately even if you're not looking directly at the screen.  I also liked the dissipating puff of smoke on the last frame.  I wasnt able to clip these large explosions when they happened on the sides of the screen... so I just nudged them over so no clipping is required.  Kinda cheesey, but I think it was my best option.

I actually attempted to add more frames onto the final explosion (and failed).  I also considered making an even much larger explosion than the final one!  This would have introduced flicker and would have been a clipping nightmare.  It was time to move on.

Not every Atari game can do something like this... especially if the explosions occur in a formation of ships.  Because Oh Shoot is graphically a fairly simple game with only two sprites on screen it was pretty easy for me to make them bigger.

Lets compare them all side by side...