Thanks for making me discover a new English verb, to cring.  
(yes, English is not my first language, so discovering new words is part of the fun posting in an English forum).

A year or so ago I tried to put together a quick minimal tutorial on pixel art basics, but the feedback and the result were scarce. Other attempted bigger tutorials on the subject, but these works were dropped half-way. So, yes, a good tutorial on this specific issue, here in this brewery is missing.

I'm not a big artist, but I dare give you my two cents advice with your own graphics; start from easy shapes:

Not too hard.

Yep, it is is kind of boring to look at, but you know what each tile is about: a number, a shield, a symbol or a sword.
You comunicate a thing, and this is your first goal when you draw something. And you start get the hand to draw in pixels.

Then, once you can think about how to draw something in 8px or 16px canvas, you can start to think about how to drop shadows, add highlights, which colors contarst better with each other, and so on.

Again, not a big artist myself, there is a lot of stuff I still have to learn about pixel art.

All I want to say it is that to experiment with your own code in your first game, simple shapes are good enough to say: this game is 100% mine! There is no need to worry about drawing 8 bit graphics masterpieces.  

Edit: misspelling.

I know that you don't read PM, and don't have your mail, so I post this here.

I think that it is great to have NN published on NA, so it is visible to everyone, easlily accessible, there are download links, it is indexed in search engines, and so on. However, I think that a nice pdf printable version would didactically wise be more appropriate, since I think it would help learning such concepts and contents, either if printed, or (since all the material published will likely be on the 100+ pages range) seen on a light pdf reader (like Sumatra pdf), which would make scrolling the content and studing it way more appealing.

So, given an half hour of free time, I dared starting this myself, and I attach here the first three lessons. I don't know if this is welcome, so unless you give me the green light I won't continue. In case you care about (or you dislike teh idea and wish me to remove such attachment), please let me know. Also, let me know what you would like to read on the cover page (right now it states only Nerdy Nights by bunnyboy), and if Metal Slime needs to be credited as well (I think so).

The text is close to 100% accurate, I only deleted any "next week" reference, and edited a tiny bit the line breaking of some multiline comments in your posted example code to make them fit page layout and text formatting wise.

Of course, I can send you the source file in .odt (OpenOffice.org) format, and I'll never claim any right on this material, which is, of course, fully yours (and maybe Metal Slime property). I'm just sharing an idea to make the content more user friendly to actually study it.

If possible, let me know, that would be appreciated.

Cheers!  
 

To the top, in case anyone is on the fence and wants to talk about it  !

Up!

Did not know of this thread. Very good topic. This is the exact question I asked myself. I stumbled across Nerdy Nights and I looked back at a shelved chipmusic project I couldn't complete without ASM and told my self 'that was it' and 'it's finally time'. I have never been happier and have gotten more done then I thought I ever would on a project I never thought I could wrap my head around. To those that are intimidated. That is ok, but you CAN do it. I promise. The NES is a simple enough machine to wrap your head around eventually. I'm nowhere near some of the guys here naturally as I've only begun, but getting your feet wet as they say is doable with the resources and people here to help.

"Rob and I want to seriously help you guys and get this scene going. We need more people putting out stuff, even if it's crap."

Yes Sir! I'm on it!

Working on it   ... but i probably would've stopped at a hello world if i didn't find motivation from another point of entry, that is, starting with graphics and music first and work myself into programming assembly from there. It's just what worked for me personally. Drawing graphics (with yy-chr first, then shiru's NESST assisting greatly with reminding me of the rules until they became second nature) is how i learned how much of the PPU works, beside the things that come intuitively from simply having played NES games. Writing a few programs to display pictures came up next. Then sprite overlays. And so on.

I did do some simple romhacking before committing to making collaborative- or my own NES stuff though. I think it's another good way for some to get over that first mental threshold just being able to see demonstrable results in an already existing game - something actually happens when you change stuff like inserting new jsr:s, tweaking constants, and so on, and it doesn't require much pre-knowledge of the PPU either at that point.

NESmaker isn't to bad at this either (and it's also decent if you just want to make a quick prototype of some artistic concept or have a first couple of tries at making a game, though gamemaker for pc would be a more didactic experience if you're looking to familiarize yourself with program structuring blocks like timers, actions, objects, and so on), but you need to get in there and start modifying code if you want to use it as a learning tool. Just browsing scripts other people made on the forums will not give you the confidence or experience to move forward.

On math... i always underperformed in math in school, it's difficult for me to keep track of values if they aren't right in front of me, some concepts were complely lost on me, i've always been a scatterhead, and i simply had other interests. Yet i find it more and more easy doing math thanks to nes homebrewing today. Besides, my experience is that it's not nearly as much math as you might imagine when looking at it from the outside. But figuring out stuff like how to make a routine that prepares reads and writes into bitpacked game flag blocks was a pretty empowering experience.

One thing that's stopping me sometimes so that it takes more time than it ought to do is that it can feel very embarrassing to show my code for review.. i rarely do it, so i get stuck on problems for way too long. 

Math, that whole thing... Everyone always told me that I would need to be well versed in math if I wanted to work with computers. This was way back in middle school or whenever, and the pre-requisites for high school programming courses followed the same line of thought. Doing anything math related was out of the question for me. Funny that with a 62% in Algebra I, and a 60% in Algebra II, not to mention never taking Geometry, I find programming math to be strangely practical. Probably 95% of the time there is zero math involved in programming as it is, and for those rare occasions when it is needed you get so used to doing everything in hex divisions that it just comes naturally. Never let math scare you!