So you may have noticed that in the original build of Scantily, pausing the main game pulled up a very glitchy dialog menu box:

Short version of how this happened, GB Studio allows a set number of unique sprite tiles per scene, and in the event you exceed that number, graphical glitches start to creep in, starting with the dialog boxes. Hence ☝

Scantily had this issue where its original incarnation does not, so I initially assumed the problem was due to some oversight or miscalculation on my part as to the number of additional sprite tiles I had added to the updated versions of the player character.

Turns out I was half-right: an oversight on my part was creating more sprite tiles per scene than necessary, but I was looking at the wrong character.

The "enemy" sprites, being:

1. the Xmas pudding that appears on the left side of the screen, "rolling" clockwise
2. the Xmas pudding that appears on the right side of the screen, "rolling" counter-clockwise

were originally created using two separate sprite sheet instances, in order to create two independent "Default" animation states for the different rolling directions.

This was a complete waste of resources!

Both sprite sheets are identical, but the process of treating the sheets as separate meant the engine counted each as two lots of sprite tiles... 😵

The solution was simple, if a little time-consuming: I set both Actors to use the same sprite sheet, then created a new Animation State for the Actor which would appear on the other side of the screen, then finally updated the OnUpdate script of the "Event Manager" Actor so every instance of "Actor2" switched to the new animation state instead of the default one.

And now the dialog boxes look good 👍:

(Don't worry about the blank space in the right side of the border, that's been fixed too since taking this shot)

Updated downloads of the demo are available (they're the ones named "SCwSAFI_demo1a"), plus the browser version has been updated.

The project is still on track, with that proposed release date of "around Valentine's Day". Watch this space 👍