Hey everyone! I wanted to share some progress on my SNES game. I’ve managed to implement a few important features:

Map Generation – My algorithm is fairly simple: I have 10x10 rooms with exits, and the generator randomly selects rooms so that their exits match up. This ensures that all rooms are always connected.

Basic Enemy AI – I’ve added moving sprites! Their AI is very primitive for now – they just move toward the player, but it’s a start.

User Interface – I can now display text on the screen, which allows me to show the first messages to the player.

Rendering Performance Issue – Right now, every player movement triggers a full redraw of the entire map (32x32 tiles), which takes about 0.5s. I plan to optimize this by only redrawing the new row of tiles, which should significantly improve performance.

Palette and Layer Struggles – I ran into quite a few problems with palettes and properly using multiple layers. For some reason, I just couldn’t get the right palette for text to display correctly. It turned out that even though I was assigning tiles to the correct layer table, I also had to manually set the palette bits for each tile. 😭 I wasted way too much time on this (basically a full day 😞). As expected, I’m spending more time fighting technical issues than working on actual gameplay.