Greetings from Raleigh, North Carolina! I kept telling myself that I’d do a Ludum Dare at some point, so here I am, ready for Challenge #27 this weekend!

My name’s Barry, and I’m a Ph.D. Student in Computer Science studying Computer Science Education. In addition to my research, I teach programming to pay the bills, and I’m currently developing a course to teach assembly programming – the catch is that this course teaches assembly for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I actually gave a workshop on this topic last week, and was terribly afraid that nobody would be interested in it, yet I had a pile of people attend not only the high-level intro, but the hard-core programming portion! This was super-validating, and now I can’t wait to teach my course! 😀

So for this Ludum Dare, whatever the theme may be, I will be developing an NES game in Assembly. I’ll be limiting myself to only 16 KB of PRG ROM and a single 512 x 256 pixel sprite sheet, so I’m expecting this to be a heck of a challenge. The idea is that by participating in this challenge, I’ll actually get some mastery making NES games before I try to teach students how to do it.

I’ll be tweeting my progress from @isharacomix, so if this piques your interest, I’ll be sharing demos and screenshots throughout the compo.

Tags: 8bit, nes