Lobsters retrocomputing - 27 Sep 2026

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So, I had to take out the scrolling. I achieve the feeling of continuity by instead turning off the background layer completely and setting the background colour to black, moving the player's sprite from one side of the screen to the other as if they were being scrolled, and then loading the next room and turning the tile display back on again. It's not perfect, but it gets the idea across just enough to work!

So, finally, we have a world and we can move around it! But hang on a minute... how did the player's sprite get here?!

You'll simply have to see how all that works in Part 2 of this series!

Next Time

Thank you reading this enormous post! It's been a lot of fun going back to this project a year later and digging around in it, and remembering all this stuff. Next time, I'll go over the Player and the Monsters, their sprites and behaviours, and things like the HUD, text, and cutscenes. In Part 3, the final part of the series, I'll talk about music and sound effects, the visual effects like the game's intro, and the various narrative changes (including the final boss!) that I was starting to think up as I made more and more changes and compromises due to the tech!

Oh, and one last thing. As of this post, the project's source code will be made publicly available to download on my GitHub, and will include things like the LDTK level files! So if you feel like tinkering with it or digging through some (admittedly kinda shaky in places) C code, you can!!

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Original: https://melon.zone/blog/blog/gamedev/tech/fun/2026-09-23-mantle-nes-breakdown-part-1/