After my GameBoy project Song of Morus: Gala of Battle, I have an itch to try NES homebrewing. In the begining, I just painted some pixel art, and then researched dev tool, and ended up postpone the development of Song of Morus: Limbo Express, and started making this NES/Famicom project.

It's using NesFab, a new development tool with its own lanugage. The developer claims the performance is better than other C language base library. I don't know if it's true but the setup is relatively easy so I decided to use it for my project. (I have purchase a license of NesMaker. Too difficult to self-learn)

I picked ROM mapper 30 (UNROM 512), becuase I found broke studio selling this cartridge, and I want to keep a possibility of producing a physical release. In case you don't know, unlike moderm games, the hardware inside a game cartridge is more than just a memory drive. Mappers are designed to extend the system and bypass its limitations, such as by adding RAM to the cartridge or even extra sound channels. And mapper 30 is designed to offer 512KB ROM for modern homebrew games. 512KB seems enough. My Gala of Battle can handle 8 game stages with 512KB with some voiceover. So memory should not be a problem ... I thought.

For the gameplay, it will be slightly different from the GameBoy project. Gala of Battle is made with GB Studio, so the game mechanic is tailored for GB Studio limitation. This time, I am writing the game by coding. More freedom but also more workload. Also, the resolution/screen is much bigger than GameBoy. So Instead of big size boss with few projectiles, we can go bullet hell.

For the graphic, it's challenging, more challenging than Gala of Battle. Gala of Battle is a grayscale game, so I just need to calculate how many unique tiles I have used. I can even convert a normal image to Gameboy with dithering For NES, it's in advanced level. It's in color, and unlike GameBoy Color, there are only 4 palette, sharing 1 background color, and the color map grid is 16x16. 

The programming is tricky because it's a new language. The only help is basically just the offical documentation, and example. Fortunately , my game is just a simple shooting game, so it's not too troublesome.

What's really troubling me is the memory. I don't know if it's me or the compile. It keeps triggering memory problem when compiling. And even when it's successfully compile, I see most of the ROM is empty. I feel the compiler doesn't organise the data well. So some tiny data somehow occupy the whole bank. 512KB  should be more than enough for my vision, but in reality I can barely make one game stage.

In my plan, this game should have multiple bosses, like Gala of Battle. I already have some ideas for the boss design. Sadly, until I can solve the memory, I don't think I can expand the game.