So, Shine got me involved in a 2k intro for the CSDB compo...
At first I was not that much willing to spend time on it as we are already working on our 2023 production and there is still a lot to do (don't hold your breath), and I was in the middle of a nasty eye infection that decided not to go for months, but Shine was able to trick me into it and I wasn't able to resist his legendary enthusiasm too...
He reminded me of a Koala multicolour logo he had done for us that was yet to be used in a release, correctly stating that we probably could fit it into a charset.
After a bit of python script coding to tile it and find the same colour duplicate tiles it appeared that we could shrink it down to 80 characters (640 bytes), so it was a good start for a 2k intro when we factor in the charset to screen mapping and code for the intro. The animation of the logo is done copying the logo info into the target part of the charset, with some rotations in order to have a small progression effect.
The remaining characters are filled with a vertical extended copy (1x2 characters) of the ROM character set. Sound effects are used in place of a tune to keep the total size down and are linked to the animated sprites animation. Animations beeing driven by a smaller than usual sinus table (128 bytes total) which is used both for the FLD scroller and the sprites circle. The upper and lower borders are opened but I don't make much use of those in this intro apart from the sprites partially moving into those borders.
Could probably have done better with more time but it was a nice interlude in the production of our next bigger release and involved a quite different approach in order to minimize the overall size (like heavier than usual use of zero page locations) vs usually trying to get the fastest code as possible.
Thanks again to Shine for the nice logo, ideas and support, including spotting some visual glitches, and also to the Kurgan for feedback and spotting bugs too.
We found that naming the intro with the same pattern as some of our very early prods with "Byg" used in the name was a fun idea, like "the Byg lunch, the Byg task, ..." (spoiler alert : it's going to happen again)
You can download the intro on CSDB (Thanks Franck for spotting the bad link)