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QuoteWe are about to blow you away with possibly the BEST C64 release news of the week, as Laxity have released the full C64 conversion of the modern Indie game ' VVVVV ', which was originally released back in 2010 and created by Terry Cavanagh for multiple platforms including the PC. This puzzle platform game is a conversion of one of the hardest games you'll ever play but it's one of the best that has gathered countless high scores!
http://www.indieretronews.com/2017/04/vvvvvv-incredible-news-as-modern-indie.html
I count up to 400 screens, 24x40 in size. The primary achievement is fitting that all into memory, even with the simplistic graphics - I'm guessing around 100 bytes per screen. On the PC a map is 2MB. I guess some screens are a lot simpler than others. Never mind teleporters, moving platforms, and so on. It's a big game - http://i.imgur.com/hTCvwhs.png
The game should be achievable on a CPC as it's flip screen, doesn't have much action going on, and so on, assuming that the C64's text mode savings aren't critical to fitting it in. Might have to be a 128KB game.
Might be fun to work out a suitable screen structure though before seeing what the C64 guys did.
I'm thinking the C64 screen rendering engine is based around filled boxes, lines, filled circles, built up in two layers (background, foreground), with some tile types having post-processing to add edges.
I guess they can fit a box instruction into 4 bytes (Box, Style, x, y, w, h), style being empty, wall, boxy-box, and the other arguments being compressed into as few bits as they need for a 40x24 (42x26 allowing offscreen coordinates) display. A line might fit into 3 bytes (Line, Style, x, y, direction, length), a Circle 3 Bytes (Circle, Style, x, y, radius). I guess a terminating instruction (Stop) is 1 byte. After that will be object definitions, which appear to be standard (Object, X, Y, Direction, Length, Speed, Start at Length) type arguments for a platformer. And then maybe some exit overrides for when you exit the screen and you don't go to the next screen in that direction.