Hoo-boy, another blown deadline... Refer to earlier devlogs in which I grumble about how I'll be highly unlikely to release another game with seasonal updates after this one...! 😵

On the plus side, the actual game content just keeps getting better and better. The gallery images have been getting more ambitious as of the Summer build - less white space, less reliance on repeated background motifs in favour of bolder, larger character portraits along with smarter implementation of overlaid sprites. The difficulty has been tweaked too - that is, I've lowered the target number of objects that'll need smashing in order to clear each difficulty level, as well as tweaking the RNG to increase the likelihood of the "double object" event (theoretically enabling the player to hit those targets quicker).

Right, you know the GRC "studio"* mascot?

That is, this guy:

Well, Morag only gets to do a little cosplay in this build:

Also, here's a little something from the cutting room floor:

As mentioned in at least one previous devlog, creating fullscreen images for Game Boy Color with clean colour breaks (or whatever the term I'm looking for actually is 🤔) involves keeping track of the number of unique background tiles in order to still be able to add sprites afterwards - the background is made up of 8x8 pixel tiles, but obviously any given image will inevitably have details which do not neatly fit to such a grid, so cunningly overlaid sprites do a fine job cleaning up those images.

GB Studio allows background images in which every 8x8 tile is unique, but of course any background image with that level of detail has gone way over the tile allowance to also permit use of Actors (the things that have sprites attached to them).

(As of GB Studio 4, there's a new "Color Only Mode", which from what I've read doubles these unique tile allowances, which would absolutely clear so many of the hurdles I've been dealing with as Scantily- has been hitherto developed in GBS 3.1.0, but I'm a creature of habit, plus I'm not ready to take a risk and migrate this particular project just in case something breaks... 😖)

(But know that Scantily-s spiritual successor will absolutely be built in GBS4...!)

Below is an image which has too many unique tiles. I've found myself in that situation numerous times during development, at which point I have two different-yet-mostly-equally-valid options:

• tweak the heck out of the image I'm already working on;
• start over, creating a similar image using the same concept but with smaller characters (covering a smaller area, therefore fewer unique tiles used

Another alternative is to actually make the characters significantly bigger so that a lot of the details become large enough to have numerous blank tiles between the lines, although how effective this method becomes is reliant on what the overall composition needs to be (and I hope that sentence makes some kind of sense - I'm very tired right now... 😵). But starting over with smaller characters is a quicker method overall in the event you're finding you're short on wiggle room - much quicker when you've built up a decent archive of assets you can use as prefabs.

Anyway, this image - the background gets a noticeable amount of reuse in the new gallery, although the specific image in the final version is very different - see if you can work out which one it is... 👍

Right, I'm going to need a lie down... and then to speedrun the creation of 60 more gallery images before Christmas... 😅

(Bah, at this point, so long as Scantily-: Complete Edition releases before the end of the year, that'll be something...)

* By "studio", I of course mean one guy working from home...