I'm on the fence about this. How is level navigation going to be set up, IE will there be a world map a la Mario 3/Super Mario World/ Donkey Kong Country? Will levels be replayable once beaten, and if so would it serve any purpose? How many total levels are you looking at? Overall though, I think I am leaning towards being able to save. Perhaps upon exiting the game?

It's around 9k now (It's not finished yet). All things considered though 9k is actually pretty small. ^^

I'm on the fence about this. How is level navigation going to be set up, IE will there be a world map a la Mario 3/Super Mario World/ Donkey Kong Country? Will levels be replayable once beaten, and if so would it serve any purpose? How many total levels are you looking at? Overall though, I think I am leaning towards being able to save. Perhaps upon exiting the game?

I don't think that I'll have a world map, simply because there won't be enough levels for one (each level is going to be 2000 - 2500 bytes). Plus, size constraints would make a world map hard. I've actually been considering a kind of a minimalistic autosave, which would just let the player start a level from the beginning of the level he stopped playing on (he could always choose to start a new game, though).

Sure, but I have a 83+, and all with my progs, it remains ~10 KB

Couldn't you just archive your programs to free up some RAM, or do you not have the archive space?

I would absolutely love to see this project come to fruition.

Don't worry, it will.
Oh, and welcome to Omnimaga.

Alright, I have an update. I'm working on a title screen right now. What you see below is a work in progress, so let me know what you think.

Along with that, I have finished the first two levels. I have a screenie, but I should warn you that it is HUGE (over 9mb). It shows the paths through the first two levels and every room in them. I wouldn't recommend looking at it if you would like to figure out the way through the levels by yourself, which is why it is a spoiler. If you do look at it, please let me know how my level design is.


The only main thing I have left is level design, along with a few finishing touches (such as saving and improving the effects and transitions). I will have a full game this year, and I hope for it to be very competitive. I would like to wish everyone the best of luck with their projects as well.

Maybe, but there would be some difficulty in doing that. The levels in Sam Heald's Mario were pretty straight forward because there was only one tilemap. With AXLE, there are multiple rooms to keep track of.

If anybody really wants to create their own levels, it should be relatively easy to modify the code. All that would be needed to be done would be to replace the included levels with custom ones before compilation. I'll include the level editor for that sake.

EDIT:
Maybe I could release a different version that runs custom levels? Hmm... shmibs, you've gotten me thinking.

An option could be included to load custom tilemaps as data like
1,1,1
1,2,3
2,2,3
or something, and a program could be made to write the tilemaps. It's obvious and straightforward, but it works.