A Journey in 8 bit

Late summer in 2021 I got myself TheC64 as I stumbled upon a good deal on it. Playing around with it and doing some typeins from the old 64er magazine I got quite nostalgic for the olden’ days. Hacking away some stuff on the bread bin and trying to figure out how everything worked.

Getting caught up in my musings I remembered that I allways wanted to get into assembly but never really could get my head around it back then (I was between nine and ten in those days and allways was more interested in graphics than coding). So I started googling around what I would need to get back into development for the C64. I was delighted to find a vscode extension for Kick Assembler as I use vscode for my dayjob anyways.

So armed with that and some tutorials and my copy of “Das große Commodore 64 Buch” by Data Becker I went for it and finally made some progress in understanding how to write and structure code in assembler.

After some experimenting with how to animate sprites, use charsets, and do bitmap graphics. It was time to think about what to choose for my first project. At first I though about some singelscreen arcade style platformer. Something simple. But as I started working on concepts for that I noticed that my heart wasn’t really in it…

I like those games but my favourite genre by far are RPGs. So while I knew that those games are quite the undertaking, especially for a single developer, I still went for it.

So that’s the story of how I got here and started this blog.