NES Trivia Title and Results

From a development perspective, the title screen of the game is not that important. From a marketing perspective, it is vital as it is the first impression of the game that a player will receive. My personal opinion is somewhere between the two points of view. You want a title screen to be attractive but you do not want to spend too much time on creating the title screen. Some decent artwork and perhaps some simple animation will probably suffice for smaller projects. For larger projects with big budgets, some type of CGI may be what the project backer insists on.

For trivia, out title screen simply shows a graphical title while waiting for a button to be pressed. More elaborate games may have a menu of options. Different modes of play, options, credits, and instructions are possibilities. Handling a menu would be done similarly to how we handled answer selection in the main game. The different options simply jumping to a separate routine for handling the particular screen.

The only hard part of the title screen is displaying the graphical title. Once you realize that the graphics are just a bunch of tiles, it is not much of a leap before you realize that you can simply print graphics. The only real restrictions being that you are not able to use character 0 as that is the character that is reserved for indicating the end of a string, and that the length of the string be under 256 characters. In our case, most of the title image is empty space so we conserve ROM space by breaking the string into individual lines. It would certainly be possible to take advantage of the consecutive nature of screen memory to have multiple lines of graphical information in a string. Still, here is the code used for printing the N.E.S. part of the title.

CallClearScreen ' ',0,0

CallPrintStringAt titleNES1, 5,2,0
CallPrintStringAt titleNES2, 5,3,0
CallPrintStringAt titleNES3, 5,4,0
CallPrintStringAt titleNES4, 5,5,0
CallPrintStringAt titleNES5, 5,6,0

And here is the data for the print statements.

titleNES1 .db 30,10,32,32,32,30,32,32,32,30,30,30,30,32,32,32, 9,30,30,10,0
titleNES2 .db 30,11,10,32,32,30,32,32,32,30,32,32,32,32,32,32,11,10,32,11,0
titleNES3 .db 30,32,11,10,32,30,32,32,32,30,30,30,32,32,32,32,32,11,10,0
titleNES4 .db 30,32,32,11,10,30,32,32,32,30,32,32,32,32,32,32,10,32,11,10,0
titleNES5 .db 30,32,32,32,11,30,32,30,32,30,30,30,30,32,30,32,11,30,30, 8,32,30,0

The rest of the title screen is pretty much more of the same, though the press start and copyright messages are ASCII strings. Once the display is generated, we simply use the WaitForButtonPress and WaitForButtonPressEnd functions to wait to start the game.

The results screen is rendered pretty much the same way though has the interesting problem of having to display the score. Thankfully the score is a single digit number. This means that to display it, we only need to add 48 to the number to get the proper ASCII value for the number. For numbers greater than 9 we would need multiple digits which adds the problem of no BCD or division functions for the NES. We will be covering software multiplication and division shortly, but it is a complex topic so it is nice that we didn't need to get into it before creating this game. Here is the code for displaying the score.

LDA SCORE
CLC
ADC #48
; the cursor is already at the appropriate position in the PPU so
; simply need to send the character index to the PPU
STA $2007

And that is all there is to trivia. Of course, having randomly selected questions and mixing up the answers so they were not always in the same order would be nice. This requires quite a bit of work as we need to delve into the topics of entropy, pseudo-random numbers, and software multiplication. Software division will be covered as well as we will need it for displaying multi-digit numbers which is something the target RPG will need for sure. There is a lot to cover before we can do the full version of trivia, though I may have a couple of other simple games before we get to trivia 2. But…that will not be done on this blog as the Blazing Games Development blog is being shut down. More on that, and where future home-brew articles will appear will be covered next.