November 2026 WIP: Snowbird on the Commodore 64

By Kodiak

Progress on Snowbird has been rapid over the past few weeks, if you regard designing all the levels and setting up the interrupt schema for them as "progress".

Things were helped in no small part by my purchase of Charpad to reduce the suffering of designing graphics for ECBM mode, and yet I found the software - very good though it is - to have some little annoyances, which I hope to write about in another blog article.

Each level has three stages, which required colour schemes and tweaks to the codebase bespoke to each stage; it sounds simple in theory but the hours of fiddling with colour combinations and making changes to graphics definitions proved very challenging and draining to me (and I am not one of those people who likes a challenge... far from it!)

You can check out a small sample of the 12 game stages below:

The score panel is only a placeholder for now, and is scheduled for redesign to take advantage of the open vertical borders.

The character sprites are well underway too and looking good, but I'm too tired to show them today, other than a quick cameo of "Buzz", the Snowbird himself:

As mentioned previously, the game is a "cute-'em-up", but I am keeping further details under wraps for now, due to all the AI-shenanigans going on in the scene these days.

Let's hope my health holds out until I get this and Parallaxian finished!

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