Starfield

Single-screen space shooter. You move a ship, shoot descending enemies, and try to survive. It starts with one sprite on a black screen and grows — unit by unit — into a complete game with sound, scoring, a title screen, and a starfield scrolling behind everything.

This is your first C64 game. Every unit produces working, runnable code. By the end of 128 units, you’ll have built a commercial-quality shooter and learnt the VIC-II sprite system, SID sound chip, CIA input handling, raster interrupts, and the 6510 instruction set that ties it all together.