Devblog for "Carnem ad Chalybe"
Bifrost Coalescence 2026-02-14 21:50
I got an idea for a game the other day, so I'm recording my progress for posterity and motivation sake.
My idea is for a creature building game where you build a biomechanical spaceship out of flesh and steel, with the neurons and synapses controlling the mechanical parts of the ship, hence the name "Carnem ad Chalybe", Latin for Flesh to Steel.
The first thing I did was make some tiles for the game, which I've attached as a screnshot.
I plan to use both backgrounds to show the player ship to allow for building veins and neurons on top of the metal and flesh. Therefore, I cannot have a scrolling star background, right?
Wrong. By using the power of a single sprite, I can render the scrolling star raster background and both backgrounds, so long as every background tile has prio 1.
I'll provide more updates as I go along.
Bifrost Coalescence 2026-02-18 23:27
So I was planning on getting a full update done today, but I'm encountering weird errors of my own design.
Because I want to have a connected tile setup, similar to the 9-patch technique, I have designed 8-9 tiles (Depending on if we have a unique middle tile) that can be flipped into all 16 states of neighbouring tiles.
Because of my addiction to premature optimization, I reasoned the optimal solution to deciding which tile to place is using a premade rom with a lookup table and copying the tiles to the position from that.
Luckily, my rom lookup table idea works. Unluckily, my ability to write code doesn't. I believe the issue lies in the code used to calculate the address of the tile.
I've attached the code I used to generate the rom and the newest verison of the game in case anyone can help.
