Meteoroid

+Bruce-Robert Pocock · October 9, 2021

Yes, I spelled that right.

This is something I've toyed around with alongside Grizzards, which is progressing itself. Real life work has had me a little bogged down so I don't really have much to show for it, but in honor of yesterday's release from Nintendo I wanted to whet folks' appetites.

There are two things that I find technically interesting about Meteoroid compared to Grizzards. One is that I'm using the SC RAM (128 bytes extra) for a buffer for the screen bitmap, allowing things like destroying blocks and the like. As you might guess, the screen is a 40×12 block layout, although the map stores columns at 1⁄4 that resolution horizontally. The other is that I'm toying with supporting "cloud saves" using a PlusCart (in addition to allowing SaveKey/AtariVox saves) as an option.

You probably won't see much more of this until Grizzards is fully in Beta, but this clip shows off the player obtaining two different power-ups, encountering an enemy, opening a door, and then the scroll-into-next-room code kinda crashing as it reads garbage memory. And yes, that weird jumping effect actually happens right before the door opening routine. It's super buggy and not really playable in its current form, but maybe it'll be out in time for