Wow, this look incredible. It really does take a while to realize it's an 8-bit game.
Carnivac wrote:So each sprite is actually made up of 8x8 pixel tiles?
Sprites can be either 8x8 or 8x16 pixels, and you can display up to 64 of them at any given time. What Dwedit meant is that the NES can only show 8 sprites in a row/scanline, if you try to put more than that the ones with lower priority won't appear. Commercial NES games handled this by cycling the priority of the sprites every frame, causing different sprites to disappear each frame, creating the effect popularly known as "flickering".
Well this is just a test shot anyways. I'll take that into consideration when doing the levels.
Just avoid having too many sprites horizontally aligned. For example, in one row you have two diamonds, an enemy, two coins, a barrel and a chest, which would need a total of 14 sprites horizontally. That's almost twice the limit, so you should avoid situations like these.
By the way are animated tiles allowed?
You mean background tiles? Yes, they are allowed. In real NES games, the hardware inside the cart has an influence on how animated backgrounds work, but you don't have to care about this.
Say if I wanted to have a hidden room with a solid color background could I then have a tile version of the coin in that room repeated a lot for crazy money collecting or would that have to be static (as in the coin doesn't spin)?
They can spin, but they would have to use one of the background palettes. The closest one you have to the coins is palette 0, which I think is similar enough.