Part 1: Getting started

1. Setting up your tools

2. Building your game

3. Playing your game

4. Making Your first change

5. Things to know about the NES and C

Part 2: Making it your Own

10. Changing the world

11. Adding new map tiles

12. Changing sprite art

13. Changing the HUD (top bar)

14. Adding collectible sprites

15. Adding new enemies

16. Adding new talking NPCs

16. Adding/changing music

17. Adding/changing sound effects

18. Changing movement

Part 3: Adding new features

20. Putting your code in the right place: a brief introduction to prg banking

21. Giving your main character a sword

22. Adding more features to the pause menu

23. Adding a second map

24. Saving the Game

25. Adding objects that attract or repel the player

26. Adding an enemy that mimics player behavior

27. Adding a new sprite size

Part 4: Polish and more

30. Ways to improve performance

31. Making a full title screen

32. Animating tiles

33. Playing your game on a real NES

34. Debugging with Mesen

Part 5: Advanced Topics

40. Understanding and tweaking the build tools

41. Dealing with limited ROM space

42. Resizing your rom

43. ROM Data Map

44. Expanding available graphics using CHR banking

45. Getting finer control over graphics with chr ram

46. Writing Functions in Assembly

47. Automatic builds with GH Actions

48. Switching to unrom 512 for advanced features

Playing your Game

Play Time!

Okay, so you’ve set up your tools, you’ve built the game, and you’ve started it in the emulator. How do you play it?

The controls are pretty straightforward.

Start will start the game, as well as pause.
The Directional pad is used to select things in menus, and also move in-game.
The A button is currently unused
The B button is currently unused

To start the game, you can either run the create-nes-game run command, or double-click the .nes file in the rom/ folder after building the game.

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