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I really like that jello! Both actually The aiming is a great addition. Things being at different angles feels commonly accepted for this sort of style. It might even actually add something to the soup, now when i think about it. A little whacky perspectives can go a long way to catch interest. European medieval, baroque and traditional japanese art styles (which i know terribly little about) does this in varying forms all the time, not to mention cubism. I wouldn't worry about it too much.


I'm sorry, i could have been a lot more specific. I think most of them are! The one that stands out to me is the one for the bricks, which feels like a representation of crushed brick, but perhaps not a direct derivate of the bricks that were there in prior to crushing.

Here's a quick mockup (though in a somewhat different style)


To the upper right is simply a metatile of crushed bricks. I made them from hacking away pixels from the original structure and moving them into a disarray. I also attempted to move them so that they'd break the tile grid somewhat, to signal the dissaray of a pile. To the upper left is some metatile variations made from the same four tiles. To the lower left they are put next to each other. Randomizing metatile content could perhaps work well.

I used the same technique when doing the brick walls and power ups blowing up animations for wrecking balls (there were some compromises and decisions, all frames didn't make it into the submission and others got changed. I just lazily took a snapshot that happened to be sitting on my desktop):

Deteriorating things that explode/destruct frame by frame feels easier to me, even if, say, only a few or even one selected frame would be used.

In the mockup above in the post, i made an interim frame between 'cracked' and 'destroyed' which would be redundant to the game logic, but helping in the process getting there.

I really like the title screen. I don't know why but it gives me an early Atari ST feel.

How much more do you plan to add to the game over the next few weeks? I ask because I notice that you left 9E40-9FFF,AD60-DFFF,EE40-FFF9 in the PRG ROM unused. That's over 21 KiB. If you aren't going to add more than 5 KiB of stuff, building it as an NROM-128 would help other things fit on the multicart.

The RESERVED_MULTICART part is actually unused, right?

Testing on real hardware there appears to be an issue on the very first boot screen being full of garbage tiles which get scrolled off screen when the title screen shows up. My guess is that the nametable isn't being initialized and the rom assumes it's clear which it isn't. It would be nice to remedy this for the action53 cartridge for a bit more polish. Let me know if you're able to work on this, or if you need more details about the problem.