I made a video of my 380 sprite demo version of Neo Thunder. The original game (coded by Sebastian Mihai in 2011) had a lot of slowdown, so I was attempting to remove it as a coding exercise. After a lot of work(!), I found I could make a 380 sprite version at 60fps with no slowdown. (24 display lines left at end of each frame worst case scenario)
The game has 32 background sprites, 21 player bullets, 155 enemies, 170 enemy bullets and 2 player ship sprites (nose + tail stuck together) all at once = 380 sprites
It has full collision detection. (Invincibility is turned on but enemy-bullets + enemies will still hit the player)
All enemies are moved and collision-checked independently. It was just easier to put them all into a regular formation to test (+ to fit them on the screen)
I plan to make this version into a little game similar to the original, but tbh it will probably be worse than the original! More sprites do not make a better game and I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. The ship does have a much faster firing-rate to make up for the large number of enemies + bullets it will face though.
