Hi Bills442
Whilst multi-color does reduce (horizontal) resoloution, it has the advanatage of elliminating color-clash and also the border. IMO these are very wothwhile tradeoffs (I can't stand colour-clash), but yes this is very much a matter of opinion. As for the smooth movement issue, we are only talking about a two-pixel horizontal stepping which looks fairly smooth anyway. Also, I'm not sure whether the Vic even has the horsepower to animate those 3x2 sized sprites at single pixel stepping.
As it stands, Vic-SSS doesn't handle 3x2 sprites (up to 2x2), although we do have the source code. Bit-Mapping the entire screen is another option as well and I belive Robert Hurst may even be working on something along those line. My mock-up was just to illustrate one possible approach.
Yes, multiplayer would be an option. I think a user-port joystick/or keyboard would be the easiest to support. Not sure about the speech, but I'm guessing that would push it to a 32K game without external hardware being used.
[edit] - Just found this...
http://www.geocities.ws/cbm/doc/weekend_vox.html
I developed Tank Battalion in 'c' as I wanted to try it out after Pooyan (written in assembler). It took me just over a month (compared to 9 months for Pooyan) so there are definitely productivity gains. However the code it produces takes up a lot of space - I think that Tank Battalion would have been an 8K game in assemler. Also, I guess performance is reduced having to exectue those additional instructions.
See below - I develop in Windows using NotePad++ and CA65/CC65 (with the NppExec and Explorer plugins) giving a Visual Studio like experience. I can switch between files on the left, edit and then just hit Ctrl+F6 to compile the code. Compiler output is shown in the section at the bottom and then it starts Vice if successful. Of course I now use the Vic20 Screen/Character designer as well