Chomp devlog

I find the mechanics of old video games fascinating, where every byte mattered and hardware limitations forced developers to come up with creative solutions. While a better developer might have tried to make something like a NES ROM, I wanted to get a bit of the feeling of developing an old-school game while still keeping in the comfort of a high-level programming language.

"Chomp" has been an on-again off-again hobby of mine for a while. I created the game engine with a series of self-inflicted limitations: 4 colors per palette, 4 sprite palettes and 4 background palettes, 4x4 tiles, a single tile-based background layer of 32x32 tiles, and all game graphics defined within a 64x64 image of 2 bits per pixel. Level layout is not stored directly but described with a 4 byte header and a series of 2 byte "building blocks". Sprites between 1 tile and 2x2 tiles in size, and the larger boss "sprites" are actually background tiles that manipulate the background scroll position to appear to be a moving object. These tricks mean the "data" of the game fits within 6kb, although this only counts data and not game code, which is just plain old C#.

Sound effects are generated from scratch from sine waves, plus some random noise for certain effects. For the music however, I wasn't quite committed enough to the bit to write chiptunes.