Wizard's Stand
NES homebrew survival game, written in C and 6502 assembly.
A wave-based arcade survival game built for real NES hardware. Control a wizard fending off ten progressive waves of enemies with unique behaviors, fireballs, piercing shots, and screen-clearing nukes. Runs inside the PetNES emulator.
Highlights
- Eliminated a bottleneck consuming 30%+ CPU time via struct alignment, hitting 60 FPS with 50% more objects
- Modular entity system using function pointers and state machines for 7 concurrent enemy types
- Diverse enemy AI and collision detection under strict 2KB RAM and PPU constraints
- Profiled with Mesen's cycle-accurate profiler to guide every optimization
Technology
C, 6502 Assembly, cc65