I was thinking about this screen as soon as I decided to start coding the game actually from the beginning. It’s still not crystal clear how this screen will look like. What I first had in mind was to show a nice background from the Amiga version of the game, converted to ASCII. I’ve done some conversions but I’m not satisfied with the end result. The problem is also stretching the 4:3 image to widescreen format. I don’t like at all that I’m leaving this part unfinished, but I have to move on, and leave the background for later.

To not leave the screen completely empty, I added the title of the game at the top, drawn with ASCII fonts. Since the text is much bigger than the actual screen, I added some horizontal scrolling and fading effects on both sides.

Now the screen looks much more alive.