Starfield

Coming Soon

Starfield is currently in development. Check back soon!

What You’ll Build

Single-screen space shooter. Player ship versus waves of enemies. Shoot, dodge, survive.

You control a ship at the bottom of the screen. Enemies descend in formations. Blast them before they reach you. Simple concept, but it teaches you how the VIC-II handles sprites — positioning, collision, and animation.

Why This Game?

After SID Symphony taught you the fundamentals, Starfield puts the VIC-II sprite system through its paces. You’ll learn to:

• Enable and position hardware sprites
• Read the joystick via the CIA chips
• Detect sprite-to-sprite collisions in hardware
• Manage bullet pools (the C64 way)
• Build wave systems with increasing difficulty

By the end, you’ll have a complete shoot-em-up running at full speed.

Skills You’ll Master

• Hardware sprites — enabling, positioning, pointers
• Joystick input — reading CIA ports
• Sprite collision — hardware detection registers
• Bullet management — object pooling patterns
• Score display — updating screen memory
• Wave systems — enemy patterns and progression
• Power-ups — ship upgrades and bonuses

Prerequisites

Complete Game 1: SID Symphony first. You’ll need the screen layout and timing skills from that game.

Time Investment

64 units at 60-90 minutes each. Roughly 64-96 hours total, spread across 4 phases.