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Many splash screens are used to cover loading, but you might be surprised how often splash screens in games are literally doing nothing but waiting. They're often very hastily implemented (i.e. cheaply, and using the programmer with the least experience), added quickly and with displeasure for everyone involved, only because the publisher demanded it or had some other contract requirement to do so.

A lot of "splash" screen style stuff is streaming video these days, too, which kinda works against the idea of using it to cover loading. ;P On one project a major publisher insisted that showing their video logo be the very first thing we implemented, and that is must appear in any build that was delivered to them (e.g. QA builds). I disabled it in my own build 'cause I'm a programmer, but most couldn't or didn't, and I thought it was utterly stupid how many collective man-hours were being lost on that project because of others waiting for this useless video to play on every restart.

Did you estimate and report to the publisher how many man-hours of work were related to that requirement?

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I complained to my superiors about it in a meeting. They told me to drop it, so I did.

If you're asking me for an estimate in hindsight, I'd ballpark that with the size of the team we were wasting about 1 man-day per day waiting for this video to play.

Thanks again, the help here is priceless.

I'm looking for a basic ROM that simply displays a full, uncompressed nametable, attribute table, and background palette. I vaguely recall seeing something that might have done that a while back on the forums, but I'm failing to find anything in my searches.

All I'm looking for is something that I can very quickly paste a nametable and attribute table into and change the palette entries, through a hex editor, for doing quick hardware tests of screens that I'm designing.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd greatly appreciate it.

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www.mteegfx.com

I made something for that purpose a little while back, although I didn't post it here. It includes the nametable/CHR/palette data from files, but if you prefer modifying them in the .asm file, simply find the relevant .incbins and replace with .byte.

(Needs asm6, included in the package. Artwork by ptoing.)

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Download STREEMERZ for NES from fauxgame.com! — Some other stuff I've done: fo.aspekt.fi

That's awesome. I'll do exactly that. Thanks a ton!

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www.mteegfx.com

My NES background graphics editor can do that. It reads the pattern table, nametable, and palette from a .sav file that you can build using the included savtool.py written in Python, or if you don't have Python installed, you can build the .sav file yourself:

• at $6000-$6FFF (.sav file offset $0000-$0FFF)
• Nametable at $7800-$7BFF (.sav file offset $1080-$1BFF)
• Palette at $7F00 (.sav file offset $1F00-$1F0F)

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I thank both of ya'll for your offers. Spent the last few months working on the Cowlitz Gamers Adventure sequel. Really excited about it as I pitched a sequel with a new artstyle and mock-up and it seemed to have been well-received by the programmer, so we're working on it together. Finished all the stage layouts and art assets about a month or so ago. Don't want to show much yet in case some parts end up getting cut from the game, but here's the title screen (for which I used thefox's tool to do palette and layout tests):

The lettering style is based off of the hand lettering that I did for the first game's box art.

Here are a few things from Isolation as well:

A computer terminal in a wall panel, player can move finger cursor along number keys only:


A ladder-climbing cycle:


And, I decided to go with #2D with emphasis bits set for the lights-out office screen I had previously posted about:

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The power-off sequence feels good! Is it supposed to be a grid blackout or the like, or just a local circuit? I think emergency exit signs ought to be powered through separate lines and should be lit.

The lone finger feels a little E.T. all on its own, but it is clear what it does.

I just saw your bike trip animation, that was extremely good. Top tier good use of the resources available. Have you studied classic film animation?

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http://www.frankengraphics.com - personal NES blog

It looks good (especially the blackout, like what WheelInventor said) but there's always one thing in whatever you draw that aggravates me. The lone finger is a little odd (you could have possibly drawn the tips of knuckles) but the problem to me was how flat the finger looks across the keyboard when there is no way for that to be possible without the other fingers to be showing, unless they were cut off. I tried to fix that and make the finger look more natural overall, not being perfectly straight and reducing the size of the fingernail among other things. I don't know if you like it more, but my OCD was killing me.

In regards to the finger cursor, I haven't been completely satisfied with it, but the bottom 8 pixels will be cropped by most players anyway (That's the full, 240 px height shown there). So, I don't think adding some sprite tiles for the other knuckles would be worthwhile. However, you're right, the main reason the finger looks weird is that it is shown flat--not angled down toward the keyboard . I'll definitely re-approach that. Thanks for pointing it out.

(The keyboard, by the way, is being held in the air by the character's other hand, as the keyboard is shown previously being stored in the vertical slot to the right of the monitor)

@WI
Thanks. I took an animation elective in undergrad but didn't major in it and I'm not comfortable with it (frequently having to check resources like Preston Blair books or google walk/flight cycles as reference, etc.

As for the exit sign, my early drafts had it on, but it shares palette with the green cube, and I'm worried that it might draw too much attention as neither are gameplay-relevant when the lights are off. May reconsider it though.

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Quick double post here. If I go with the visible exit sign, it'd look like the above. I think it's a bit too distracting, but I've yet to make up my mind on it.

Also, here's a sauna.

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www.mteegfx.com

Heh. I like how he's still wearing the backpack even after undressing.
Maybe trying to explain why you can still access the inventory items there?

Wait, there's a terribly easy fix to the light problem. When the lights go out, just switch the cube's palette to that of the robot thing, because it's completely black.

One nitpick is that glasses/eyeballs in dark rooms usually, in cartoony settings, remain full-white.

I think the exit sign's fine, especially if that's how you exit. Is that

Otherwise? Everything is amazingly recognizable even built with an economy of pixels. Lovely as usual.