Good job on the artwork in the playfield. As for the status bar, some glyphs in the font are difficult to tell apart at a distance: O vs. D, R vs. B vs. A vs. 8. If you could post all the letter and number tiles as an attached image, I'm willing to suggest some fixes.
Different TVs at different settings (and with different proprietary skin tone enhancement algorithms) will produce different palettes, so don't worry about that. If you have a PowerPak, I have a tool to let you view your backgrounds on your NES and TV.
rainwarrior wrote:it may be a good idea to avoid the D column greys
In addition, on an NES-compatible system with an RGB PPU (PlayChoice, Famicom Titler, Sharp C1, 2C03/2C05-modded NES), all D column colors are exactly black. The safest grays are these:
- 0F: black
- 00: lightness close to 11-1C
- 10: lightness close to 20-2C
- 20: white
ShaneLite wrote:Good to know about the way sprites work; do NES games use one or both? The caterpillar was meant to walk in segments, but that could be too complex.
A scene can contain 8x8 or 8x16 sprites. A larger sprite is made out of multiple sprites: Super Mario is eight 8x8s in
Super Mario Bros. or four 8x16s in
Super Mario Bros. 3. Most of the time, an entire picture uses one size of sprite, but you should be able to use 8x8 for the status bar and 8x16 for the playfield without problems, as the write to $2000 to set the high bit of the X scroll position also changes the sprite size. Use 8x8 rules above the split and 8x16 rules below and there shouldn't be problems.
In any case, your Wiggler expies can probably get away with a 16x16 head and four 8x16 segments, for a total of 6 out of 8 sprite slivers (a sliver is 8x1 pixels), leaving 2 for the player character. Flicker when using your weapon can be expected.