Classic Game Programming on the NES

13 Animations and more

This chapter covers

• Animating our enemies
• Adding background animation
• Visualizing a bigger explosion when an enemy mine hits the ground
• Progressing to the next level of difficulty

We now have a mostly playable game, but it still lacks excitement and doesn’t really show some of the abilities of the NES hardware. We will use this chapter to add some items to make the game more interesting, including animations for both our enemies and the background, shaking the screen and fast cycling some colors when one of the enemy mines hits the planet’s surface, and finally allowing the player to progress to the next level of difficulty.

13.1 Enemy animations

In our previous chapter, we added starting and ending pattern numbers to ...