With good games people don't mind commiting some space to them.

Well I wouldn't say so, unless the trend has changed in the past year. Until 2005 people didn't mind about the space taken by games if they were good, but afteward it was a different story. You probably missed all the complaints and whining about how Reuben Quest 2 and Metroid II took way too much space on a 84+ . THere were even people complaining about Desolate being too huge. I have no idea why people got so uptight about game file size in these years, considering many nearly worshipped authors of games like FFTOM and The Verdante Forest before

A few days ago I released my first game under 3 KB since 2002 and it can only hold 2 small dungeons and battles are limited to text except for 2 magic animations and it has 3 different attacks and barely any text. There are sacrifices to do if you want a game that is long (even in ASM) and has many features and personally I would rather prefer doing the later instead of downloading many small RPGs on ticalc.org that I can beat in 15 minutes or am unable to beat because the author made them ridiculously difficult to artificially increase the lenght.

I think today people are less crazy about file size though (altough maybe it's because my files are no longer on UTI/ticalc/calcg so they have less huge games to complain about), because they saw the shit on ticalc.org being uploaded every week or two. That's providing the games are well coded, though, because 50 KB of programs for a 4-room RPG isn't justified IMHO.

Well, that's it. I can actually foresee slamming face first into the 16KB memory limit for a 1 page application. I've just started working on the text system for the "story mode" in the game (where the story of the game is told in the dialogue between you and the boss of whatever level you're in) and I'm nearing 11KB.

Know that I have to have boss and enemy image and script data for about 6 to 8 stages, each boss having its own portrait sprite and image data for each of its spellcards that it can use. Then there's your own characters, which I plan on including 6 to 8, each with its own portrait and spellcard images, and their own code. Don't mention anything about backgrounds, which there will be 8+, one for each stage, and maybe one for each of the boss fights. THEN, there will be the actual dialogue between you and the boss, which will vary depending on what character you select for the "adventure."

Then, there's the issue of having an actual title screen, which this game completely lacks at this point. Cramming it all in the remaining 5K seems unrealistic, so... now I have to figure out how to distribute all this data across two or more pages and still have the routines that need to access it still readily available.

BUT... on the bright side, the beta demo version that will release prior to actually writing a coherent story for this will remain as a 1 page, 16K application. I just want to let you all know that this game *will* end up being a 32K or (if worst comes to worst) a 48K app when all is said and done.

What kind of compression are you using? I'm getting pretty nice compression rates (~300 bytes for a fullscreen picture) for my pictures of loli's in this game. I'm using Vertical RLE. My game is 7.5K now, with the insane buffer and lots of loli's etc. Of course I'll be making a lot more code still, and it barely contains level data.

all right. keep going IAMBIAN!!!

mhmm I think bullet collision detection is completly broken. When I shoot directly on the enemy sometimes he won't lose any HP and when I shoot away from him he loses HP. Also I think you should make the first level easier, because it took me several tries before being able to go through it without losing 2 lives. Some of the bullets are just impossible to avoid, or maybe it was because of the collision detection bug?
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Otherwise, very nice job so far

I got a screenie there, but it's 13 MB huge
http://xlib.mtv-music-generator.com/cadan.gif

uhm how come you didnt died when touching these bullets at the beginning? I've been trying to avoid everything shot at me

ok, it must still require very accurate timing when moving around though

This screenshot is mostly cosmetic effects. You get an introduction phase to make the transition from menu to stage to boss much less jarring. You also get to see the difficulty setting when you pause the game, shown at the bottom-left corner. This is, of course, what I have for the demo level. I'll have something else for the official levels. Also, it looks WAY better on a real calculator. You'll just have to wait for the binary.

Linky: http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php?quickkey=mztxej2hkyz&thumb=5

Todo: Write varying scripts for the stage/boss difficulty modes. Might not write all four, but maybe, just to see the memory impact of fully scripting a level.

I like that stage intro thing ^^